How to move or copy a Dynamics AX 2009 Enterprise Portal instance?

Question

I can't think of a better way to word the question than the subject line, but I'll try my best.

We're comfortable copying and handling the AX instances themselves, but how do I create a duplicate of an existing Enterprise Portal? For example, we have one that is working well, and we'd like to spin off a copy to point at a different copy of the AOS (for development purposes).

Is there a simple process, is it as easy as copying the inetpub folder from IIS to another site instance or server? Or can you re-run the setup for Enterprise Portal on another server, copying over the files after the fact?

Links to any documentation on the process would be appreciated, although my Google searches yielded very little results.

Answer 1

Given that your site only contains Enterprise Portal content (pages and web parts), you should make sure that everything is persisted with latest copy /version in the AOT.

Then it would be a matter of making a project with everything in and export it and import it. You can use axupdateportal utility to deploy on the second environment. This procedure implies installing EP from scratch on the new server.

The trick with EP development is to make sure you have a solid project within AX that holds the most recent version of your custom EP applications.