I'm a “glass is half empty” kind of guy, and this task of moving a document libary from Sharepoint Server 2001 to Windows 2003 Sharepoint Services is more difficult than I anticipated.
Great resources like Lamont Harrington's Sharepoint 2003 Overview, as well as some good info on Microsoft's Sharepoint 2003 site provide migration tools from Sharepoint Team Services (STS - based on SQL and Windows File System) to either Windows 2003 Sharepoint Services (WSPS2003) or to Office Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 (OSPS2003). Tools also exist for migrating from Sharepoint Portal Server 2001 (SPS2001 - based on the Web Storage System) to Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, but heaven help the fool who wants to move from SPS2001 to WSPS2003.
We need to move a Sharepoint Server 2001 Document Library to a Windows Server 2003 Sharepoint Services Document Library.
I've always trusted what Mike Walsh, an STS MVP out of Finland says on Sharepoint topics as he confirms that migration from SPS2001 to WSPS2003 is not supported, as he does in a recent news thread.
Could it be possible someone at Microsoft thought,
“Hmmm, so they paid for Sharepoint 2001, right? And now they want to move to Windows 2003 Sharepoint Services, which is bundled with Windows 2003 Server? And the document library backend for both WSPS2003 and OSPS2003 is essentially the same? And we lose how many thousands of dollars in licensing and software fees if we provide migration support from SPS2001 to WSPS2003? Screw that!”
I thought I found the migration tool from Redmond Heaven this morning: The Microsoft Office Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 Document Library Migration Tools, found thanks to Lamont's SPS2003 Overview. SPOUT and SPIN. Let me in!! So the SPOUT worked great. Files sitting there ready for import according to a nice juicy manifest.xml file listing all the metadata you could want. But my attempt at SPIN was greeted with THIS PROGRAM MUST BE RUN FROM A FRONT-END WEB SERVER WITH SHAREPOINT PORTAL SERVER INSTALLED. (Caps added for effect...)
I need to import documents and their metadata to a SPS2003 document library. Real basic. No enhanced WSS folder stuff like approval settings, no multiple profiles, most recent document, no routing info, nothing. But I can't do that without my company paying thousands of dollars for SPS2003 which we do not want nor need? Our intranet document management system has been built around the WSS features of the SPS2001 document library. We use check-in, check-out, and document metadata for various functions. Not a single dashboard page on the system. We used it for a year and everyone pretty much hated it. But that's another topic.
THE PLAN: Not that we want to do an in-house migration app, but at this moment in time we have no alternative. The steps will consist of:
- Copying SPS2001 folders from explorer window to normal file explorer window.
- Copying from the file explorer window to a WSPS2003 explorer window. (direct copying from SPS2001-to-WSPS2003 for multi-tiered objects doesn't seem to work. Thus the additional step.)
- A middle data layer XML file--I built with MSDAIPP to access Document Library materials without requiring Digital Dashboard--will serve as the source of document metadata.
- The WSPS2003 SQL database will at this point contain all documents, with their folder locations and document names. I will use ADO.NET and SQL procs to update WSPS2003 SQL UserData and Docs table fields like tp_author, tp_editor, tp_created, various nvarchar and other fields using the folder locations and document names as the unique relationships between the XML metadata file and SQL tables.
Initial R&D has proven that this approach will work. Updates will be posted here. Check the Sharepoint category. If not there, subscribe to the glass half-empty feed.