MOSS How to separate Mysites from the SSP web application or any other web application

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Many a times I have come across customer’s environment where they use the single web application for Shared Services administration and Mysites.

When we use a single web application for SSP and Mysites then the content database will contain both SSP admin site and the personal sites.

Later they realize that it not as per the best practices to use the same web application for SSP and Mysites and now how to separate Mysites from the SSP web application.

Here are the steps which will assist us to separate the SSP and Mysite into different web applications:

1. Create a new web application for mysite.

Create a Mysite Site Host template site collection for the web application

Go to Managed Path under Application Management and add the "Personal"  as Wildcard inclusion.

Enable the Self Service Site Management for the web application under the Central admin.

2. Modify the My Site settings under the SSP admin page to point the new mysite web application.

In the above steps we have taken care of creating a new web application for mysite and updating the reference in the mysite settings

But what about the personal sites which are still stored in the SSP content database.

If you run a query as given in below Figure against the SSP content database it will return all the sites including the personal sites.

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Our next task would be to move these personal sites from SSP content database to the mysite web application content database.

1. Take a SQL backup of SSP content database

2. Create a list of sites in the sites.txt file using the redirector operation ">", use the following syntax:

stsadm -o enumsites -url https://<servername> –databasename SSP_ContentDB > C:\sites.txt

3. Open the Sites.txt and make sure that it contains the complete list of all the sites.

4. Remove the ssp/admin site and the root site from the sites.txt file.

5. Make sure that the sites.txt contains only the personal sites.

6. Remove the content database from the Mysite web application

7. Add the mysite content database to the SSP web application

8. Check if SSP web application contains 2 content databases.

9. Move the site collections specified in the sites.xml file from SSP content database to MySite Content database, use the following syntax:

stsadm -o mergecontentdbs -url https://<servername> -sourcedatabasename SSP_Content -destinationdatabasename MySite_Content -operation 3 -filename c:\sites.xml

Thats it!

We have successfully achieved our requirement.