Old publish status remains after upgrading to SDL Web 8

Question

I'm upgrading Tridion 2011 SP1 to SDL Web 8.

My plan is following.

• Copy DBs to new server and upgrade them.
• Newly install CMS(SDL Web 8) to new server, not upgrade Tridion 2011 SP1 itself.
• Setting up Topology Manager.
• Publish pages to a new Web server

After doing those steps, CMS and Web site works fine, but a problem about publish status occurs. Because DB was copied, pages which are published at old environment's publish status is "published", even if those are not published to new Web server.

I think delete all data from CM DB's table "PUBLISH_STATES" and "PUBLISH_TRANSACTIONS" and publish all pages is possible, but delete data from DB manually is risky.

• Is there any way to solve this problem without deleting data manually?
• Is it no problem to unpublish pages from publication targets which are moved from old environment?
• If delete data manually, which data have to be deleted?

Answer 1

Never Ever should you want to delete anything from one of the CM DBs, if you want to make a change in there, change the value of the publish status in those tables, but never delete records by yourself.

Please also note that making any change manually in the CM database will void your support status, so know what you are doing and know the concequences.

For clearing the publish states, Web 8 has the option to decommission a Publication Target, see http://docs.sdl.com/LiveContent/content/en-US/SDL%20Web-v1/GUID-11A16F5A-717A-4B07-ABFC-0F1C29A1C82F

This is using either the TOM.NET API, or the Core Service API, to decommission a Publication Target, so you can delete the Publication Target without explicitly unpublishing its contents.