So you've designed the perfect taxonomy for your new portal. Your nice new document libraries are associated to brilliantly planned content types. Your content types use site columns that are associated with top level lists, making editing your Meta data a snap. You've basically created a document management masterpiece.
Now it's time to migrate all those documents from your network drive. It's also something you've promised to finish up over the weekend before everyone gets back into work. But you need a way to move big batches of documents into a library and tag them with Meta data at the same time. If you have to do this one document at a time, you're in for a long weekend.
Luckily, Colligo Contributor gives you a very low cost solution to your data migration headache. Here's how it works.
First, install Colligo Contributor Pro. I'm using 3.2, but it sounds like there's a new version coming out this summer. I'll be showing you how to use the Client version (there's also an Outlook Plug-in).
Once installed, you'll need to define the document libraries that you'll be migrating documents into.
Enter the address for the SharePoint site containing the document libraries. Enter your credentials and click download.
Colligo will return all the libraries and lists available in that site. I'm just going to select one library, but you could go ahead and sync up all that are available. Then click the "Synchronize" button.
After this is synced up, you'll see the document library is the only one not grayed out. If there are any existing documents in the library, you'll see them as well.
Now you'll have the ability to just highlight multiple files from the network drive and drag them into the Colligo window.
Colligo will display a window allowing you to add Meta data to your batch of documents based on the document libraries content type. You'll notice my Meta data fields are pulling in data from other SharePoint lists.
If you have site columns that reference look up lists, you'll need to make one setting change. This will allow Colligo to automatically copy list data referenced by your site columns (which is a real nice feature). Here's how you'll make these changes.
You also may want to go ahead and click the synchronize button. This will move your documents into the SharePoint library right away.
You'll get the option to perform a full synchronization. Once you select synchronization Colligo will move your documents into SharePoint and include the Meta Data you've added.
Here my four documents have been moved into the document library. You'll notice they are also checked in as part of the process.
Some things it won't do…
- Migrate batches of documents containing directories.
- Allow you to add Meta data where you have related or "cascading" dropdowns.