SharePoint Migration in the Hands of the Content Owner?

Let Business Users Manage their Content Migration via a Drag-and-Drop GUI.

If you have ever worked on the team responsible for SharePoint migration, you no doubt have seen how a single initiative of content consolidation within legacy systems instantly becomes a “nightmare” project with many failed migration attempts. There are various approaches you can use, depending on your need, systems and hardware involved.

For example, you can utilize existing hardware, assuming you are migrating from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007, whether with an in-place or gradual upgrades. Or, if you are migrating to new hardware, you would probably reserve to either database upgrade, or utilize third-party migration tools, such as Tzunami, Quest and Metalogix. They all offer administrator-based migration solution that do provide some piece-of-mind.

Another option one of the companies shared with us is user-powered, manual migration. Simply put, SharePoint Administrators configured new hardware with MOSS 2007 and allowed power users to manually recreate documents.

Why would organization decide to put control into the hands of the users? For different reasons: the content in SPS2003 was mostly outdated and out of control, required large storage capacity within new infrastructure, plus SharePoint administrators refused to migrate unorganized content (“garbage in-garbage out”).

The company decided to give migration control to owners of the content. They created a dedicated power user group, provided extensive training by outsourcing it to a professional training company, put power users in charge of recreating and organizing their new sites and content, and set deadlines on content migration (the company had plans to disassemble and reuse old hardware). This, however, became a long process and while users were constrained by the timeline, they were overwhelmed by the amount of information they needed to sort through and migrate. Not a bad thought though…

Now there is a new product that helps business users migrate and consolidate content: PathBuilder Migration Studio by Vital Path. It allows end-users to quickly and easily move content, calendars and tasks at the file, folder or repository level, while insuring content integrity by retaining all associated metadata. All using the power of their desktops. This approach not only speeds up the migration, it greatly maximizes ROI.

PathBuilder Migration Studio used customer content migration experience and industry best practices and wrapped it all up in a cool Drag-and-Drop GUI. End-users now have the ability to migrate content between various Enterprise Content Management repositories including SharePoint, schedule events, and receive real-time reporting related to the migration/integration actions.

Though the GUI itself may look a little clunky, your IT department should definitely appreciate its benefits.

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