Another day in SharePoint Migration

Restricting video files in SharePoint Migration

Requirement - We are migrating enterprise wide SharePoint 2003/2007 sites to SharePoint 2010. Migrated content has to go to new site structure, governance and in some cases the list/libraries level migration also needed, so we are relying on the 3rd party solutions for the migration. Leaving much on the background coming to the actual problem statement, one of the department decided to migrate large document library which has lot of videos. All these videos are quite large in size.

The department wants these videos to be excluded from the migration, and only the non video files are to be migrated.



Solution - We tried with the multiple options,

• Filtering based on the file type - the tool which we are using is not filtering the contents based on the file type and adding them to their exclusion list. 


• Dumping the total contents to the file system and then removing the videos files in them - but in this approach you'll be losing the versions and other meta data in the list. For example all the modified by column will hold the user info of who is trying to upload the documents, and same modified time stamp also. 


• Deleting the video files from the source and then restore back from the recycle bin once the contents are migrated to the 2010 site - but this option is risky we can't rely on this approach. 


• All these options doesn't seem to be a feasible and apt ones. Then we opted for a better solution to add these video file extensions to the web application file extension blocked list and removing the file extension block after the migration of the non-video files. 

The last option worked great, nothing to do in the tool. Find the file extensions which are to be excluded from the migration and then add them to the block list and unblock it once it's done. I used this approach since we dint had any kind of meta data associated in the source SharePoint site, it's always advised to use metadata for better classification. I'm open for any other optimized approaches.