Best way to copy a site from one farm to another

Question

I have to make a specific site with very easy requirements, one content type, one document library, and some columns are tied to managed metadata terms.

I dont see the need to make everything with visual studio, I can do everything with sharepoint gui.

What I dont know is when I finish doing it in my dev environment what is the best way to copy to test /qa/prod environments easily.

Its export-spsite and import-spsite a good option.

What about the connection to the terms in some site columns? Will they work if I export and them import?

Answer 1

Personally i always like to use visual studio for moving assets around as you have more control of versioning and building the solution in a way that is repeatable. For example content type ids when created via the gui are going to be created with a random gui each time.

You'll need to use backup-spsite and restore-spsite which do a full fidelity backup. Export-spweb / import-spweb will change list ids, web ids etc.

As for the MMS I am pretty sure it will seamlessly reconnect to another MMS provided iMMS has been setup correctly and associated to the web app. You will need to ensure the export of your term sets are with the GUIDS for the term set and terms so that your fields and the data in the fields can be used.

I have just used this tool from Eric Khaw

http://erickhaw.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/migrate-sharepoint-2010-managed.html