Abel Solutions / Axceler Webinar

Getting Content into SharePoint Easily

February 2012

Microsoft SharePoint offers powerful capabilities for managing content. This includes document management, collaboration, auditing, versioning and many other features. However, not all content originates in SharePoint. Your organization may already have content in one or more locations within your environment which needs to be moved into SharePoint in order to take advantage of these capabilities.

  • You may have one or more network file shares.
  • Users may have files on their local computer.
  • Content may exist in other systems, other than SharePoint, within your organization.

There are several challenges when trying to migrate content from existing locations into SharePoint. One of these challenges is tagging the content with Metadata. Metadata tagging is fundamental in making sure your content is easy to find within SharePoint. You’re most likely already organizing your content in one form or another. The trick is to translate that into useful Metadata which SharePoint understands.

Your content may already be organized by:

  • The structure of your file directories.
  • The naming convention of your files.
  • Another application that is currently managing the content.

Adding to the challenge of getting your content into SharePoint and applying Metadata may be the fact that your application might be leveraging one or more of the following SharePoint features:

  • Managed Metadata – This is data stored in your term store and used throughout your SharePoint environment.
  • Lookup Fields – The data in this column references data stored in another list in SharePoint.
  • External Data – You may even have SharePoint pulling Metadata from external sources.
  • Document Sets – Provide a way to group documents together and process as a single entity.

So how do you get your existing content into SharePoint as well as tag it with the appropriate Metadata?

There are many third party solutions that have been built that can help with the migration of content into SharePoint. These solutions come in many forms and some are more suited for certain scenarios than others. It is important to know if the solution will be able to understand both the source and destination structure and will provide the capabilities to move and translate Metadata between the two.

One very popular solution for batch migration of content into SharePoint is FileLoader from Axceler.

KnowledgeLake’s Connect product is a very powerful tool for real time loading of electronic files and email attachments into SharePoint (along with Metadata).

Oftentimes, the specific needs of a business process dictate that a custom feature be developed to automate the collection and application of Metadata as a file is being loaded into SharePoint. One such example is a knowledgebase repository. When a project manager uploads one or more project artifacts to the repository they input the Project ID code into the system. This code is then used to look up other project Metadata from an external project management system. All the Metadata is then automatically applied to the documents that are then uploaded into the SharePoint repository.

There are many ways to load content into SharePoint and apply Metadata. The facility with which users can accomplish this objective is fundamental to the ongoing adoption and effective use of an organization’s SharePoint deployment.

This tip contributed by Eric Gregorich, Abel Solutions Senior SharePoint Architect.