Managing the Pain of SharePoint Document Migration

April 2008

 

You’ve identified SharePoint as the platform for your library of knowledge. You’ve created the taxonomy for how your documents will be organized, stored, and tagged. You’ve defined your processes and procedures for how new documents will make it into the library. And you’ve maximized the power of the search interface to return significant, meaningful search results to your end users. All that remains is to migrate and tag the tens of thousands of documents from your legacy file folders into your new SharePoint repository.

 

For most companies migrating from a traditional folder-based file structure to one based on SharePoint, this seems like a daunting task. Yet, to best harness the capabilities of SharePoint search and document management, it may be a necessary one.

 

A recent Abel Solutions client faced this challenge. While working with this company to define the taxonomy for a new SharePoint-based library of client and project artifacts, Abel Solutions and the client mutually identified this obstacle. The company had over 100,000 documents from previous projects that they wanted to not only retain, but migrate into their new taxonomy. Assuming an average of 30 seconds to upload and tag a document, it would have taken a single librarian 21 weeks of uploading documents non-stop before all of their content was migrated.

 

The need for some automation for this process was clear. So Abel Solutions developed a custom utility to help manage the migration of documents. Because the document artifacts would need to land in dozens of different SharePoint sites, each with their own document libraries, custom metadata fields, and custom settings, the tool needed to be flexible and adaptable. To that end, the tool included a configuration interface to easily manage the rules that define the following:

• From which location(s) documents are coming, and to where they are going
• Metadata fields/columns to populate based on document source locations
• Values to be applied to metadata fields based on source locations
• If applicable, documents or folders to exclude from migration

 

 

The tool is also flexible enough to elegantly handle various exception cases, such as:

• Renaming documents where file names conflict
• Create missing target sites, document libraries, and columns when they have not previously been created
• Provide visual verification to ensure that all files and folders within the mapping have a target location

 

This tool reduced the amount of time necessary to move documents from the 21 weeks estimated above to about a week and a half. Of that time, only small portions were spent on manual tasks such as configuration, refinement, and verification. The rest was the time that the utility spent moving documents in the background, allowing the company’s knowledge workers to complete their other responsibilities.

 

When migrating to SharePoint it is important to take into account the effort and approach required to migrate documents from existing file server folders to SharePoint – not just by dragging and dropping, but in a way that ensures the documents are tagged and indexed so as to fully exploit the capabilities of the new SharePoint platform.