I have been undertaking a reasonable-sized shared-drive to SharePoint migration, and found that Beyond Compare does an excellent job of it.
There are a few things that could be improved though, which would in turn allow BC to be pitched to a whole new market (i.e. those who are looking for a sharepoint migration tool).
Enhancements that would be brilliant:
When in "SharePoint Compatibility Mode", in addition to the above:
That's it I think, hopefully there are some good ideas there to help Scooter improve on this great tool.
There are a few things that could be improved though, which would in turn allow BC to be pitched to a whole new market (i.e. those who are looking for a sharepoint migration tool).
Enhancements that would be brilliant:
- Automatically detect when one of the Base Folders is on SharePoint and activate "SharePoint Compatibility" mode.
- Properly recognise and display SharePoint error messages - for example, when moving a file that is too long, instead of getting a message saying "path is too long" BC keeps displaying "The file type being saved or retrieved has been blocked" which is not correct.
- Enable parallel file operations - with SharePoint, to get the best performance you should do operations on multiple files in parallel rather than sequentially - it's many magnitudes faster. To do this currently, you have to click on the "Move to Right" button for each individual file/folder, then go to the next folder and do the same thing repeatedly. I have been doing this so much that I have entirely filled up the screen with parallel transfers (believe me the transfers scream along when you do this). This should be handled better, in a built-in manner - e.g. configure 'up to 10 parallel transfers' so that when you move a folder it will create up to 10 parallel operations without me needing to start each one individually myself.
- There is a bug where, if a folder contains hidden/system files (typically Word/Excel temporary files that begin in ~) then the folder can display as empty, with a 'size' totalling these files, but the files aren't displayed and the folder can't be moved/deleted within BC - you have to open it up in Explorer and delete those files manually.
- It would be nice if BC could put the "Extract All..." option in the right-click popup for zip files, rather than buried in the Explorer submenu - we had a lot of zip files that needed to be unzipped before being migrated and this would be more convenient.
- A duplicate file finder would be an awesome addition to BC
- The ability for BC to more smoothly identify superfluous zip files would also be awesome - i.e. where a user has right-clicked on a document, created a zip file with the same name, and then emailed that zipfile off, but never deleted the zipfile. You end up with the original document and the zip file in the folder - but to figure this out you currently need to right-click on the zip file and make it the right hand base folder, then make the current directory the left hand base folder, then do the "=?" compare to see if the files are identical, then once you find they are you have to go back twice in the base folder history, then right click on the zipfile and delete it - there must be an easier way to do this very common task.
When in "SharePoint Compatibility Mode", in addition to the above:
- Detect and warn of filenames that include invalid characters for SharePoint (including ~ and &), and have an "autofix" function to replace them with "_", " " or delete the offending characters.
- Highlight paths that would exceed the 128-character limit in SharePoint, and have an option to automatically fix them (e.g. deleting repeated whitespaces in filenames, truncating, etc.)
- Recognise and highlight file types that are not accepted in SharePoint (these can be queried from the SharePoint server).
- Recognise that many file types stored on SharePoint will differ slightly in file size but actually still be the identical - e.g. .doc. These currently display as 'red' in BC, but if you do a 'rules' based comparison they will properly recognise they are identical - they should display as 'unknown' until the comparison is done.
- Like .doc files, .msg files stored in SharePoint will differ slightly from the originals - the rules based comparison does not recognise this for .msg files and will say that they differ even though they are identical.
That's it I think, hopefully there are some good ideas there to help Scooter improve on this great tool.
Comment