Forum Discussion
Manage changes in SP online production lists and workflows
New sites are easy. Nobody is using them yet.
I'm talking about sites that are already in production and have data and are being used every day.
How do I make changes to site structure and/or workflow and/or forms and test them without impacting the user? I create a copy of the site and make my changes and tests there.
But then, how do I get the tested changes back into the production site???
I have a very similar situation where I have built a business application on top of SharePoint 2013 On-Premises which is highly transcational. There's usually 20+ new creates and then 100 changes/modifies across multiple supporting lists daily. I've had to continue to build & enhance this solution, adding new functionality, and provide the new functionality + list schemas along with those changes. For awhile I was doing every other week loads into Production.
I basically had to use ShareGate to manage those changes for me. I would first migrate the content types, and then I would migrate the list but uncheck (very important) the option to migrate the list content. This started out as a very nerve racking experience in the begining but became easier with time. The other option is incredibly manual to make all the changes you do in "non-production" and then recreate in Production. We tried this in the beginning but found it to be very mistake-prone. You'll have much better success with a tool like ShareGate to manage the migrations for you.
Hope this helps.