Tuesday, November 24, 2009

SharePoint Site Migration Manager/ Website Migration Manager

SharePoint Site Migration Manager Build 3.6.31 (Beta) Published

(Build, SharePoint Site Migration Manager, Upgrade) Permanent link

 
 

This new Beta version of SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) contains a few new features and fixes, as well as those from the previous Beta (version 3.6.30).

The main new features of note for this build include:

  • Ability to Authenticate using PKI Certificates. (New!)
  • Ability to correct the Preview image link when copying master page gallery. (New!)
  • Site level - Permission Levels Copy. This can be done as a pre-migration step, or as a part of a normal site level copy.
  • Ability to bypass the user info additions when copying metadata.
  • Ability to copy alerts as a part on the full migration using an XML override method.
  • Ability for group mapping to account for group names.
  • Items migrated through the use of the "Drag and Drop" feature will now be logged.
  • Folder level copies will now include column mapping.
  • Ability to preserve column mapping on sub-folders.
  • "Explicit inclusion" as well as "Wildcard inclusion" denied managed paths are now selectable in a site collection copy.

Of note among these Features is the new ability to include PKI certificates when connecting to a site or server. This feature will allow SSMM to use these client side certificates whenever it contacts the site or server using the credentials that are entered.

Also of note is the ability to copy Permission Levels as a part of a normal Site copy. This feature helps remove the creation or copy of Permission Levels to the target site as a pre-migration step, and allows users to copy them at the same time as the rest of the site content.

Some of the more notable bug fixes include:

  • A fix for "Index out of bounds" errors when copying Document Libraries with versions and user columns. (New!)
  • Tool bars in list view web part will now be preserved. (New!)
  • Fixes to the content type feature.
  • A site permission copy bug.
  • A column mapping bug.
  • Some MySite bugs.
  • Wiki page migration bugs.
  • Setting the maximum number of versions on the target site now works at the site level.
  • Ability to preserve version numbers when versions have been deleted.
  • A fix for versions in Pages libraries and Wiki libraries.

We have also started basic localization changes of SSMM, for Japanese, in this Beta.

For a full list please see the Build Notes.

Note that this build uses a newer version of the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions Service (v. 3.2.17).

Details: Download SharePoint Site Migration Manager Builds.

Download your Free trial now!

Posted by Metalogix at 11/3/2009 9:08 AM Comments (0)

Michael Gannotti Interview at SPC09

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With over 31,000 followers, SharePoint social media expert Michael Gannotti (@gannotti) is one of the most prolific tweeters/bloggers in the SharePoint community.

During Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, Mike came by and did two interviews with us at the Metalogix booth.

In the first interview, we talk about Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager and how it makes upgrade to SharePoint 2010 a whole lot easier. Migration and upgrade to SharePoint 2010 was also the topic of the Metalogix session at SPC 2009 (presented by our CTO, Julien Sellgren and Stephen Cawood).

Posted by cawood at 10/27/2009 6:55 PM Comments (0)

Website Migration Manager Build 3.3.52 (Beta) Published

(Build, Upgrade, Website Migration Manager) Permanent link

There is a New Beta release of Website Migration Manager available for download on the Builds page.

This Beta contains a number of improvements, and bug fixes as compared to the previous Release Build. The main features and improvements of note are:

  • Link correction for Word and Excel documents. The Link correction now supports the correction of the links within Word and Excel files.
  • An Updated workflow for extracting content from HTML pages.
  • Migrate Source URL option is now checked by default (for link correction).
  • A re-worked and updated ability to migrate content through a command line.
  • Ability to choose the location target to migrate in items related resources (attachments and/or images).
  • Improved Error handling.
  • Improved abilities for "Strip XML Node" actions.
  • Ability to map content into Content Editor and Summary Link Web Parts.

There has also been some improvement through over twenty bug fixes from the previous Release version of WMM (v. 3.3.35). Some of the more notable bug fixes include:

  • Populating Document Library hierarchies during a document migration with special characters.
  • CSV import issues.
  • Custom Page Layouts will now populate in the migration options dialog.
  • RegEx and Text searches will now authenticate against URLs where authentication is required.
  • Improved CSV importing and exporting issues.

Note that this build also includes an update for the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions Service (V 3.2.08)

Details: Download FileShare Migration Manager Builds

Download your FREE Trial Now!

Posted by Metalogix at 10/14/2009 3:42 PM Comments (0)

FileShare Migration Manager Build 3.3.14 (Beta) Published

(Build, Upgrade, FileShare Migration Manager) Permanent link

There is a new Beta version of FileShare Migration Manager available for download on the Builds page.

This build includes some new features and improvements, such as:

  • Link correction for Word and Excel documents. The Link correction now supports the correction of the links within Word and Excel files.
  • An Updated workflow for extracting content from HTML pages.
  • A re-worked and updated ability to migrate content through a command line.
  • Ability to choose the location target to migrate in items related resources (attachments and/or images).
  • Improved Error handling
  • Improved abilities for "Strip XML Node" actions.

Some of the more notable Bug fixes include:

  • Populating Document Library hierarchies during a document migration with special characters.
  • CSV import issues.
  • Custom Page Layouts will now populate in the migration options dialog.
  • RegEx and Text searches will now authenticate against URLs where authentication is required.
  • Improved CSV importing issues.

Note that this build also includes an update for the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions Service (V 3.2.08)

Details: Download FileShare Migration Manager Builds

Download a FREE Trial Now!

Posted by Metalogix at 10/14/2009 3:37 PM Comments (0)

Metalogix Selective Restore Manager Pro Gets Top Marks

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Metalogix Selective Restore Manager (SRM) Pro was recently reviewed at SharePoint Reviews, by Mike Ferrara, and received a 5 out of 5 rating!

Mike, who is the owner of Ferrara Data Consulting, a web development company in South Florida that specializes in SharePoint consulting, wrote "Selective Restore Manager (SRM) Pro enables farm admins to quite easily restore site collections, sites, libraries, lists, documents, items and any other SharePoint content you can think of without the use of a recovery farm." He even had a hard time finding anything to criticize in the product, writing "It did everything that I needed it to do, and it plugged a big hole for me when needing to restore documents quickly."

The staff at Metalogix are very pleased to get such a great review, and are working hard to maintain a high quality of excellence!

Read the full review of Metalogix Selective Restore Manager here.

Posted by Metalogix at 10/5/2009 10:03 AM Comments (0)

Search Engine Optimization for SharePoint Publishing Sites with Website Migration Manager

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When transitioning from an existing web content management system to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, most organizations focus on leveraging SharePoint's rich publishing, document management, collaboration and metadata features. One area they often overlook during migration, however, is search engine optimization (SEO).  Although Metalogix Website Migration Manager is primarily used to move HTML and document content, along with metadata, to MOSS publishing sites, it can also help customers to adopt SEO best practices for their entire site very quickly.

SEO entails configuring site structure, navigation, page content, metadata and labels to improve search engine relevance and ranking. The goal is to make it easier for customers and partners to find you through search engines such as Bing and Google.

Microsoft has created a whitepaper on SEO optimization that drills down on specific SEO tactics that can improve search engine relevance for MOSS sites.  It can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721591.aspx


The Microsoft whitepaper gives a great overview of some core SEO best practices. This post addresses how Metalogix Website Migration Manager can help implement these tactics. Here is a high-level summary of the key tactics that can help improve search relevance:

1.      Use accurate keywords in your page <TITLE> tag
2.      Use descriptive headings for pages that include relevant keywords (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
3.      Use descriptive text for site labels (navigation structure) that include relevant keywords
4.      Set ALT and TITLE attributes for image tags
5.      Simplify the site structure to avoid deep site hierarchies
6.      Use valid HTML or XHTML
7.      Use proper semantic HTML tags including Heading tags, List tags.
8.      Use permanent redirects to inform search engines of navigation changes
 
Following these guidelines manually requires substantial effort and forces editors to modify content pages one at a time and rebuild site structures. With Website Migration Manager, the MOSS implementation team can tackle these activities efficiently and automate migration tasks at the same time.
 
Getting started – Create a site inventory and review titles and keywords

A good place to start is creating a site inventory using the website crawling engine built into Website Migration Manager. When the crawl is complete, you immediately identify which pages are lacking page titles and keywords by browsing the project datasheet

  

Create a Site Inventory Video
Check for Heading tags and ensure that Img tags have Alt attributes
Using Website Migration Manager's XPath toolset, you can quickly query all web pages for their heading and head tag (<HEAD>) content. You can use the following query //H1 to extract the H1 content in your project database. Repeat this process for H2, H3 etc.  You can also check to see if Alt tags are set on Image tags with this query //img[@alt=""], which is a good SEO practice.


Once you have this data, you can answer an important question: Are your pages leveraging heading tags?   Or are they using formatting tags to visually represent relevance? If heading tags are not being used, you can flag offending pages for more detailed analysis and amelioration. Website Migration Manager can assist in refactoring HTML to correspond to semantic standards that help search engines index content accurately.  More on this below.

  

Using XPath to Check Your HTML Video

Leverage Excel to update SEO relevant metadata
After you have looked at the extracted data, you can export the content to Excel and edit it there. This is particularly useful as you can circulate the spreadsheet to a larger audience so they can fill in the blanks and update inaccurate data. Although this is a straightforward task for keywords and titles, cleaning and optimizing HTML can often be easier when you use SharePoint's content editing features or Website Migration Manager's action framework. When you finish editing, you can re-import the SEO-optimized metadata into the project database and map it to SharePoint.


Define and create an optimized site structure automatically
One of the great features that Website Migration Manager offers is the ability to  easily create or customize a SharePoint site structure. The best way to quickly define a site structure in SharePoint is to start with a flat list of paths in Website Migration Manager. You can automatically extract these paths from your existing site structure at crawl time, edit them manually using Excel, or pull them out of your HTML content using XPath queries.  If a given site structure does not already exist in SharePoint at migration time, Website Migration Manager will create it automatically. You can specify a site description, site properties and what site template you want to use in the project database. It is important to remember that the value in this exercise is to use keyword-rich site labels and to adopt a structure that enables end users and search crawlers to find your content easily. It is also worth noting that you can implement the site structure as a standalone activity without loading any content, which is great for dev environments and testing.

  

Create an SEO Optimized Site Structure

Clean up HTML

Ensuring clean, semantically rich HTML is difficult to do retroactively but Website Migration Manager can help you achieve this result painlessly. Using our visual extraction tools to extracting HTML content involves an automatic "tidying" process that ensures your HTML is valid. All tags will be closed and formatted correctly. As a result, all content will render when it's loaded into a SharePoint page. This in itself can be a huge improvement over what you have today. Going a step further, WMM includes a number of content-processing tools that allow you to manipulate and modify HTML. You can run find and replace operations to remove redundant tags or replace formatting tags with heading tags and leverage CSS more effectively. There is support for Regex and XPath to search and modify content. If the HTML was generated from Word or Frontpage, you can leverage Website Migration Manager's Actions framework and programmatically define transformations on your content. We have samples of this in our SDK, which can act as a good starting point.

Create permanent redirects
Website Migration Manager tracks both the originating URL that content came from in your legacy site and the new MOSS URL. You can export this data to Excel and marry it to existing site analytic data. Once you have identified which pages had high search relevance, you can create permanent redirects and ensure that adopting a new SEO-optimized site structure doesn't affect your legacy search ranking.

Takeaway
A few of these points deserve a drill down and will be addressed in future posts. The takeaway is that, in addition to reducing the overall migration effort, Website Migration Manager enables organizations to quickly adopt SEO best practices when moving their content to a SharePoint hosted publishing framework.

Posted by cawood at 9/29/2009 3:08 PM Comments (0)

Metalogix Wins MSExchange.org Readers' Choice Award

(Archiving, News) Permanent link

Metalogix Professional Archive Manager for Exchange (formerly known as exchange@PAM) has been voted MSExchange.org Readers' Choice Winner in the Email Archiving category. This is the third consecutive year that Metalogix has been honored with this award.

"Our Reader's Choice Awards give visitors to our site the opportunity to vote for the products they view as the very best in their respective category," said Sean Buttigieg, MSExchange.org manager. "MSExchange.org users are specialists in their field who encounter various solutions for Exchange Server at the workplace. Their vote serves as a solid peer-to-peer recommendation of the winning product."

Read the Press Release here.

Posted by Application at 9/28/2009 3:00 PM Comments (0)

The 8 Best Practices for Email Archiving

(Best Practice, Archiving) Permanent link

Government organization and enterprises alike are required to preserve copies of email for future requests both internal and external. This mandate includes compliance with e-discovery laws including the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). When organizations are faced with an e-discovery request, they are likely to find it expensive and time consuming to execute retrieval from backup copies. Email archiving is a simple – and cost effective – way for both public and private organizations to assure speedy and complete responses at any time.

I recommend that any organization follow these eight key best practices:

  1. Archive Everything:  A complete records retention policy should assure that all email and related email items (including email content, attachments, calendar items and tasks) are retained. Even lunch appointments may be very important to a future eDiscovery request. Let the investigator determine what's significant.
  2. Define Policies Early:  Establishing retention and deletion policies early on will keep storage from growing to an unmanageable level.  A policy that states the reasons for your criteria and how the policy is followed is acceptable in court – but only as long as you can prove that you adhere to it.  Without a policy, you'll be stuck with keeping everything forever.  
  3. Be Consistent:  Disposition processes should be consistent and documented under the direction of legal counsel.  Remember that retaining and disposing (optional) of email in a consistent way takes the burden off IT.   Investigators will force you to explain deviations, so keep it simple.
  4. Enforce Your Policies:  Once a written policy exists, you must enforce it with an automated solution to eliminate the "human" component of policy enforcement. 
  5. Freeze – It's the Cops: Don't even think about deleting data arbitrarily during the legal process.  The courts will find out, assume you're up to no good, and fine your organization heavily. 
  6. Eliminate PST Files:  PST files are created by end users to store their emails and keep them accessible but these "underground archives" are not the best primary storage location for mailbox data.  They expose the organization to legal risks and make it hard for you to locate emails when you need them – which usually happens under pressure to meet deadlines.  Make PST files read-only and dispose of them prior to the earliest disposition of your policy.  Take a copy of existing PST content into the archive to protect it for future access by the creator and the investigator.
  7. Tape Backup is forDisaster Recovery. Tape backups should not be used as email archives. They capture information only from the point of backup, which does not include items that were deleted by users. They cannot capture activity as it happens.  Tape has no intelligence. It has not indexed the email, just copied it, thus tape is not an archive.
  8. Stubbing:  Creating stubs, or shortcuts, is an option that provides tremendous value by reducing back-up time by up to 70% and has little user impact for most organizations. 

Review your archiving policies annually, communicate them to end users clearly, and execute them consistently. Email archiving is a journey, not a destination, but the trip doesn't have to be difficult.

By Frank Mitchell

Posted by Ken Savage at 9/23/2009 1:19 PM Comments (2)

SharePoint Site Migration Manager Build 3.6.30 (Beta) Published

(Build, MOSS 2007, SharePoint Site Migration Manager, Support, Upgrade) Permanent link

This new Beta version of SharePoint Site Migration Manager (SSMM) contains a few new features as well as some bug fixes. In fact, this Beta is a bug-bash with more then twenty bug fixes. Some of the new and extended features for this build include:

  • Site level - Permission Levels Copy. This can be done as a pre-migration step, or as a part of a normal site level copy.
  • Ability to bypass the user info additions when copying Metadata.
  • Ability to copy alerts as a part on the full migration using an XML override method.
  • Ability for group mapping to account for group names.
  • Items migrated through the use of the Drag and Drop feature will now be logged.
  • Folder level copies will now include column mapping.
  • Ability to preserve column mapping on sub-folders.
  • "Explicit inclusion" as well as "Wildcard inclusion" denied managed paths are now selectable in a site collection copy.

Some of the more notable bug fixes include:

  • Fixes to the content type feature.
  • A site permission copy bug.
  • A column mapping bug.
  • Some MySite bugs.
  • Wiki page migration bugs.
  • Setting the maximum number of versions on the target site now works at the site level.
  • Ability to preserve version numbers when versions have been deleted.
  • A fix for versions in Pages libraries and Wiki libraries.

For a full list please seem the Build Notes.

Note that this build uses a newer version of the Metalogix SharePoint Extensions Service (v. 3.2.16).

Details: Download SharePoint Site Migration Manager Builds.

Download your Free trial now!

Posted by Metalogix at 9/23/2009 9:49 AM Comments (0)

Selective Restore Manager Pro Build 4.0.67 (Beta) Published

(Build, MOSS 2007, Upgrade, Selective Restore Manager) Permanent link

 
 

This build of Selective Restore Manager (SRM) Pro is the newest Beta release, since the launch announcement was made.

This new Published version includes a few new useful features:

  • Search feature - Ths Search feature has the ability to operate on items within the search results, in the same way that operate on items in the Items View (for example, Save to disk, Copying, or Restoring). From the search results users can also navigate back to an items location within the Explorer view.
  • Sort items view on columns - Items in the search results screen and the items view can now be sorted.
  • Connect directly to offline MDF and/or .BAK files - This will allow for SRM Pro to be used in conjunction with backup solutions based on Microsoft's Volumn Shadow Copy (VSS) API (which involves the creation of MDF database file snapshots). This can also include products such as Microsoft's Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Symantec's Backup Exec.
  • Preserve content types on lists - Content types can now be preserved on lists for a restore or copy action. This includes any list-level content type customizations, and as a result items and documents content types will be preserved if their content type is not a part of the list template. In order for this feature to run correctly, the content types must be available on the target site.

Note that this build also requires an update of the Metalogix SharePoint Extension Web Service (v. 1.0.34).

Details: Download Selective Restore Manager Pro Builds

Posted by Metalogix at 9/8/2009 8:09 AM Comments (0)

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