SharePoint Migration

Question

Hello, 
 We are in the process of migrating SharePoint Documents over to M-Files. The way we do this is using the importer tool, but we are finding this to be quite a time-consuming and tedious task. 
 First, we download the documents from different libraries to a network drive since this would be required by the importer tool. Then we will have to clean up the spreadsheet with the metadata, this part is one that takes very long. And then when we start the import, it takes its time to upload, I guess this one depends on the upload speed of the connection here(about 250mbps upload), but it feels like it should be faster than that. 
 Are there any other ways to migrate from SharePoint that I might have overlooked? 
 We are on the Cloud version of M-Files. 
 Thanks

Joonas Linkola · Accepted Answer

What you have described is the standard process for pretty much any migration from another system: first export the data from the legacy system to disk, then clean up and modify the data as needed (enriching metadata; removing redundant, obsolete and trivial files etc.) and finally import the content to M-Files using the available importing tools. 
 A very rough estimate for M-Files Importer's upload speed is 1 document per second since these uploads go through the API and there are multiple database operations etc. involved for each new document, so even with a fast internet connection you cannot get much more speed than that. If you have any scripts, VAF applications etc. running in the vault for new documents these may slow down the speed too. 
 We have some other importing tools available for large cloud migrations where millions of documents are imported but these take some time to setup the migration pipeline and require M-Files employees to do certain operations. If your migration is large and it seems the M-Files Importer speed is insufficient, please raise this with your M-Files account manager to see what are the available options. 
 (Looking forward, we are releasing a new Smart Migration feature later this year which will allow you to move documents from external repositories to the M-Files vault through connectors . However, I'm not yet familiar with the exact functionality and it likely won't be any faster than using M-Files Importer.)

SharePoint Migration

Top Replies