Moving Lists from Hosted WSS 3.0 to Office365 – The ShareGate Way

The other day I did a post in which I was grousing about what a pain it is to move individual lists from a 2007 environment to a 2010 environment. Even worse, I wanted to move the lists from a hosted WSS 3.0 environment at FPWeb to Office365. Because of this, there was no access to the back end, and it was a one-time move, anyway. I did figure out a really messy way to do it, and my prior post outlines that if you’re interested.

[notice]I’m going to stick with my premise that portability is one of SharePoint’s Achilles’ heels. We absolutely have to get to a point where there are better answers to these questions than “hire a developer” or “buy a third party tool”.[/notice]

Ben Niaulin (@bniaulin) at GSoft Group saw my complaining on Twitter and reminded me that as an MVP I could get a copy of their Sharegate product for free. BTW, GSoft fielded an awesome Iron SharePoint team called the SHAREPOINT G-NIUSES at the recent SharePoint Summit in Toronto. I was there to see what they came up with, and I was impressed. Check them out if you need SharePoint Services in Canada (or anywhere, I suppose).

I was certainly willing to try Sharegate out, of course. Setting it up and getting it running was a snap. The user interface is really nice – something that I think many end users would be totally comfortable with. Ben wanted to give me a tutorial up front, but I figured that wouldn’t be a fair test. I wanted to see if I could figure it out myself, just with the existing help.

My first challenge was that I couldn’t figure out how to copy the structure of the lists from WSS to Office365. It was clear how to move the content, but not the structure. I caved and pinged Ben. Apparently, this was by design.

In Ben’s words:

Sharegate is currently a Content Migration tool, you need to have the destination library there.

The idea is that when migrating from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 many new features and structures exist. What  may have been a lookup column could become a Managed Metadata column in 2010 instead. That’s what we focus on, migrating the content, for now.

This wasn’t a big deal, though, because I was interested in moving only about a dozen lists, and the structures weren’t that complex. I had hoped to be able to move the structures *and* content, but I just bit the bullet and built the structures (that I hadn’t built already based on my prior, manual method) by hand.

Here are some screenshots that show how straightforward it was to move the content. The first step, which I don’t capture here, was simply to connect to the source and destination locations.

Next you select the source “container”, in my case, an individual list.

Then you specify the destination “container”.

Once you’ve made those choices, you can see all of the items in the source which you can migrate.

I wanted to move everything, so I just clicked the “Select All” link.

The next prompt let me choose between an easy and a more powerful route. I just wanted to go the Full copy route, as I was moving the content wholesale. The option on the right, which I poked around in but didn’t use this time, gave me a *lot* of control over how the content moved. I could remap fields, change values based on conditions, all sorts of stuff. The other migration tools I’ve looked at also do this, but I really liked the interface in Sharegate.

Next came a warning about mapping the permissions. Since I didn’t have access to the back ends, I couldn’t install the Sharegate Extension. This meant that the permissions wouldn’t go across. This was something else I didn’t care about, so I simply clicked Continue.

And voila, the content moved across, with a nice progress indicator telling me how things were going. It wasn’t a lot of content, so it was pretty quick.

Lather, rinse, and repeat for each of my other lists and I was all set.

All in all, it was a pretty painless experience. I think that Sharegate’s UI is one of the big selling points for it. Also, since it doesn’t try to be too many things (like some of the products out there), the process was streamlined for basically the exact path I wanted to take. If you’ve got some content to migrate from one place in SharePoint to another, give it a look.

And thanks, Ben!