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The SharePoint Administrator has the toughest job to migrate the site, list/library, and other items from one account to another. Whenever, the requirement occurs for the migration, then the Administrator must arrange all the prerequisites and create a safe environment at both source and destination accounts. To achieve that, you must get answers to a list of questions to prepare for the process thoroughly. This article provides you with some important Q&As that will help you in gaining some knowledge related to careful SharePoint metadata migration.
How does metadata help in SharePoint migration?
Here are the few pointers which helps you understand how metadata helps in SharePoint data migration:
- Document Management
- Faster file searching
- Custom views
Document management in SharePoint becomes much easier and manageable with the help of metadata. You can easily find, filter, and sort documents based on the metadata value, which is a special characteristic of the file. SharePoint applies some metadata to the file by default, like the date and time. You can also tag other characteristics based on your convenience.
Metadata helps you find your SharePoint file with ease. So, it increases the efficiency of data management.
You can create custom views in SharePoint sites with the help of metadata. This helps with easy filtering of content based on certain parameters, providing more accessibility
Here are some important questions for which we tried to find answers
Q. Why is Metadata important for SharePoint files?
Metadata makes it simpler to recognize the data, manage it, and retrieve information from it. With the help of metadata, you can easily find a document from the item list. Metadata helps you to effectively organize and sort list or library items. Metadata provides an alternative way to sort out files without implementing complex hierarchies on the libraries. It makes easy to recognize the file and folders through the information like status, date created, date modified, and size.
Q. How will we tag metadata?
Metadata tagging in SharePoint allows adding information to the files and folders that describes them well. It helps with more efficient content search, better data organization, and content management. Metadata includes details like date, category, location, timestamp, file name, etc. Use grid view editing, add custom-tailored content types, and managed metadata columns to execute consistent metadata tagging.
When efficiently used, metadata makes content search easier for organizations. But it is essential for users to tag documents religiously.
Q. Does governance policy affect metadata?
As metadata tagging is considered the responsibility of end users, the SharePoint administrator often neglects defining the governance policy for the metadata. Also, most of the business organizations do not have enough awareness about the metadata. There are over 20 percent of businesses that use the metadata effectively.
It is essential for administrators to make end users aware of the importance of metadata. With the use of metadata, the SharePoint data becomes more manageable. So, it helps organizations to increase productivity and meet the business requirements.
Q. How to train users on the new metadata requirements?
End users often feel overwhelmed due to the sudden change in the platform they have been working on for years. This also causes a downfall in productivity and performance. To avoid conflicts post-migration, it is important to provide the users with comprehensive role-based training, create quick reference guides, implement phased adoption, and offer hands-on workshops for personalized support.
Make the users aware of the metadata by inculcating real-world scenarios in their training, Q&A sessions, and frequent group discussions, followed by regular follow-ups.
Q. Will Managed Metadata Service will be useful?
>Managed Metadata Service is used to create some predefined terms for SharePoint data which will be used throughout the environment. To tag SharePoint files, end users will be choosing metadata from these predefined ones. This makes metadata more manageable in the SharePoint environment.
Q. Can Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration tool migrate metadata?
Yes, the SPMT tool helps to migrate the basic SharePoint metadata during SharePoint to SharePoint migration. However, it often struggles while handling complex, custom, or managed metadata.
Q. How to deal with the metadata that was corrupted after migration?
To manage the corrupted metadata, use the pre-existing backup from the local storage to restore, check out the log files to analyze the patterns, adjust the methods or tools to avoid the issues, and run a pilot migration before restarting the process.
Q. How to preserve metadata during SharePoint to SharePoint migration?
You can preserve the SharePoint metadata during migration by switching to a professional SharePoint migration tool. It will help you simplify the migration process and migrate metadata as well as permissions.
Technically speaking, it is implemented by a service application and runs on the application and front-end server roles. Metadata connections maintain the connection between managed metadata and the application.
As we were planning SharePoint 2013 to 2016 migration, all these SharePoint Migration Administrator Questions were rigorously asked by our users, and our SharePoint administrator was quite sure about the usefulness of metadata in the SharePoint environment. As we understood the benefits of metadata, we were sure that we would surely be using metadata more effectively in the SharePoint environment.
Migration of SharePoint metadata
To migrate SharePoint metadata along with data, you cannot rely on a manual method because it will take too much time, involves technical expertise, and may require you to tag the metadata with each file manually.
Kernel Migration for SharePoint is one such tool, which lets you breathe easy about metadata migration as it has a special feature where you can choose to migrate metadata along with complete data. Also, SharePoint Data Migration tool is a highly useful, if you want to upgrade your SharePoint to a higher version.
Conclusion
With sound knowledge of the SharePoint environment, one can easily understand the value of metadata in SharePoint. These questions will help a SharePoint administrator consider the concept of metadata migration to avoid mismanagement of content. As there are no easy or native methods to migrate SharePoint content and metadata together, you must acquire a professional migration solution like Kernel SharePoint Migrator.
