Illegal Characters Will Ruin a SharePoint Migration
\ / : * ? " < > | # { } % ~ &
No, that is not the string of profanity you’re yelling at your computer when your SharePoint migration fails. These are the illegal characters for documents in SharePoint libraries.
A big problem is many big companies in the legal, financial and education industries have an ampersand (&) in their name. And thus, many documents on their file system contain this illegal character.
If you need to load files into SharePoint from a file system and you have files that contain any of these characters, your upload will fail.
Axceler worked with a client who started their bulk upload on a Friday evening using the out-of-the-box SharePoint tools. When they returned on Monday, their document library contained only half the content they intended to upload because thousands of their documents contained an ampersand.
The client was faced with the laborious task of changing all document names that contain any illegal characters and restarting the migration. This manual process would have wasted an enormous amount of time.
With Axceler’s FileLoader you can automatically replace all illegal characters with a legal character, like an underscore. Your documents will be successfully and seamlessly uploaded from your file system and into SharePoint.
During the upload, FileLoader will also let you apply content types and metadata, create versions for an item, send documents to multiple libraries at once, and many other time saving bulk operations.
Download a free evaluation copy here
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Guest author Steve Goldberg is an Axceler Sales Engineer.
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