People usually avoid the idea of content migration when shifting to a new version of SharePoint or when getting on board with it because of the problematic process. If you are also among these people and is thinking about migrate content with SharePoint manually, Sharegate is just what you are looking for. Let’s see if this SharePoint migration tool can really help us or not.

What is Sharegate?

Sharegate is a software that can help you with SharePoint migration and classification easily with a set of tools. It doesn’t require any server installation and supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2003/2008.

What Sharegate has to offer

Sharegate offers a 15 days free trial and an option to purchase the full version. You will see 2 different file inside downloads section, a quick installer and an offline installation. Before you install Sharegate, make sure .Net Framework 4.0 is installed in your PC to complete the installation process quickly. Sharegate also offers some optional downloads as extension, server extension and sandbox server extension.

 

The first thing I loved about Sharegate is it doesn’t require any agent for working on servers. You can do your work without installing any software on servers. There is only one limitation with the trial version, it supports copying only 5 items at a time. Sharegate supports 8 versions of SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft Offfice SharePoint Server, SharePoint Foundation 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Office 365, BPOS and SharePoint 2013.

If you want to connect to Office 365 or SharePoint online, you have to select the manual authentication mode. You can directly migrate to SharePoint 2010 or 2013 from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007. People who want to maintain the version history when migrating has to check the “Preserve version history” when creating a new property template.

There is a map properties available for the destination lists/libraries and source which can help you to map your sources easily. It’s a great feature for consolidating lists and libraries. You can also copy permissions and version history and also create your own template so when you have different sites with the same idea, you can use your custom copy template everytime. I didn’t find any major negative side of this tool and you can try the trial version of Sharegate before purchasing the full version.

Verdict

Sharegate calls itself a no brainer migration tool for SharePoint and I must say, it’s a great tool for SharePoint structure and content migration.