Unable to unpublish the content and remove a Publication Target in Tridon 2011?

Question

I recently moved and upgraded Tridion 5.3 application in to Tridion 2011 SP1 on new fresh environment. Now we have a publication target (with “file system” protocol) which was in use and no more needed now. This publication target uses a destination that does not exist anymore.

There are few pages which are published from this publication target to destination which was on old machines and no more in existence.

Now my requirement is to unpublish the content and remove this target.

For this I am unable to find any equivalent of old TOM SetPublishedTo() in TOM.NET. So I created an empty http deployer and point it to above mentioned publication target (changed the protocol from file system to http) and issued an unpublish instruction for few pages now Tridion reports success on that operation in the publishing queue. But these pages are not getting unpublished at all.

Should I ask to Tridion support to provide some database script which can change the item state in the Tridion database? Please advise.

Answer 1

You can still use TDSE/TOM to do this change, I would just go ahead and do it this way. It is a known issue that you can't change the PublishedStatus with TOM.NET / CoreService [checking quickly if it's fixed in 2013, will come back with updates].

Since this is a "one-off" update, I don't see any reason to not use TOM.

Answer 2

You can modify the CM database table but this is not recommended as it can void your warranty and support agreement. Best solution is that contact Tridion Support who will give you a SQL script that removed these pages.