10 Reasons Davinci Beats Database Attach for SharePoint Migration
One of the most common lines of inquiry at conferences and during online 
demonstrations of our migration product, Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, is why someone would go with a tool when they can just use database attach? The answer really depends on what you are trying to accomplish, the technical abilities (and availability) of your team, and the complexity of your environment. And complexity doesn't necessarily mean you have a lot of content - if you've jumped on the SharePoint "extensibility bandwagon," you'll likely have customizations and configurations that may need extrahand holding.
At a high-level, using Davinci Migrator allows you to plan out your migration, prioritizing sites and site collections, cleaning up and restructuring as you migrate, identifying potential problems before you migrate, and then giving you more visibility and control over the migration. Davinci lowers the risks associated with migration, such as system downtime, surprise issues (usually undocumented customizations) that could extend the project, and the entire attempt-fail-fix-attempt-fail cycle.
At a more detailed level, here is what Davinci offers that database attach cannot provide:
- Davinci allows you to migrate sites and content directly from 2003 to 2010.
- Davinci provides discovery capability, allowing you to query your environment and identify the right sites and content to be migrated.
- Davinci is not restricted to moving one content database at a time. You can migrate all at once, or migrate gradually, site by site, ensuring that all content and features are working properly.
- Davinci maintains navigation elements, formatting (those that are supported in 2010), and migrates supported web parts.
- Davinci offers a unique pre-migration analysis feature, providing item-level analysis of potential problems with your sites before migrating so that you can resolve problems beforehand.
- Davinci allows migrations from mixed environments - no need to consolidate 2003, 2007, and WSS environments before moving to 2010. Davinci migrates from a wide variety of systems and configurations.
- Davinci allows you to maintain or break relationships with current site permissions, navigation, look and feel, and other attributes, allowing for full-fidelity migrations or simple migrations that inherit these attributes from new 2010 templates.
- Davinci allows you to plan out and schedule your migration in waves, based on priority of sites or content databases.
- Davinci has a built in scheduler and is multi-threaded, allowing you to execute migrations in real-time, during off-hours, and even schedule multiple migrations to run in parallel.
- Davinci makes it easy to identify migration failures -- beforehand, during a migration, and post-migration -- providing the data you need to quickly fix problems and iterate.
Hopefully this information is useful to you and your team as you make the decision on how to move forward with your migration. For more details on the unique and powerful features available in Davinci Migrator, you can watch a 15-minute video demo of the product, or contact sales@axceler.com to schedule an in-depth demo or to receive a full-featured trial version.