SharePoint Migration - Managed Metadata Guide

Background:

SharePoint site collections can easily become very complex, with many custom metadata columns spread throughout the entirety of the Sites and Libraries, which can be further complicated from a mix of manual and inheritance setups.

This guide provides some basic insights and steps around migrating into SharePoint while taking advantage of these custom metadata columns. This means, we can match discovered and calculated information, based on calculated field values, to metadata values at the migration location. 

To fully take advantage of this functionality in Discovery Center, it is upon the organization to understand their SharePoint deployments and navigate through the metadata columns as they exist in SharePoint.

 

Setup

Discovery Center is configured to map metadata to SharePoint via the "Mapping Rules" module which is nested under "Reporting and Actions" by users who operate Discovery Center under the AN Administrator Role.

1) Here, you will browse to the field source which will be the SharePoint instance that you desire to migrate to.

mappingbrowse

Note that the Field source selected is the location used to provide definitions of available metadata fields for mapping purposes. Discovery Center imports all of the metadata fields available at the selected location and makes these available for mapping against basic metadata and calculation fields discovered by an index.

When the Field Source selection is made, we populate the Metadata columns at the highest level of the Site, therefore, if you choose a sub-site for the destination of Migration, the selected metadata fields must be available in that sub-site.

The Field source may be the destination repository for file migration although this need not necessarily be the case so long as the contained metadata is equivalent.

2) After selecting the Field source location, Click add to create a new mapping set, and give it a memorable name for use in migrations.

 

mappingadd

 

You have the ability to use your Calculated Fields, such as a markup column, and Basic Metadata, such as File Owner, in the mapping sets.

3) When you are finished with the mapping exercise, click the save button which completes the creation of the mapping set.

4) Once you are migrating to SharePoint from a report, you can now make a selection of a mapping set to be used in the migration process. This drop down should include your newly created Mapping set.

mapping selected

5) After the Migration is complete, you should now see the files in SharePoint, along with the values of the source fields in the columns that you selected as the mapped destination.