As organizations put more into their SharePoint installations and they become true business platforms, upgrading to a newer version of SharePoint, or getting off of a competing ECM system and moving things on to SharePoint, gets way more difficult and time-consuming.
“It’s not just an application, or a site collection, or a department,” said Ken Allen, director of marketing at SharePoint solutions provider Axceler. “Now, with SharePoint as an enterprise platform, you’re essentially moving the whole company. You’re moving business logic as well.”
The key to a successful migration, according to Garry Smith, GM of migration products at Axceler, is planning. And querying provides the knowledge that makes for effective planning, he added.
Davinci Migrator 2.0, which ships today, comes with 40 queries out of the box and allows for new ones to be created. And, full workflow migration capability has been introduced with this version. “Things like ‘Show me every site that has a file checked out,’ or ‘Show me which sites have SharePoint Designer workflows,’ or ‘Which is the largest site collection?’ All that feeds into planning that drives sets of migrations,” Smith said.
Davinci Migrator 2.0 also can be used to run preflight checks that can warn of potential problems during migration, and can offer suggestions to remedy those situations, he added.
“We’re taking more of a business analyst approach that incorporates processes rather than simply moving bits and bytes,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, everyone wants shorter migration and lower cost.”
