Sharepoint preservation options?

[Christie Peterson]

Hi all,

We have a donor organization that is using SharePoint to organize their electronic files. It's been over a decade since I've personally worked with SharePoint and the last messages on this list that I see are from 2013.

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has exported materials out of a SharePoint system for preservation in the past few years -- what was the approach you decided on, and how satisfied were you with the results? I'd also love any documentation that could be shared.

Thanking you in advance,

Christie Peterson

[Bruce Smith]

I've only done this in the context of active business use in the 2014-2017 period, and never in the context of digital preservation. That caveat aside, I've used "Metalogix" and "ShareGate" migration tools in the past. They both got the job done, and of course they both had lots of red error messages in the logs during every job. So put on some good music and get ready for some frustrating troubleshooting. 

I'm assuming you want to try and preserve at lease some of the technical context/history of what appear to be "simple documents" in the SharePoint site. If so then it's best to use a migration tool, rather than trying to slice files off of the IIS web interface and ignoring deeper things powering SharePoint from the background like the Active Directory users and groups, SQL databases and SharePoint central administration configurations, etc.

I did notice this announcement in 2019: https://redmondmag.com/articles/2019/11/22/sharepoint-online-migration-tool-options.aspx Of course most of the Microsoft tools seem biased towards migrating from on-premises Microsoft environments to Microsoft cloud platforms. So I'm not too sure if they'd help you get the content to a digital preservation system... But if you get creative then I'm sure some of the PowerShells scripts out there will at least help you ask questions to the SharePoint server farm and get a sense of what you're dealing with. For example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/overview-spmt-ps-cmdlets 

Hopefully you donor organization will donate some of their IT Pro SharePoint Administrator time, so that resource can help you run some PowerShell queries, interpret any error messages that come up in the error logs, plan workarounds, etc.

Best of luck, hopefully someone else here has a better / more precise answer for you!

Bruce

[Christie Peterson]

Hi Bruce,

Thank you so much for this response! I got a tour of how they're using SharePoint with their IT support person who is being very helpful. The good news is that this is a small org that never implemented any of the fancier features of SharePoint that lead folks down the emulation route, and instead they're using it like a fancy shared drive to replace the local server that died in 2012. The great news is that their IT person did the initial migration in using a tool that retained original creation and edit dates on the files. So if we can get the files back out with metadata intact, we'll be calling it a success. 

We'll be looking into both the tools you suggested; thank you again for the advice.

Best,

Christie Peterson