Easier SharePoint Migrations with Davinci Migrator
Moving from SPS2003 or MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 can be a daunting task for even the experienced administrator or IT Pro. But how does one go about selecting a migration tool? In an article for SharePointReviews.com, well-known industry expert Joel Oleson outlined 15 questions you should ask when identifying a SharePoint migration vendor. We thought we'd answer each of these questions for Axceler's migration tool, Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010.
We're quite proud of our product, and are confident that we offer the strongest, most powerful solution on the market. Here's how we answer each of Joel's questions:
1. What version is the tool?
Davinci Migrator is the next gen product from one of the oldest SharePoint ISVs, echoTechnology, which was acquired by Axceler in June 2010. Built specifically for the SharePoint 2010 platform, Davinci is not a port of our 2007 code, but a complete redesign, leveraging years of product and service experience to solve the common and painful migration processes that many companies experience.
2. Maturity in the field – Seasoned?
Axceler has been building collaboration technology since 1994, entering the SharePoint space in 2008 with the award-winning ControlPoint administration product. Because our customers were also looking for migration products, the company went out and found the only other product that met our high standard for quality, acquiring echoTechnology. With the release of Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, we extended our record of building best-of-breed technologies.
3. Microsoft Gold Certified?
Axceler is proudly a Microsoft Gold Certified sponsor.
4. Time to migrate/Reliability.
Davinci Migrator includes many unique features to help teams plan and estimate the time a migration will take, ultimately reducing the overall time it takes to migrate. The Migration Estimate tool within Davinci takes into consideration the number of sites, items, and content to be moved, providing an estimated duration of a migration. Through Davinci’s unique pre-migration analysis report, admins can preview a list of issues by site, allowing them to automate how these issues are handled by the system, or go through and clean up the issues manually prior to migration, ensuring that your migration will run quickly and successfully.
5. Unique features such as Co-Existence.
Davinci Migrator allows you to co-exist with your legacy production environment, allowing you to test, re-test, and test again to ensure that your content moves where you want it, how you want it, and when you want it moved. Davinci Migrator supports migration from both 2003 and 2007 to SharePoint 2010.
6. API Compliance.
Davinci Migrator is a server-based enterprise tool, not a desktop application. It packs a lot of power under the hood that competing products just don't offer. The result is faster performance, richer functionality, and more granular migrations.
7. Exception Handling.
Davinci Migrator provides three layers of exception handling: first, through our Discovery interface, Davinci allows you to query any attribute of the object model to identify sites and content to be moved, and to learn more about your environment, helping you to uncover exceptions within your environment and plan accordingly. Second, Davinci provides the unique pre-migration analysis, running your migration against a rules engine to show you what the problems are, where they are (site level), a recommendation of how to fix them, and an automated step to correct the issue (which you can modify). Third, Davinci improves the migration logging experience, giving you the ability to query and filter your post-migration reporting, showing you what migrated successfully, where there were issues, and helping you quickly iterate your migration on those areas where it failed. With Davinci, migrations are not "all or nothing."
8. For whom is the UI Design.
Davinci Migrator has an intuitive interface based on its unique Discover, Plan, Migrate philosophy. If you know what you need to migrate and where it is going, the interface is streamlined and simple, using the familiar explorer window and default settings to kick off a migration in seconds. However, Davinci was built to support both simple and complex migrations, and so it offers unique planning and organization tools to help you identify, organize, and orchestrate large migration efforts.
9. Involvement in Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and Partner Council.
Axceler is part of the TAP program. Prior to acquisition, echoTechnology was also part of the TAP, beginning architecture of what is now Davinci back in December 2008.
10. More than Migration: It’s not about Point A to Point B.
Davinci Migrator helps you to manage the complexity of your migration through the creation of 'migration sets,' which are subsets of source and destination sites. This enables administrators to work with teams, business units, and site admins to understand the unique requirements of their sites, and set up unique rules and filters for their migrations instead of applying one blanket set of rules and filters across all sites. This allows for cleaner, more successful migrations, as well as increased end-user satisfaction.
11. How complex is the installation and dependencies?
Installation is straightforward and clean. Davinci Migrator requires farm access, and is installed on a web front end of your SharePoint 2010 farm, with a connector installed on a WFE of each legacy (2003 or 2007) farm.
12. Does it support automation?
Yes. There is automation within Davinci Migrator around pre-migration analysis, and includes a built-in scheduling tool that allows you to run a migration when you want, and to help you iterate on your migrations. Because Davinci is multi-threaded, users can schedule multiple migrations in parallel.
13. Some tools are built with Java, others with older versions of .NET.
Davinci Migrator is built on .Net as a web application.
14. Migration to and from Hosted environments.
Like many other Microsoft Gold partners, Axceler is currently working with Microsoft to have Davinci Migrator supported in the BPOS-Dedicated environment. While there is no official BPOS certification process, we are working closely with several prospective BPOS customers to support Davinci, as well as our ControlPoint administration product, within Microsoft's environment.
15. Who else is using the tool?
Axceler has over 2,000 customers and would be more than happy to provide customer references. Look for forthcoming case studies of successful migrations using Davinci Migrator in 2011.