Portal Migration clarification and advice

[chrisOrtiz]

I am new with portals, I created a website last week for a client and its live now. They now require further page updates and content updates, in order to do this I need a testing environment (since I cant risk breaking the live site). So I need to pretty much make an exact replica of the live site which is in a production environment. I found this https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/admin/migrate-portal-configuration and had thought this was the solution, I followed the steps and the result was the starter basic portal that is created from a blank portal with the 3 tabs from my original portal that do nothing.

I placed a ticket with Microsoft support about this and the service personnel I got said that the migration does not seem to be the solution for what I am trying to achieve (creating the exact replica of the portal).

From everything I have seen here it seems that they are incorrect. I did further research and I found that XrmToolBox can achieve what I am trying to get done...which is an exact copy of my live portal website for testing purposes.

My question is: 

1) Is the Microsoft personnel I got incorrect about this?

2) If he is incorrect, which will be easier for a noob like me to use, XrmToolBox or Configuration Migration tool?

[OliverRodrigues]

Hi, so first thing here is to make sure you have provisioned the same Portal type in your test environment (I believe you already did this).

Now you need to migrate data, in your case from LIVE to TEST. 

Microsoft's official method would be using the Configuration Migration as you pointed out the link.. I personally like to use XrmToolBox / Portal Records Mover, with that tool you can export/import or transfer the Portal data. You can also select which tables/records will be moved across.

Please see if this video helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oANcwG0nLU8

this might be referring to an older version of the tool, but should still be a good starting point

[Fubar]

Would recommend you have a Dev, Test, and Prod environment (even if you do Test as a Trial), that way you can test the actual move of Solution Files and the Portal, before just dumping them into Prod.

Depending on exactly what you need to do, if you need to 'clone' Prod you can do that (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/copy-environment), and then point a new Portal at the cloned instance.  The alternate method is to move solution files and other config data, and then copy the Portal using the Configuration Migration Tool (or XrmToolBox).

If you are doing a manual setup it is important that the type of Portal you install is the same as what you have in Prod.

(also, if you clone, make sure you don't have things like Pending emails, or Plugins etc that point to Production Web Services etc in your Test - because if everything is hooked up the emails etc will send and look like they came from Prod)

[chrisOrtiz]

Thank you for the information, I used the XrmToolBox. First I tested by migrating a trial portal to a testing environment and it worked perfectly, the trial portal I migrated is very similar to the live portal I intended to migrate.

Then I created a new sandbox environment and migrated the live portal but I did not get the same results at all. below is what I got instead

I had removed the navigation bar from my live portal but the migration placed it back and with no content. the highlighted are the pages from my live portal. None of these tabs have any functionality. Below is the edit of the portal:

I followed and disabled the extra default publishing states and no change. I do not understand why my test run of migrating a trial portal worked but not the migration of my live portal which is in a production environment, that is the only difference. I will try again, maybe I missed something. 

@Fubar What do you mean by the type of portal I install is the same as what I have in production? The only way I have built a portal is by "Portal from blank" is that what you mean? Thank you.

.

[Fubar]

Yes, both blank or both Customer Self-Service etc

You sometimes get the double Home etc when you have multiple types of Portal in your environment, and you get the menu items from the different types of portal onto the Primary navigation Web Link Set.  Or you have somehow ended up with the Guid's being different of the duplicated items.

The last time I looked at Publishing States they were't really working.

When you install the Portal into your Environment (Test) before migrating/copying the portal it will give you a blank portal with all the default setup - Primary navigation etc - the copying of the Portal from one environment to another does not delete or remove stuff that is in the Target environment - it does an Upsert - what this means is that if you removed out of the box items from the source you also have to remove them from the target.  This is similar to what happens with Solution Files for moving Tables and Columns etc etc so we are probably used to this type of thing occurring.

I use the Data Migration Tool and not XrmToolBox (but I have a colleague who prefers XrmToolBox). One difference between the 2 is that the Data Migration Tool moves everything (unless you have changed the Schema file) but XrmToolBox allows you to move smaller elements (it is possible that you haven't selected the correct options in XrmToolBox - but I am not sure).

Personally, I would be using the Portal Management App to see what was wrong rather then the new editor interface - e.g. do the Web Pages exist are they linked correctly to navigation etc but I probably have more of an idea about when something looks wrong in the config. 

[chrisOrtiz]

I think I figured out why my migration did not work. My portal in my production environment is not a trial (production). My portal in my Sandbox environment is a trial. The use of "production with environments and portals confused me. the Image below is the status of both my portals. The first "test copy" is my sandbox environment where I was trying to migrate my live portal into. The second if my portal in my Production environment which is live. From my understanding they should both be in "production"?

[OliverRodrigues]

Hi, when we say Portal Type we mean if it's starter portal / customer self-service etc, I think you answered that you provisioned both as Starter Portal.

The Portal type set to Prod / Trial / Sandbox / etc shouldn't really matter

Would you be able to check if the Website GUIDs are the same? You can check that in a few ways:

• install a browser extension and check via Portal Management App (extensions: D365 Level-Up or D365 Power Pane)
• open Advanced find, search for Websites and export via Excel, there should be a hidden column (A) in your excel file with the record GUID.. it's important that they are the same for the data migration

[chrisOrtiz]

@Fubar "the copying of the Portal from one environment to another does not delete or remove stuff that is in the Target environment - it does an Upsert - what this means is that if you removed out of the box items from the source you also have to remove them from the target." - This is what happened when I did a test migration from another environment with a trial portal to the destination sandbox environment. In the source portal I had removed out of the box navigation default settings and when the migration was completed, everything I had removed from the source portal was not in the target portal, was an exact copy. @OliverRodrigues I am trying a fresh migration again carefully and will look into that if I get the same errors. Thank you all for the input I really appreciate it all.

[chrisOrtiz]

@OliverRodrigues I downloaded the excel and in section A (GUID records) are different from the target portal and the source portal. How can I make sure they are the same? Thanks. 

[chrisOrtiz]

I was able to make a successful migration. I had placed a ticket and interesting enough, the documentation was missing 1 step. What I had to do was make a copy of the source environment and copy it into the new target environment. After that, it was all working perfectly. The Microsoft service was very knowledgeable and I think something should be done about the fact that the documentation is not updated.