To fill a gap in understanding what’s involved in a SharePoint migration, Metalogix today released Migration Expert, an analysis tool that provides best practices and metrics for migration.
The free tool, according to the company, gives SharePoint administrators a view of their environment to help them avoid issues with migration from older SharePoint versions to SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 (SharePoint Online). This enables organizations to lessen downtime created by the move and to safely handle the migration of critical business content.
Many organizations don’t have a deep appreciation for what they have in their current environment in relation to the target environment, which could result in them trying to move an on-premise, 200GB site collection into a new SharePoint environment with, say, a 100GB limit, according to Metalogix’s Steve Marsh, director of product marketing. The new tool scans the platform for apps, content databases, sites and site collections to see if they meet Microsoft’s recommended thresholds.
Migration Expert offers a drop-down list for choosing the target migration environment, and it provides custom advice for the one selected. It also helps with organizational best practices.
Marsh gave the example of using the tool to identify a SharePoint site when the content hasn’t changed in 90 days. The organization can then decide if the content is out of date and should not be included in the migration, or create a rule about how to handle older content if there isn’t already a rule in place.
The new analysis tool comes with eight reports in the initial release, along with 60 metrics and a visual dashboard in the client. This provides users with such information as file names, whether or not they are checked out, which content was modified least, who created it, who last used it, and more.
“Everyone’s hearing that users are not as happy with SharePoint, and adoption is not as great” as might be expected after investments in the platform are made, Marsh said. So one way to keep them happy, he said, is to offer a clear migration path. “If you don’t know which files are checked out, you might migrate it while someone’s working on it, and then it might get checked back in to the old installation.”
Migration Expert helps remind all users to check in their work so migration can occur, and you can then run a test to make sure all files are checked in before migrating. Then, after the migration is done, you can get the correct version of the file, taking away confusion.
For more information and a link to download the tool, visit the company’s website.
