In part 1 of this series I talked about some of the high-level planning you need to go through when planning a content migration. In this section we’ll go through some techniques and tools that are available to help you with your content migration.
Preparing the environment
In part 1 we discussed the idea of inventorying your content. With the inventory complete you will have insight into things like the size of your content and types of content. This will help to understand things like:
- Will the new system accommodate the largest files?
- Will the new system accommodate all my file types?
- Do I need any additional add-ons to accommodate special file types?
- How current are the files we have inventoried?
After obtaining the inventory we can also identify business ownership and responsibility of the files inventoried. Business ownership can be the last person to edit them, the author of the content or who should have responsibility for the content.
Similarly with the inventory we can easily identify non-business personal files users have been storing.
Prepping the Content
To reduce the seemingly overwhelming task of migrating all of the content a grouping strategy needs to be made. This grouping strategy is used to break down the content into manageable sections.
One method to prepare the content could be to define three (3) categories (you can break it down into even more if needed):
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- Current
A small number of files. All metadata will be applied to these files
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- Old But Important
A larger number of files. May or may not have metadata applied to all of them
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- To Archive
The largest number of files. These files may or may not be migrated right away, they may or may not belong in the migration task.
Breaking up the files into these categories establishes an analysis model and business justification for applying different actions to the kinds of content.
Tools that can help
Updated 2018-02-28
Below is a listing of tools specializing in content migration:
| Microsoft | |
| SharePoint Migration Tool | |
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| AvePoint | |
| DocAve SharePoint Migrator | |
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| DocAve File System Migrator | |
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| MetaLogix | |
| Content Matrix | |
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Migrating the content
When migrating the content the best method to use is a multi-pass migration. In the first pass, only the current content will be migrated. This content will also have the metadata information assigned already and can be used as a test pass. Users migrating this content should note any problematic content or whether the content or new taxonomy doesn’t fit for the content.
The second pass should include all the problematic files as well as the ‘old but important’ content. This pass of the content may or may not have metadata associated with the content, but a reasonable amount of it should be tagged.
Before attempting the migration a ‘trial migration’ should be done in a test environment. The ‘first pass version’ of the content should be attempted first in this environment. This will identify any issues that could arise when doing the actual migration in the production environment.
Once the trial migration is completed the source and target should be tested for completeness and accuracy as well as all the target metadata being applied to the content.
Once we are confident that our results are as expected we can attempt the production migration.
Approaches to migration
There are three (3) main approaches to migration:
- Manual
The manual approach typically has the best results when the number of documents is small. Each document and it’s contents can be easily inspected by the users as the number is small. In addition, this approach allows for users to update metadata on each of the documents as they add them to the new system.
- Automatic / Tool-Based Migration
The automatic approach works best with large numbers of documents. The two main leaders in content migration into SharePoint are AvePoint and Metalogix. Both of their tools provide analysis, mapping and migration features.
During the analysis stage, the tools can create an inventory of the source content (folders, files, permissions) as well as the structure of the destination SharePoint environment (libraries, folders, expected metadata schema, etc.).
Using the mapping feature, the tool then correlates source materials with destination containers. In addition, most tools have the ability to add missing information to the documents to be migrated, such as metadata (which cannot be stored in shared folders).
The automatic migration features of the tool programmatically move each source document to its destination container in SharePoint, adding in relevant permissions and/or metadata where necessary.
- Hybrid / Custom Solution
A hybrid solution of manual and automatic can always be used. Not all documents must be moved through the tool, but small subsections can be manually moved if required. If neither option fits there is always the ‘drag and drop’ option that Windows Explorer can do. This approach is very visual and very easy to do.
The final method is to build a custom solution. The solution will move documents through a script as well as tag documents using metadata stored in a spreadsheet.
Post Migration
The migration is done! Congratulations, but we are not done everything yet. Once we are done with the migration the leftover metadata needs to be applied to rest of the ‘old but important’ content. At the same time locking down the source environment(s) will force users to use the new system.
Once confident the old system is not being used anymore and there are no more files being requested from the old system then we can turn off the old system.
Congratulations you are done!
