SharePoint Migration Best Practices Using Metalogix Software from Max Herve

Part 1 of 2 -- Migrating File Share to SharePoint 2010

After working on multiple migration projects in 2011, I wanted to share some information with you that will hopefully facilitate your migration process. Some of these techniques will be Metalogix-related but the rest of them will be relevant no matter which migration method or tool is chosen. This is Part One of two parts, and focuses on migrating content from file shares to SharePoint 2010. Part Two will include some tips on migrating content from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

Pre-Migration:

• The first step before getting rid of an old File Share should be to clean up the folder structure ahead of migration.

• If you have business cases where you need to keep folder architectures in your SharePoint libraries, it is widely considered a best practice to consolidate folders and subfolders on the File Share by merging unnecessary sublevels. Too many folder levels will create long file URLs in SharePoint. Shorter SharePoint URLs will give you more accurate search results. Indeed, the shorter the SharePoint URL is, the higher the document shows up in search results.

• Part of the File Share cleanup will be to exclude certain file extensions from the migration. As a “safety net”, it is a good idea to append these file extensions to the blocked file types in SharePoint 2010 so these files cannot be uploaded to the new site. (Central Administration => Security => Define blocked file types). Here is an example of file extensions that you may not want to include in your migration:
  • . accdb, .css, .db, .inf, .mp3, .gif, .exe, .fm3, .lnk, .lock, .mht, thmx, shs, .tif, .tmp, .xml

• Microsoft recommends not to increase the list threshold to anything over 5000 items. Over 5000 documents in a library could have a huge performance impact in SQL when users access this library. One way to avoid querying the whole library that has over 5000 documents at once is to create folders and have less than 5000 items in each folder. Filtered views and/or metadata-based navigation returning less than 5000 items are also options.

• Do not migrate a folder named BIN to SharePoint, as you will not be able to open the documents within this folder.

• You may have issues opening Excel documents in SharePoint when the file URL exceeds 218 characters (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213983). PathScan is a great tool to use in the pre-migration phase in order to determine which .xls files are likely to exceed this limitation.

 

Some of my preferred tools to use during the pre-migration phase:

• Tree size professional 5.5 => this tool can generate a report of your file structure. You need to use the professional version ($52.95; 30-day trial) to scan network drives. It generates a report that will allow you to analyze your file share pre-migration and remove any redundant files.

• Path Scan 0.11 => this tool can scan file share folders and lets you generate a list of documents with a path greater than x number of characters. It is useful to run this before executing the migration to determine which paths need to be shortened.

 

Migration Time:

Here are some specific “how to’s” on which I did not find documentation but learned from hands-on experience across several migration projects:

• One of the benefits of using a migration tool is that you can easily run incremental jobs. These jobs are usually run before going live so documents in SharePoint get updated with the latest documents from the source. Keep in mind you can also export Metalogix jobs to PowerShell scripts and run them as scheduled jobs via the Windows Task Scheduler:
  • Run incremental job in Metalogix – File Share Migration Manager:
    • Right click on root
    • 1^st rerun modified after date X
    • 2^nd rerun created after date X

• In the Metalogix tool, you will be able to tag your documents by adding new “file properties,” properties that will be located on the server itself. Also, in order to speed up the migration, you may want to set up additional Web Front End servers (WFEs) as part of your SharePoint farm and install the Metalogix client on them. [NOTE: Since Metalogix licenses by amount of data being migrated, not number of servers, this is a viable and recommended option if you need rapid migration.] However, since the additional properties created via the tool are “cached” on the server, you will need to export/import the metadata to move it to other Metalogix clients:
  • Move metadata between File Share connections or Metalogix clients:
    • To move metadata from one File Share connection to another one, right click the root and click on “save metadata as,” then save it to the other WFE.

• By default, Metalogix will map file names to the Name column in SharePoint. I recommend mapping the file name to the Title column as well. SharePoint by default will show the first few words of a document in search results when the Title field is empty (see Optimistic Title Override). Having a matching Name and Title for all migrated documents will allow you to have relevant search results.

I hope you found these tips helpful. In my next post, I will detail some lessons learned about “SharePoint to SharePoint” migrations using Metalogix.