Approaches for migrating portal objects from a source installation to a target installation are disclosed. In one embodiment, when portal objects are selected to be migrated from a source installation to a target installation, the selected portal objects can be considered to form a transport set. The metadata of the transport set itself may be stored in infrastructure tables. Then the data in the transport tables (i.e. all the application specific data), plus the metadata in the infrastructure tables (about the transport set itself) are exported and/or imported to the target installation. In an embodiment, scripts are generated to perform export and/or import functions.