This post is sort of part 2 of my other post on migration using Metalogix. I was working with the Migration Manager to move data out of the Vignette Collaboration platform, but the steps I describe below can actually be used with any other source platform (or no source platform at all!).
If you are building out SharePoint sites with Metalogix Migration Manager there are 2 ways to do it:
- Crawl your source site and transfer content to SharePoint
- Export your source content to a CSV and transfer content to SharePoint. (Technically, you don’t have to export anything. This method can be used to create SharePoint sites/pages from a CSV file.)
I find the crawl method to be inferior in cases where the original content is dynamic. For example, imagine you have a set of pages that pull information from a database. When crawling such pages, you are just taking a snapshot of their HTML and the crawler can’t know anything about the structure of the underlying database. So it’s easy to lose your site logic in the migration process.
The CSV process can certainly be more work-intensive, but it allows for a lot more flexibility and you can build a much “prettier” SharePoint site and page structure. Hopefully by now you are sold on the CSV approach as the “right” way to migrate content. Below are a few bits of information that will hopefully make it easier for you to get started.
Useful Native Metalogix Fields
First, let me introduce the fields that I found most useful in my migration. They are built into Metalogix and you just need to “plug in” your own values for your migration. In addition to the provided fields, you can also add your own (the Metalogix website has helpful demos on how to do this ) and map them to SharePoint.
| Column | What it does | Required |
| SourceURL or ID | Unique identifier for your resource.Metalogix can use SourceURL to pull in page resources like images | Yes |
| FileName | Tells Metalogix what the file name is. Can be used to name files/pages in SharePoint. | Yes |
| MimeType | Tells Metalogix how to handle the entry.You can import CSV without MimeType, but you won’t be able to migrate to SharePoint. | Yes |
| Title | Can be used to set page title and name the page. | No |
| Author | User that created the resource. If you don’t explicitly populate this field, System Account will be set as the Author in SharePoint. | No |
| Created | Date the resource was created. As with Author, if not explicitly set, the time of migration will be set as creation time. | No |
| Modified | Date the resource was modified. | No |
Managed Metadata
If you need to migrate or create Managed Metadata, there’s a bit of a trick to it. You have to do it in 3 steps:
- Create the term store with all the terms that you plan to use with imported content.
- Import content without keywords. Whether you import pages into MMM via crawl or a custom CSV that you created, it must have a SourceURL or other ID property to uniquely identify each piece of content. For example, first you import at CSV into Metalogix with the web content. Import a CSV with just the content data like the one below into Metalogix.
SourceURL Mime type Author CreatedDate http://my_website_name.com/Page1.html Text/html Darya Orlova 3/2/2011 3:45 AM http://my_website_name.com/smiley.png 3/1/2011 8:13 PM … - Import the content-keyword connection. You should use the same URL/ID to identify the items marked with Managed Metadata. Import this CSV into the same data source as the first CSV and let Metalogix match the MetadataField to the appropriate data with the Source URL. You will then need to go into column settings and set the MetadataField as such, rather than a text field. The managed metadata CSV ought to look like this (you can name the metadata field whatever you want):
SourceURL MetadataField http://my_website_name.com/Page1.html First Page Tag|1C50BF44-35CA-484D-9FAF-99637BFDF517 http://my_website_name.com/smiley.png Smiley Image Tag|61149853-BC54-46BA-9A7C-6926747126FB …
Check that the managed metadata column really links up to SharePoint and import!
