I’ve found it extremely difficult to find a clear list of what limitations are in the box and what I should be looking for in a SharePoint Migration tool. I’ve collected this list based on my own experience and would love to see the limitations all in one place. Ultimately it would be great to have a single list and ultimately get this fixed.
What Doesn’t Migrate with SharePoint Built in Import/Export and other known issues:
- Item created by, created date, last modified date
- Workflows (Definitions)
- Workflow State & Tasks
- Workflow History
- Audit logs
- Usage Logs that have not been processed
- Site collection settings (Site Collection Ownership, Quota, email notification settings)
- Personalized views
- Alerts
- Recycle bin items
- Object GUIDS are not preserved
- Global Navigation inheritance issues (parenting challenges)
- Known issues with conflicts when used with content deployment
- No migration of features, solutions or assemblies associated with site (Must be manually migrated if separate farm and exist on destination)
- Content overwritten if exists
- Gallery lists known to have issues (Need more detail)
- No list level migration (granularity is site level in 2007; Windows Powershell SharePoint Commandlet in 2010 gives you list level) Thanks @toddklindt
- Scale limitations (reliability goes down the larger the site <25GB)
- Portal Template Global Nav known to have issues (Need detail. Problem appears to be associated with site collection property loss)
- Security remapping AD group challenges for groups between 2 untrusted forests
- Versions of aspx pages (Need more detail)
- Can’t change site template during migration
- Can’t consolidate sites during migration
- No good list of what fails to import
- blocked file types
- files over max file size
- Post migration sync (No way to migrate again. If template already chosen or not blank)
- No support between farms of different builds and versions. Have to be exact same version number (This may be different in 2010).
- No ability to target a specific content without manual intervention (limiting all others or setting capacity high)
This list is in progress. Feel free to ping me on twitter to update or add things on this list. I’ve added text such as “need more detail” where I don’t know the exact issue and could use clarification.
Question any vendor tool that says they do full fidelity migrations since much of this list is not available in the Content Migration API. How are they doing? That’s the follow up question. You do have the ability to retain the GUIDs the Object IDs and as a developer using the content migration API you have the ability to target migrations at the list level. What about SharePoint Designer? It uses the same API and has all the limitations above plus it’s own scale limitations for size of CMP files. Some of the known issues around SPD scale are listed won’t fix.
Both WSS and MOSS in 2007 and as well in 2010 you’ll see a lot of use of this API at various different places:
- Content Deployment
- STSADM -o export and import
- Copy/Move operations in Site Manager
- Variations
- Windows Powershell cmdlet import/export
- Unattached recovery uses a form of the migration API in SharePoint 2010
What’s fixed with content migration in 2010?
Well, the unattached recovery gives us a new API for interacting with a database that’s not apart of the farm, but ultimately I’ve found a lot of the same issues. Try to recover a site and a workflow for example. You do get more granularity in recovery if you can find what was lost. Powershell export can give you more granularity, but the data faces a lot of the same issues.
