The blog “SharePoint comparison matrix for 3rd party migration tools” posted by Alex Dove on December 17, 2014 caught my attention.
I have been doing similar work recently and am providing my paper : Guide to selecting best SharePoint Migration Tool, as a way of contribution to the ‘migration’ thread.
The paper seeks to provide selection criteria for a specific business need, and will not be appropriate to all cases. However, I hope it will provide food for thought and a starting point for adaptation to your circumstances.
There are are many blogs and papers that cover this challenge. Those I have read emphasis the need to treat migration as a significant project, resource hungry, time consuming, and requires careful planning. This is a legal and political minefield for any records management team and benefits by strong support from senior managers.
Lets not forget those businesses that specialise in this kind of work. The questionnaire is not directed at those, but could easily be adapted.
Summary
When handling a sales pitch from vendors or attempting to disambiguate web site or publicity material it is useful to have a set of questions to assist evaluation of a product or service. The attached paper provides questions about software used to migrate files into SharePoint.
Faced with a business requirement to move content from file servers and SharePoint 2007 into a new SharePoint 2013 on premise service the challenge is to determine and define the basic requirement of “moving files”. Records and Information management, in any business, is concerned, amongst other things, with data integrity and findability. What does this mean in practice?
A simple lift and shift will loose basic metadata like created and modified dates, because the target SharePoint document library will apply the current create and modified dates, and any other defaults set in the library. This changes the file metadata and context which has potential of affecting any legal admissibility, the document life-cycle and will likely mislead end users using search or other discovery methods.
We need, therefore, to find software or alternate methods which “transform” the file metadata and ideally inject additional metadata which is useful to the business and ongoing information management.
By working through ‘use cases’ and ‘what if’ scenarios a set of questions arose which provide base criteria for selecting software. Also included were questions about software requirements, licensing and support.
Mike Bunyan
