Community Server Migration Script -- Announcing CSverter 1.0

Anyone who’s been following this blog lately is aware Robert McLaws and myself have been diligently working on a .Text to Community Server migration utility (thanks again for all your hard work Rob, the wizard looks awesome!).  I’m pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of this tool, you can download it via this link!  Note: This release supercedes my previous releases (the console application), and I have overwritten the zip archive with 1.0 (had to use the previous name, DotTextCS for the archive for links from previous posts, but the new name of the utility itself is CSverter).  If for some reason you still need the previous version (for example, if you're a glutton for punishment), let me know and I'll send it to you.

This wizard should alleviate many of the headaches some of you guys have been running into, and the process is completely automated now.  Have a look at the readme included in the archive, and I highly recommend you read Robert’s release notes before diving into the wizard.  I will reiterate here just for the sake of clarity:

• Right now, the source and destination databases need to be on the same server. If enough people need to move between separate servers, I can add it later.
• You need to run the wizard on a machine where the CS web application is installed. This is because the temporary web service we use to create users and blogs needs to run in the HttpContext of the application.
• You will need to set up CS and change the web.config file to point to the destination database you will use to complete the migration. Again, this is because the web service will use those settings to create blogs, users, and blog groups.
• Depending on the number of users, blogs, posts, referrers, etc, this process can take SEVERAL HOURS. DTS is rather fast, but it still took over seven hours to migrate LonghornBlogs.com
• You may need to use the CS admin UI to change the blog theme after the migration. I'm looking into why this isn't working, but it's not a showstopper, so I'm releasing it anyway

From the feedback we’ve received so far, supporting seperate server machines is the hot topic (due to many people hosting with an ISP and not having access to the actual machine)…I’ll speak with Robert and we’ll address this soon.  It’s also worth mentioning that when specifying the ‘Blog URL Address’, you need to use a fully qualified web address (i.e. http://yoursite.com/cs/blogs), otherwise it will hang.  I will be publishing the code for the engine itself (not the wizard, that’s Robert’s call as it’s his code ) within the next couple of days.

If you end up deleting a blog via the blog admin pages in CS (perhaps you want to recreate the blog with the wizard, or re-run one of the DTS packages), some of the associated data for the blog in the underlying tables will not be removed, namely in cs_Links and cs_LinkCategories…what this means is that if you attempt to re-run the DTS package, it will fail on those steps due to primary key violations.  I just discovered this issue with CS today and have addressed it with the folks over at Telligent.  Of course, this doesn’t affect new installs.  If you run into a situation where you need to drop and then recreate a specific blog, contact me and I’ll send you a query that cleans everything up.  Feel free to drop feedback either here, or over on Robert’s blog.  Last but not least, enjoy it and happy migrating!