Providing the pre-production feature to organizations
After enabling If your service provider has enabled the pre-production feature, you can provide it to organization administrators for the Windows Web Hosting service and the MS SQL service.
To provide the pre-production feature to organization administrators:
Create the production organization and provision the Windows Web Hosting service, or the MS SQL service, or both services to it. For instructions on creating an organization and provisioning a service, refer to the Adding organizations topic.
While creating the production organization, do not select the Preproduction organization check box or type anything in the Production organization domain name text box.
Before you create the pre-production organization using the next step, review the service-specific information by clicking the links given below to open the service-specific Help:
MS SQL
Windows Web Hosting
Create the pre-production organization, and provision the Windows Web Hosting service, or the MS SQL service, or both services to it.
Ensure that you select the Preproduction organization check box and type the domain name of the production organization created in step 1 in the Production organization domain name text box.
The pre-production feature will now be available to organization administrators. After the pre-production organization is created, a Publish link will be available in the pre-production organization administrator control panel which links to the Publish page. The Publish page will contain a Publish button; clicking this button will transfer all Windows Web Hosting data, and MS SQL database users and their permissions to the production organization.
On clicking Publish, while the Web site content is getting transferred from the pre-production organization to the production organization, the production organization's Web site will not be accessible to any user.