We were recently at a client site where we needed to complete a like for like migration of a 2003 site collection.

We migrated the site collection using the out of the box gradual upgrade on a staging server and then restored the 2007 site collection on production.

The site collection contained a series of sub sites with the same structure (created from site templates), there were over 60 sub sites. The sub sites contained:

1. Custom navigation to local lists on the quick launch

2. Custom links to a central site on the quick launch

3. An infopath library with a form that posted content to a central location

Since we were moving the site collection to a brand new server with a different url, some of the links and the infopath form needed to be updated. The task could have taken us a long time to complete manually but luckily with echo we were able to achieve the migration quickly.

This is what we did:

1. We Reset to site definition all the sub sites and applied the new custom theme to each sub site using the "Site Manager"

2. We updated one of the sub sites with the right links (relative to the site, for example pointing to Shared Documents and Lists/Tasks rather than hard coding the full url). Then used echo to replicate the quick launch links to each of the other sites in the site collection. We did this via the "Site Manager" as well.

3. We updated one of the infopath libraries with the new template (pointing to the new url and getting drop down list content from a new location). Then replicated the template to each of the forms libraries in the sub sites using the "List manager".

4. There was a list with lots of items that contained hyperlinks to the old server, so we created a content loader task, then replaced the current links with the new url and updated the existing metadata. We used the "Content Loader manager".

This process saved us a stack of time during the migration using echo.