One of the biggest challenges I have when migrating customers over to SharePoint is moving their files and folders.
On the surface this is a daunting task as you can’t just give SharePoint your folder structure and tell it to do the work for you, so below are some of the processes I use.
Option 1: Manually via SharePoint Web Interface
Recreate the folder structure in SharePoint and upload the files via SharePoint in batches doing a multiple file upload to one destination folder at a time using explorer view. Not much fun for anyone, but it can be done. This has also proved to be unreliable, some machines need patching to get this to work, so I have found myself spending a lot of time correcting errors with the WebDAV service in order get this to work… This is my least favourite method.
Option 2: Commercial Tools
Possibly look at a third party tool they will cost you but will get the job done and probably with a few extra bell’s and whistles like applying metadata to SharePoint columns during the process. Some of the key companies to take a look at would be:
- Metalogix http://www.metalogix.net
- AvePoint http://www.avepoint.com
- Sharegate http://en.share-gate.com
- Thinkscape http://www.thinkscape.com
Option 3: Open Source Tools
There are some open source projects going around that claim to handle these types of bulk uploads, here’s a couple that look interesting:
https://spfilezilla.codeplex.com/ – This is my favourite – it really is just like FileZilla
http://spbulkdocumentimport.codeplex.com/
http://spfileupload.codeplex.com/
