About BrightWork Copy Site

BrightWork includes a proprietary site copy feature that does not rely on the Solution Gallery and gives far greater granularity than is offered by vanilla SharePoint. This feature is used in the Create Project, Create Template and Create Portfolio pages. If any errors or warnings are generated during the copy process, these are written to the Site Provisioning Log.

Advantages

Advantages to the BrightWork Copy Site feature include:

• All Solution Gallery Issues are addressed and remedied
• Assignee and Owner values are preserved
• Ability to specify which list and library content (i.e. list items and documents) is copied
• Views in sites that use the List View Web Part (LVWP) - likely if the source was originally upgraded from SharePoint 2007 - will be created using the new XSLT List View Web Part (XLV).
• Support for Nintex Workflows and Nintex Forms, but not Nintex Forms added as web parts.

What is not copied

• Scheduled Report Email Items
• Nintex Forms added as web parts or responsive Nintex Forms.
• Security Settings

• Note: Please see About BrightWork and SharePoint Security for more information.

• Personal Settings such as Personal Reports and views
• Note Board web parts
• Records Management Settings
• Taxonomy column properties
• Checked-out document states

• Note: Documents that are checked-out in the source web are checked-in in the target web.

  If the person the document is checked out to creates the site, then the checked-in version that appears in the target web is the version that was checked-out.

  If a person other than the person that the document is checked out to creates the site, then the checked-in version that appears in the target site is the version previous to the version that was checked-out.

• Tag Cloud web parts
• Version History
• List Item IDs

  Note: This means that list items in the target site may have different reference numbers to list items in the source site.

• Workspace information in Calendar Events (as it refers to a sub-web that is not created)
• Subsites and links to them
• Datasheet web part views from web part pages
• Schema changes on "created on/by" or "last modified on/by" fields.
• Workflows that have No New Instances selected on the Workflow Settings | Remove a Workflow page:
• • Out of the box workflows such as the Three-state or Disposition Approval workflows are not copied
  • Reusable workflows (e.g. SharePoint Designer workflows) with No New Instances selected are reset to Allow
• Workflow Tasks

• Note: A list may contain a mixture of Workflow Tasks and standard Task items; standard items can be copied; however, Workflow Tasks will never be copied.

Solution Gallery Issues

The BrightWork Create Project; Create Portfolio; and Create Template pages on SharePoint 2007 leverage the native SharePoint Site Template Gallery. With BrightWork, it meant you could have 'live site templates' and reuse them on the fly. In other words, you could inspect and customize the source, unlike the stp files stored in the Site Template Gallery.

SharePoint 2010 replaced the Site Template Gallery with the Solution Gallery and this has been maintained in SharePoint 2013. Whilst this added some useful functionality, it also created some problems for the BrightWork 'reusable site' paradigm.

Problems with the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 and 2013 Solutions Gallery include:

• Sites created from the Solutions Gallery are sandboxed
• Solutions must remain in the Solutions Gallery for sites created from them to work correctly. If the Solution does not remain in the Solution Gallery, the below items will cease to work correctly:
• • SharePoint Designer Workflows
  • SharePoint Designer Custom Actions
  • Default Scope setting in Calendar Views
• If the below items exist in a source site, they are not copied to the target site when the Solution Gallery is used:
• • Site or Web level Content Types
  • Attachments
  • Calendar Overlays
  • Column Visibility settings
  • Compound Indexed Columns
• The below items maintain a relationship with the original site and do not get updated to point at the new site.
• • Related Items in Tasks lists
  • Timeline Web URL
  • Site-relative URLs in Promoted Links
• Nintex Workflow is not supported.
• Post the August 2020 Cumulative Update, the Quick Launch creation will fail if JavaScript exists in the solution's Quick Launch.
• Quick Launches containing tokens in the URL, i.e. a question mark '?', do not copy the token part of the URL reliability.
• Solution Gallery Bugs:
• • Picture Libraries crash if they contain an Image
  • Web Level Content Types can appear to be duplicated
  • Items in lists with multiple content types can be associated with the wrong Content Types