Metalogix SharePoint Migration Solutions

At the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, one of the most common questions we heard was “How does your SharePoint Site Migration Manager differ from the out of the box upgrade?” This is an easy answer.

1. SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) is easier

SSMM is easy to install, easy to use and easy to evaluate (download a trial version). Instead of going through a complicated series of hardware and software configuration steps, you can simply set up a new SharePoint server and then upgrade. You don’t need to go through a pre-scan process, you can immediately connect to servers and copy/paste content from one to the other. (Watch a SSMM copy site video demo.) SharePoint Site Migration Manager allows any user—not just IT administrators—to upgrade what she has rights to access (SharePoint site collections, sites, lists or items) to a different SharePoint server. This can mean upgrading from WSS to MOSS, SPS to MOSS, or from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0.

2. SSMM is better

The out of box upgrade gives you no flexibility to improve your server as you upgrade. With SSMM, you can do an incremental migration or you can reorganize your server. For example, you can split sites/lists, merge sites/lists, promote sites to site collections, improve performance by decreasing the size of lists, re-template your pages, re-ghost your pages, map to new templates, and the list goes on. (See our blog post for more info: http://blog.metalogix.net/?cat=5)

3. SSMM works in more environments

The out of the box upgrade simply doesn’t work in as many cases as Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager, and even in supported cases, the out of the box upgrade does not allow you to reorganize your SharePoint servers as part of the upgrade process.

SSMM allows you to upgrade systems that aren’t supported by the out of the box upgrade. We support upgrading WSS 2.0 to MOSS, SPS 2003 to WSS 3.0 or MOSS, and even migrating MOSS to WSS V3. These moves could be an entire server, or a single site, list or item.

There are very good reasons why dozens of our customers have chosen to upgrade their SharePoint servers with SSMM instead of using other options. Since SSMM uses the SharePoint API and web services, you can upgrade systems that are on different service packs. Also, SSMM can move/upgrade your SharePoint sites between 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

How does SharePoint Site Migration Manager fare in a direct comparison to the out of the box upgrade options?

1. In-Place Upgrade – Even Microsoft will advise you not to use this, so it’s not worth discussing (see the Microsoft post about why you don’t want to use in-place upgrade). For example, your environment is offline while it runs.

2. Granular Upgrade – While it’s true that this option allows you to have granular control and upgrade one or more site collections at a time, it is nowhere near as flexible as SharePoint Site Migration Manager. Take a look at the SSMM features page, and you’ll see why. SSMM offers the same overall benefits, plus the ability to re-organize, re-ghost, re-template and fix errors you made in your original setup. With SSMM, you can end up with a faster and better organized environment

3. Database Attach – This option is more complex and resource intensive than SharePoint Site Migration Manager. This is how Microsoft describes the database option, “Complex process that requires many manual steps and a higher risk of error. Requires additional manual steps to retain original URLs for sites. … Requires new server farm..” According to a talk from the recent SharePoint conference, this method also “requires 4-6 times the SQL storage of the original server.”

Even in the best case scenario, where gradual upgrade is successful, Microsoft says the server that does the upgrade can be “significantly slower” than a clean install of MOSS 2007. Microsoft recommends that customers upgrade on one machine in a farm and then remove that server from the farm and install MOSS 2007 from scratch.

Also, because you can’t re-template as you upgrade, you likely end up with “Frankensites” where the original templates don’t fit in with the new MOSS pages. As you navigate around, you get a strange inconsistent experience.

SharePoint Site Migration Manager is the upgrade and migration choice for hundreds of customers. Download a trial version and try it today!

This is a substantial Beta build. 13 features and 29 fixes.
 

- Audience mapping has been added for some cases

- You can preserve site themes

- Users can map columns during a view copy operation
- You can now hide a column (or not copy it) during a list migration
- User mapping warnings no longer trigger an event log entry

Note that this build requires a new version of the Metalogix extensions service (included in the download). 

Details (click the caret for the detailed build notes):
http://www.metalogix.net/products/buildhistory.aspx?ProductID=MLMigrationLL

This build resolves an issue with the installer for 64-bit servers.

Details:

http://www.metalogix.net/products/buildhistory.aspx?ProductID=MLMigrationLL

There is a new release build of Website Migration Manager available on the build page. This build packs in 16 new features!

- Recent Projects List: A Recent Projects list has been added to the File menu, it displays the ten most recent Migration Manager projects.
- MCMS Import Log: MCMS Postings import and MCMS Resource import now both produce logs.
- Broken Link Finder: There is now an action available that will scan a site and test all hyperlinks.

Details (click the caret for detailed build notes):

http://www.metalogix.net/products/buildhistory.aspx?ProductID=MLMigrationWS

Here are some points to remember when planning a migration with Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM).

- Check www.metalogix.net for resources. For example, SSMM has a features page (http://www.metalogix.net/products/migrationmanagersp/features.htm) and there are short video demos that show how to use various features.

- Read about the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions Service in the SSMM product documentation and decide whether you require the service to be running on the source and target server.

- Run a comprehensive test migration well before your final production migration. Our customers have a varied array of network topologies and it’s always best to run a meaningful test in an environment that matches the actual migration.

Pre-Migration Setup on the Target SharePoint Server

- Configure SharePoint to accept all file types to be migrated (e.g., .exe files are not accepted by default) .

- Configure SharePoint to accept the largest file size to be migrated (the default max size is 50 MB).

- Set up third-party web parts and custom content types on the target server before you migrate. If you want your sites to look at similar as possible, you should also set up any customized templates and themes on the target.

Have you ever wanted to use your batch copy files on a different server? Have you ever wanted to instantly see which log files contain warnings or other messages? If so, then the new Batch Migration Utility is for you.

- click for full-size image

This utility will hopefully also enhance our dialog about some of the features we could add to the next major release of SSMM.

Features:

- Use Find/Replace to change text in batch files (e.g., change the source or target server).
- If you have a commercially licensed version of SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) installed on the same machine, you can run Batch files right in BMU.
- View log messages in a tree view or see which logs contain errors in a list view.

Known Issues:

- Log messages that contain newline characters may be truncated in the summary view. Switch to the full Log View to see the whole message.

Download the BMU utility here: http://download.metalogix.net/downloads/BatchMigrationUtility.zip

Reminder: Always backup your batch files before altering them with any tool.

This build includes many new features and fixes. For example:

- copy site themes
- copy alerts to MOSS 2007
- preserve list view web part views from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007
- filter items out of list copy
- preserve top navigation settings
- create new columns when using the column mapping feature

Note that this build also includes an update for the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions service. 

Details:

http://www.metalogix.net/products/buildhistory.aspx?ProductID=MLMigrationLL

SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) only writes to SharePoint through the public API and web services, so the performance of your migration will be primarily dependent on the performance of your SharePoint servers. The good news is that SSMM can help you refactor your SharePoint servers back to peak performance. Using the software, you can restructure your lists, sites and site collections, so that they best meet the Microsoft performance recommendations.

The SharePoint API performance begins to degrade when a contain has more than 2000 items. Therefore, Microsoft recommends no more than 2000 items in any given list (e.g., 2000 documents in a document library). This blog post lists some useful stats about recommendations for MOSS performance (the data was gathered from TechNet): http://mystepstones.wordpress.com/2007/06/04/more-sharepoint-2007-figures-numbers/. And here are some field specific limitations: http://mystepstones.wordpress.com/2007/05/18/10/.

Other Points to Consider:

- Installing the Migration Manager client on the Web Front End server may improve the performance of your migration. This reduces the data moving across the network to the client. Note that if you are using a load balanced environment, you should refer to our documentation about how this can affect the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions service.

- Running multiple clients can also improve performance. However, if you are running multiple Migration Manager clients against the same source and/or target server, you should ensure that they are accessing different parts of SharePoint. For example, writing to the same SharePoint list with two Migration Manager clients will cause errors.

- Only use the “Preserve Document IDs” option to copy document libraries if SharePoint lookup lists are referencing the documents. This setting will have a negative impact on performance, so it should only be used when necessary.

- Creating objects through the SharePoint API will account for most of the time it takes to perform a migration. For this reason, complicated site structures (even if they are empty) will take longer to copy than a simple site structure that potentially contains more data and/or documents. In other words, it is possible that creating dozens of sites on the target server will take longer than migrating a single document library that contains large documents.

- The start time for each operation is recorded in the SSMM log file. To diagnose a performance problem, you can check these time stamps to see which operation is causing the delay.

- If you want to perform a quick incremental copy, you can use options such as ”Preserve existing lists.”

This release of Website Migration Manager offers an impressive number of fixes and new features. For example, a number of MCMS to SharePoint features have been added or improved. Also…

- You can now publish migrated documents and images.
- You can create SharePoint Sites with a new custom action.
- A new MCMS import log has been added.

Details:

http://www.metalogix.net/products/buildhistory.aspx?ProductID=MLMigrationWS

This is a minor release which is primarily for a documentation update.

Topics were added for: migrating views independently, copying site structure without contents, filtering view, filtering out lists during copy, copying all users, copying MySites, site collection promotion, site collection creation and copying, mapping columns during item-level migration, Hot Keys, mapping lists names during migration, and renaming lists during migration.

Details:

http://www.metalogix.net/products/buildhistory.aspx?ProductID=MLMigrationLL