SharePoint Development - Migrating Existing Content

This was a SharePoint Development project that had been outsourced by a client who had content that uploaded to static sites, one web CMS and some custom content databases. As the client requested, all of the content needed to be transfer to the SharePoint 2007 platform.

Why people want to transfer their online content to SharePoint platform? Are there any benefits of using SharePoint 2007, especially for business? One of the greatest benefits of SharePoint 2007 is that companies are able to access their digital documents and files in their SharePoint portal from multiple sources, so sharing information becomes more fast and easy with SharePoint.

There are many vendors who offer content migration tools to SharePoint Platform. These tools allow users to transfer content to SharePoint lists/ document libraries.

Here we list some popular content migration tools to SharePoint platform that are welcomed by SharePoint development team:

MetaLogix – SharePoint site migration manager, web content migration manager for SharePoint, FileShare migration manager for SharePoint, SharePoint migration manager for eRoom.

AvePoint – DocAve SharePoint migratory, DocAve public folder migrator, DocAve file system migrator, DocAve documentum eRoom migrator, AvePoint website migrator, etc.

Tzunami – TD file shares migration, TD SPS 2003 migration, TD SPS 2001 migration, TD exchange migration, TD LiveLink migration, TD DocuShare migration, etc.

Quest – migration manager for SharePoint, file migrator, public folder migrator, notes migrator.

The most challenged part of this SharePoint development project was page library migration. The content must be transferred into a SharePoint page when migrating content into a page library. To complete this, the original content mark-up must to be parsed, unwanted tags need to be stripped and then mapped to the correct resource in SharePoint. It can be stored in the respective native SharePoint fields based on the relevant Content Type once the source content is parsed. And then, it can be mapped to the relevant page layout that determines the look and feel of the rendered content, in accordance with the principle of separating content and presentation.

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