Graphicalwonder - Shane Perran's SharePoint Customization Blog

"We have learned that the true benefit of site definitions and ghosting is seen when updating a large number of sites via a single set of files."

I have to point out that you're not supposed to do this; Microsoft (through Fitz and others) made it clear that you're not to touch a site definition file if there are sites deployed against that definition. This is one of the main reasons why the ghosted versus unghosted argument is flawed. Plus, this tool (and any other re-ghosting tool) touches the database, also unsupported. :)

Sorry to threadjack here, but it had to be said. :)

Disclaimers aside: This tool does exactly what it says, and it does it will little fanfare. I've seen it in action, and for those of us who don't mind doing unsupported things (well, that's just about all of us, right?! :P), it's a great tool to have in your toolbox.

Readers may also be interested to know that the next version of SharePoint Designer allows you to "revert to template" right from the UI (same thing as re-ghost). Built right in!

I have used both this and Ghosthunter and like them both equally. One benefit I have found with ReGhost is that it can sit on your desktop as opposed to living as a webpart on your server.

Bob Fox

I agree for the most part Dustin, experience has taught me though that having an underlying "custom" site definition even if it's unmodified can really save people a lot of time.

For example:

We recently rolled out a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installation for a very well known software vendor.

These guys had more than 150 products which were spread out amongst developers, testers and support across several countries.

They wanted fast-rollout and consistent elements so we met with all the teams and settled on creating 'out-of-the-box' templates complete w/ custom theme.

We rolled out all 150 sites in no time once we had the templates customized. A couple of weeks later something came up and they wanted to push a change out to all of these sites.

In that situation site definitions are basically the "only" way to get the job done fast. Otherwise they have 150 sites 'in use' that have to be deleted, template updated and then completely re-rolled out.

To be honest I was unaware that pushing out a change to a site deployed on a "Custom Site Definition" was un-supported.

To be perfectly honest I have not had any issues to date (knock on wood) with people actually "needing" to have identical websites so it's really been a moot point. For that matter I have honestly had limited need to ever create site definitions and I have done some fairly extensive customization jobs.

Cheers and I hope things are going well for you!