Home > MOSS 2007 > Metalogix–SharePoint Migration Tools

Metalogix–SharePoint Migration Tools

I am currently working on a project which makes it my 15th small to large scale content migration experience in total using SharePoint Site Migration Manager tool (SSMM) offered by Metalogix. I am excited my experience with over 15 clients has brought nothing except a good experience for both myself and my clients for less than $100k total (Thats for all 15!), another branch in my career (besides just being a dev or an integration kind of guy) and many ideas on how a product should carry itself to stay in business (Starting from sales all the way down to the development, support and releasing new features).

I thought I should just put together a blog post about them along with addressing couple of questions that may be on your mind. I would love to hear your experiences (positive and negative). Please leave me a comment or email me at [myfirstname] at devhorizon dot come if you want me to incorporate your thoughts or concerns into this post. The end goal is , we all walk away with a better understanding of what they are really good at and what they are not. I also have no experience with other products such as AvePoint or Tzunami, so if you could please shed some lights on them as well, that would be great!

What Metalogix Offers: They offer three migration services:

1. FileShare Migration Manager (FSMM)
2. SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM)
3. Website Migration Manager (WSMM)

What I like about Metalogix:

* Small dotnet based install (4mb – 100% MS solution, no need for Apache Tomcat server, Java and etc;) )
* 5 min install (no moving parts)
* Good docs and videos – very intuitive
* New features rolling out ever 6-8 weeks
* Excellent support
* Restructuring or re-templatizing capabilities for lists, libraries and sites (SSMM)
* Consolidating lists, libraries and sites from multiple source servers (SSMM)
* Merge or split lists (SSMM)
* Promote subsites to site collections or demote toplevel sites to subsites (SSMM). I am currently investigating to see how they are doing this operation under the hood, how much this will put you in the risk of losing your data or metadata and if they use any unsupported ways to accomplish this task – I will keep you posted on this.

Update (14/April/2008): I just confirmed with Metalogix that they are NOT doing anything at db level or any undocumented calls but they use RPC and webservices in conjunction with the API which can be considered as poorly documented calls. Versioning in this process is retained, but page customizations are not preserved as they instantiate new sites based on the target template. The upside here is the sites are all reghosted and so you can leverage the new masterpage framework for customizations. Metalogix can NOT copy custom webpart binaries, page layouts (MOSS 2007 to MOSS 2007), alerts, workflows or content types yet. These functionalities are coming but in the interim , and in the context of site collection promotion/demotion, webparts and content types can be instantiated at copy time if they exist on the target.The workflow is a little more complicated but still very doable and useful. Worflows need to be manually re-associated with list/libs for another 2 months while they work on the new features.

Step 1: Instantiate a new site collection using Migration Manager or central admin.
Step 2: Install custom content types, webparts, workflows
Step 3: Copy/promote or demote content to the target site collection and ML will instantiate the appropriate webparts and content types.

*Easy mapping and migratation from WSSv2/SPS2003 site permissions to WSSv3/ MOSS 2007 (SSMM) *Migrating document libraries and lists to SharePoint sites while retaining views, versions, user-info and metadata (SSMM)
*Adding metadata to docs and HTML content prior to migration (This really gives you a lot of flexibility in migration process – just think about it!) (FSMM and WSMM)
*Ability to correct content links after content has been migrated (Getting old? this option is your friend 🙂 ) (WSMM) *Rapid prototyping for your SharePoint or CMS demos with actual customer content in it

Drawbacks:

Honestly, besides the pricing which seems to be a little bit high for some projects (but remember, you get what you pay for!), I have ONLY heard one person complaining about it. It was about FileShareMigration utility (to migrate a large ntfs share to SharePoint) which buckled under pressure and skipped some of the files (This can happen sometimes as a result of server time outs). I have never used FileShareMigration under a huge load , so I have no idea if this is really a problem of the tool or anything else. I am just echoing what I heard. That’s it! (They have also made a lot of improvements over the last year)

Important: Please make sure that Metalogix is the right tool for you , before you jump into it , spent your money and finally find out that there was a free tool ( Such as DavCopy by fellow MVP Maurice Prather ) that can do the job for you. Don’t blame Metalogix (or as a matter of fact any other tool), if you haven’t done your research.

One thing needs to be highlighted here : Metalogix is a content migration tool , it is not superman!, so don’t expect it to do a miracle for you. The other day, someone was asking me if Metalogix can upgrade their V2 web parts to V3 counterparts . C’mon guys! They can, however, copy webparts between sites and servers as long as the binaries are in installed.

Couple of frequently asked questions and answers:

Q) Can Metalogix preserve the timestamp value while transferring list items from V2 to V3? Yes, it absolutely can. This requires a server side component to be installed as it needs to leverage the SP API to do this.

Q) Can Metalogix retain the folder modified by and created ? No.Metalogix cannot retain the folder modified by and created by as there is no SP API available to do this.

Q) What command line features Metalogix offers? You can run projects from all three apps via the command line.This zip file includes the latest WebSite Migration Manager sample actions (C# and VB.Net examples), and the sample actions Getting Started guide. The samples include the C# command line “UILessMigration” utility, as well as:

1) Hello World
2) Create XML Action
3) Merge From External DB (C# version includes UI for mapping multiple Access DB fields to Migration Manager columns)
4) Create New Items
5) Action Wrapper

Here is a link to a video for command line operation of SharePoint Site Migration Manager and here is another one. Pretty much the C# example for ULessMIgration will work with both Website and FileShare Migration Manager.

Q) Are you saying that Metalogix has no issue? No , that’s not true. Every tool has its own glitches and ML is not an exception. Remember, we are looking at an Enterprise tool here, where there is always a trade-off and based on overall positive and negative points a tool (like ML) or even a solution (like SharePoint) is evaluated. Get the trial version and do your research before rushing into it. I see many cases that ML doesn’t make sense at all , so a free tool or even your code is just more than enough.

Q) Can I share my license with my customer? No you can’t. You can definitely showcase to your customer to close the deal, but sharing it is not an option.

Q) What are the SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) Supported Features? http://www.metalogix.net/products/migrationmanagersp/features.htm

Categories: MOSS 2007 Tags:
  1. Cameron
    May 2nd, 2008 at 01:16 | #1

    Rezza,

    I’ve got a quick question. We just migrated about 300GB of data using ML from a 2003 environment to MOSS 2007. For some reason on the 2007 site I associate a new workflow with a document library that was copied over, but when I go to try to start the workflow there is not an option for it. If I create a new document library and associate a workflow with the same settings, the option is there. Being a SharePoint developer, I know just about everything when it comes to backend and programming with the object model, but I’m a retard when it comes to actually using it. Am I just missing something here?

    On a side note…We’re also using echo for SharePoint (because we didn’t do enough research) and we’ve been very pleased with their support. I recommend you check them out.

    Cameron

  2. Reza Alirezaei
    May 7th, 2008 at 14:38 | #2

    Hi Cameron, I can’t reproduce the situation that you’ve described.

    If you can share more details about exactly what was migrated, and what settings you used, that would be helpful.

    I am following up with ML and curious to know the cause of this issue.

  3. Trevor Guiles
    May 9th, 2008 at 04:19 | #3

    I was having problems finding an adequate solution to migrate my data from one server to another. The first server was WSS 2.0 and the new server is MOSS 2007. Nothing would migrate our survey data correctly or completely. That is, not until I used Metalogix Migration Manager. It truly went way beyond what I had expected.

    As a seasoned IT veteran of over 15 years, I am not one to need a flowery interface. But, I have to say that Migration Manager was so easy to use that I think that my 10 year old daughter could have used it and obtained good results.

    I am not one to advertise, but let me say that this program is a LIFE SAVER if you need to migrate your data! MS has not provided any acceptable tools, but Metalogix has sure stepped up to the plate to fill that gap!

    This is experience with the product, and I highly recommend taking a good look at it.

  4. Pankaj
    October 23rd, 2008 at 05:26 | #4

    We are using metalogix for content migration from stallent to sharepoint system.Trying to import the files through VPN It imports successfully.But while migrating it is not giving the page layouts. If any body have solution than please mail. Thanks in advance.

  5. Cameron
    October 23rd, 2008 at 11:23 | #5

    We had custom page layouts and we had to move everything to Metalogix blank site layout.

  6. Kunal
    November 9th, 2008 at 13:11 | #6

    Hi,

    I was wondering that is there any websites or blogs which can give me the problems occurred while migrating from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. And how these problems were troubleshooted?

    I will really appreciate if someone can help me out with these.

    Thanks

  7. Kevin Simms
    January 8th, 2009 at 17:27 | #7

    Metalogix sucks sh*t.

  8. Reza Alirezaei
    January 8th, 2009 at 17:50 | #8

    Kevin,

    Please elaborate why and educate everyone. That’s the whole point 🙂

  9. Reza Alirezaei
  10. April 24th, 2009 at 06:13 | #10

    If you ever want to hear a reader’s feedback 🙂 , I rate this article for 4/5. Detailed info, but I have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed bits. Thank you, anyway!

  11. Suneet
    June 28th, 2011 at 10:37 | #11

    i am doing Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration. Metadata points its working fine but could not find a way to get the Site Columns and Publishing Feature working on 2010 migrated site. Any idea?

  12. July 16th, 2011 at 09:49 | #12

    Hey Reeza,

    I wanted to know whether I can migrate Workflows, Custom content types and Custom Datafeatures, Master pages form MOSS-2007 to SP-2010 using the latest version of Metalogix Sharepoint Site Migration Manager (v4.0).

    I have tried migrating lists, libraries, etc. using the trial version. But could not migrate custom content types, thinking that this might be the case for all trial versions. Pls thro some light on this.

    Thanks

  13. Vinod
    September 8th, 2011 at 06:39 | #13

    Hi Reza,
    Nice elaoration on the post. I am with you on ” Every tool has its own glitches and ML is not an exception.”

    I have tried Metalogix migration version v3.6.34 Could find some of the files not copied when i tried Sp 2007 site- site migration across farms. Also the Metatags like modified by were having some issues. Can you tell me if that had any improvements in the latest version..

  14. Avi
    December 19th, 2011 at 07:36 | #14

    Hello

    We would like to migrate from 2007 to sp2010. We have 5 site collection and 3 web application and 100+ sites. We have 2 WFE and 1 DB servers. Our total content databses are 7 and total size is 300 GB. We also have branding on 1 of the web application (modified master page). We dont have any other customizations. Here are my questions

    1. Is Metalogix support the merging of the sites as one site?
    2. Is my branding also migrate as it is?
    3. We dont have any trainied metalogix professional, however we have sharepoint admin and developer in our team, do we need any special training to using tool?
    4. How much time it will to migrate 300 GB data?

    Please advise
    avi kumar

  15. Kevin
    October 20th, 2012 at 10:21 | #15

    @Avi
    Hi did you get an answer for this question? I’m curious how long it might take to migrate 300GB of data.

You must be logged in to post a comment.