We're working on a parallel install/upgrade of SharePoint. The client has WSS 2003 on some old hardware. We've installed MOSS 2007 in a medium farm environment. They want to use this as an opportunity to not just upgrade and use the new features, but to also better organize their content and categorize between different site collections.

To accommodate, we've created a few site collections per their specifications in the new environment, and when we ran an upgrade test run we ran into a few .. quirks.

We made a backup of the old content database, copied it over to the new environment and restored it as a new database. Created a new web app and attached the migrated data to do an in-place upgrade in this new "test" area. This seems pretty standard - no issues.

We have to do a little bit of cleanup (e.g. reset pages to site definition, reset themes, and inherit the global nav / top link bar, etc.). Once that's done, we're using stsadm export/import to copy the individual sites over to their ultimate destinations in the various different site collections.

So far so good. But then we ran into one particular site that has a link to an .aspx page in the top link bar in WSS 2003 that's not behaving properly after the upgrade. It's just a link to a "dashboard" .aspx page in a doc library - nothing special. It doesn't seem to matter what we do, or what order we do it (in the "test" web app, in the destination web app, or both). In the end, this ONE site will not allow us to create a link/tab in the global nav.

• It can inherit the global nav just fine.
• We can break the inheritance just fine.
• But if we want to manually add a link in the top link bar - we go through the steps that I've done 1,000x before and click OK - and the tab never appears.
  • It doesn't matter if it's to a page within the site itself, or to Google.
• We can migrate over other sites into the same site collection and add a tab without issue.
• If we migrate this quirky site over to another site collection we run into the same issue.
• Yet, in the "test" web app that we're using to upgrade the data we can add a tab?
  • If we add the tab before we export/import to the final destination, the tab is lost during the process?

Has anyone run into anything like this? Any ideas? I've tried every combination of everything that I can think of and nothing works. Unless we can figure out how to get this to work, we're going to just add this tab to the global nav for the entire site collection and inherit it for this site (but that adds the link to all of the site that will inherit, which is both a pro & con for them).