Sharepoint 2010 Live to Development VM Copy Setup (backwards deployment)

Question

Live to Development Migration

We are currently migrating some sharepoint sites from external live environments to development environments hosted on vm's. The sites are a mixture of websites and intranets. We have not had access to the live environments so can not specify structure of the sites.

The sites do have some customisations applied. Some are customisations are packaged via wsp packages for which we have the source code (somewhere previous developers have left it need to find it)

The sites setup we have no knowledge so the objective is to restore live back to a development vm so we can bug fix and make enhancements moving forward.

What steps should be go through for this.

We have outlined the following steps:

1. Take a copy of the content databases/s
2. Take a copy of the wsp packages straight from the live environment (using powershell)
3. Create site collections from live on dev
4. Restore the content databases from live on to these.
5. Deploy the wsps from live on to dev.
6. Activate the features from live on our development vm's.

What other steps are missing as I am sure they are.

Answer 1

What I would add here are:

• Make sure your notifications don't go to the users of live environment
• Make sure your BDC and custom connectivity components don't modify or otherwise load production external data sources
• Document and verify (using PowerShell) that all assets are deployed accurately, because sometimes you'll face issues such as event receiver registration, etc.
• Make sure your InfoPath forms are reconfigured to use the updated data sources
• Make sure your Alternate Access Mappings and Incoming/Outgoing Email settings are adequate