I recently got a request from an end user to move a list from his My Site to one of the intranet pages.  Since SharePoint don’t have any functionality to copy or move lists I thought I use the Save List as Template function, include the content, upload it to the Site Collection that hosts the intranet section and then just create a new list based on that List Template.

What happened when I moved the list was that the content in Lookup fields and the People and Groups column got messed up. Strangest thing was that it included links to people and groups but they got mixed up. The columns were populated with the right amount of users but it was showing the wrong users. I haven’t found out exactly why this happens (it’s just a move between Site collections within the same Shared Service Provider) but I managed to solve the problem with help from Gary Lapointe’s fantastic STSADM extension, if you have not visited his blog here it is.

What Gary has done is an incredible list of custom commands to use, and in my case I used the export and import list. With that I could include the content and retain the object identity which solved the problem for me.

Thanks Gary!