• Security Manager is a product to analyze, copy and mass-manage SharePoint security objects like users, groups, AD groups and permissions for nested structure of server farms, site collections, sites, lists, folders and items. Read this BLOG post for more information about Security Manager.

• File Manager is a product to copy content from file shares to SharePoint and offload it back to file shares (including documents and items) while supporting metadata (either directly or through Excel spreadsheet), created / modified properties, filtering, scheduled migrations or synchronization. Read this BLOG post about File Manager.

• Public Folders is a product to copy content from Exchange public folders, mailboxes, third party mailboxes, PST archives while supporting metadata, created / modified properties, filtering, scheduled migrations or synchronization

• Content synchronization (Incremental copy) is a feature that enables co-existence of multiple SharePoint environments by allowing to copy changes made in one environment to the other one. Content synchronization could be used as a temporary solution to support long migration process when users still use the source environment during migration. It could also be used as a permanent solution for the ongoing co-existence of multiple environments like record management or archiving. Read this BLOG Post for more details.

• Offline migration and synchronization is a feature that allows to copy or to synchronize content between unconnected SharePoint environments by using file system media to actually transfer the content. Offline migration and synchronization could be used to connect unsecured and secured environments or a disconnected environment (a ship) with its base.

• MS Excel-driven migration is a feature that allows a user to filter content during the migration process based on the records provided in Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet may also contain metadata that has to be applied to all migrated documents and items.

• There are several updates made to the platform itself

• Global settings for MetaVis properties is a feature that allows users to save commonly used combination of content copying settings like user mapping, template mapping, site or list copy parameters for further reuse for each copy operation

• MetaVis Toolbox is a dialog that lists all MetaVis products available in the MetaVis Platform with the indication of their availability in the specific installation. MetaVis Toolbox allows a user to switch between products in the integrated Architect Suite environment.

• There are several updates that enable better handling of SharePoint objects and environments

• Allow to map values from hidden fields when copying or tagging individual SharePoint items

• Support migration between two different Microsoft Office 365 environments (accounts)

• Support for Enterprise Keywords fields

• Support for various custom field mapping for Document Sets

• Support converting text, lookup, note, choice fields with email or account login values to person or group field

• Preserve look and feel of SharePoint 2007 sites when promoting SharePoint 2007 sites to SharePoint 2010 site collections

• Copy item level permissions

All MetaVis Architect Platform products are easy to download and install, agent-less and work for on-premises, hosted and Office 365 environments.

We are also excited about more news and updates coming in the near future for MetaVis products. Stay tuned!

Specifically, MetaVis Security Manager for SharePoint allows its users to perform the following functions:

• Browse, add, edit and delete groups, users, permissions and permission levels in a visual hierarchical structure of site collections, sites, lists and individual items in a single GUI for multiple server farms, domains and site collections.

• Copy groups, users, permissions and permission levels between server farms, site collections, sites, lists and individual items possible across different user directories (LDAP, ADFS, RDBMS).

• Manage permissions for multiple SharePoint objects at the same time.

• Compare objects permissions.

• Discover and resolve potential security problems in multi-server farm environments like disabled users with granted permissions, broken chain of permission inheritance, etc.

• Analyze who has access to what in a multi-server farm and multi-site collection environment. Discover what objects could be accessed by certain users or groups.

MetaVis Security Manager for SharePoint supports SharePoint 2007 and 2010 environments, connects to SharePoint from remote computers, does not require server side installations and supports managing hosted SharePoint environments like Microsoft Office 365.

• Loading Files
  • Ability to set metadata as part of the loading process
    
  • Ability to extract metadata from file system folders and assign them to SharePoint metadata
    
  • Ability to retain or unwind the folder structure in SharePoint
    
  • Ability to retain the core properties such as created/modified by and created/modified at
    
  • Load files and metadata using a spreadsheet (CSV)
    
  • Auto-creation of CSV for loading based on content in the file systems
    
  • Ability to load files with pseudo-versioning to SharePoint versions
    
• Downloading (Off boarding) Content
  • Ability to download content from sites, sub-sites and libraries into the File System with metadata stored in CSVs
    
  • Ability to Load downloaded content back into SharePoint
    
  • Ability to retain pseudo-versions in File Systems
    
  • Ability to remove downloaded content
    

Uploading Files from the File System

This option is designed to enhance and expand SharePoint’s ability to import files located in Windows or other operating systems. There are several advantages to using MetaVis File Manager to do this operation.

• You can upload, tag and check-in content in one step and en masse
• You may reuse existing file system (NTFS) attributes to tag the content
• Users often implement a folder based hierarchy inside the file system to categorize content. Classifier/Migrator can automatically extract and use these folder names as metadata in SharePoint.
• There are no limitations to how many files you can upload at one time

The process of importing files is very similar to interaction with Windows Explorer, but rather than moving content into another drive or folder, it is moved into a SharePoint list. All that is required is for the user to select the content (including folders) from Explorer drag it into the desired location in MetaVis.

When importing content from the file system, File Manager can use files system attributes such as created and modified dates and file owner to tag the imported content. These attributes are shown under Available Columns list in the Field Value Selection Screen and include relative folder names.

Uploading Files into SharePoint Using a Spreadsheet

The option is designed to enhance and expand SharePoint’s ability to import files located in Windows or other operating systems by utilizing a spreadsheet that contains accompanying metadata. The files will be imported into SharePoint and tagged with the metadata associated to it from this spreadsheet. The spreadsheet itself is automatically generated for the user and may be updated and used and any time.

Downloading Content from SharePoint

The option is intended to allow the user to extract content out of SharePoint into a local or attached storage or file share. There are a variety of situations where this feature is helpful. Some examples include:

• Archive or off-board content from SharePoint
  
• Move content from one SharePoint to another that is not accessible through a network
  
• Ability to download and then reload content into a re-built environment
  

Copy SharePoint Library File Using CSV

This option allows the user to create a CSV file that will copy files located within SharePoint rather than in a file system. A typical scenario for this is to copy many files but with unique metadata changes for each file. This can be done by creating and modifying the CSV file and then using the Upload Copy Content Using CSV option.

MetaVis Migrator and MetaVis Change Manager support copying or unique list permissions between SharePoint sites. This time we added a function to display list permissions in the MetaVis Content Viewer and copy individual permissions between lists, sites and site collections.

Right click on a list, select Objects and then Show Permissions menu item to browse list permissions.

Users can copy and paste or drag-and-drop permissions records from this Permissions Viewer to the other list in this or other SharePoint site.

Also note the little icon on the Permissions Viewer toolbar that is an indicator that the list has permissions inherited from the parent site. Clicking on this button would break or restore list permissions inheritance.

This way, content types form pretty complex structure in SharePoint site collections. Look at the example below generated by MetaVis Architect

MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint can copy all content types including their complete parent hierarchy and fields when a user copies a list or library that used these content types. MetaVis Migrator also reproduces source content type hierarchy in the target environment when copying the whole site.

Recently we added the function that allows users to copy just one selected content type from one site to the other one in one operation including all tree of the parent content types and all fields in these content types.

Select source and target sites in MetaVis Navigation Tree, Start Compare, expand Content Type compare area, select the content type to copy and click Copy from Left to Right button (or Copy from Right to Left button depending of the circumstances)

Using this operation MetaVis Migrator will copy the selected content type and all its dependencies.

MetaVis Change Manager allows scheduling content type copy activities using simple copy / paste or drag-n-drop gesture on MetaVis Navigation Tree. Unlike MetaVis Migrator, Change Manager displays content types in the navigation tree and allows copying them between different sites.

A part of MetaVis Change Manager functionality is to execute activities for multiple source and target site pairs provided by Excel spreadsheet. This function allows to mass-distribute content types between multiple site collections as a part of an execution of a single activity.

MetaVis Architect Suite provides an easy way to list WEB Parts for any selected page and to copy WEB Parts between pages. Find WEB Part Page in MetaVis Content View, right click on the page and select Show WEB Parts.

Show WEB Parts menu item brings the WEB Parts Viewer that displays WEB Parts located on the selected page.

It is possible to copy and paste or to drag and drop WEB Parts from MetaVis WEB Parts Viewer to any other WEB Part page in MetaVis Navigator tree or content viewer.

While MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint allows immediate copy of WEB Parts, MetaVis Change Manager for SharePoint creates activities that could be executed at the later time. As usual, MetaVis Change Manager activities could be executed at once for multiple targets. It could simplify such operations like mass distributing WEB Parts from list view page to hundreds of the sites in multiple SharePoint farms.

Another interesting functionality of WEB Parts View is the ability to save WEB Part XML definition to the file on the local computer. To do this, right click on the WEB Part in the WEB Part Viewer and select Save XML Config to File option like on the picture below.

One of the common problems that arise when people copy SharePoint objects or the whole site collections between active directory domains is to change account information when copying users. For a long time MetaVis Migrator used to have an ability to specify user mapping when performing copy operations. Each Copy Wizard to copy items, lists, sites, permissions or user groups includes the controls to provide user mapping

User mapping should be provided in the form of CSV file with a row per user mapping. Each row should specify account name is the source and target environments separated with comma.

While this approach works well in majority of the situations it is often hard to compile user mapping file if environments contain hundreds if not thousand user accounts.

To cover the situation with bulk user mapping, MetaVis Migrator added the ability to provide user-mapping rows using wildcard specifications like on the picture below

In addition to this, the wildcard specification could just add a domain to the account that does not have domain in the source environment

The later mapping could be user to map user accounts from FBA environments or from non-user fields like text field or MS Office Authors or Last Saved By fields.

It is worth to note that the wildcard records could be provided in the mapping file in addition to the real account mapping. This technics provides the mechanism to specify default values to the user mapping in addition to the direct mapping of the account that have more changes in the source and target environment than just domain change.

Discover Site Collections button on the SharePoint Connection Wizard leads to the screens that list all site collection in the server farm.

On a first screen of Discover wizard the user is prompted to connect to server far central administration console and pick a WEB Application.

On the last screen of the Discover Site Collection Wizard the user can browse, filter and select site collection to use to connect to the new site.

Current use of Discover Site Collection wizard is to select a site collection to connect to. Our plan is to reuse this functionality to implement functions that perform mass-operations with existing site collections. For example, next function we plan to roll out based on the Discover functionality will let users to copy multiple selected site collections to the other server farm. The other variation of the save function will be the ability to copy My Sites between SharePoint farms.

Developers usually create such SharePoint Designer objects like HTML Pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS files), WEB Part pages, images to display on the pages and folders to keep other objects. WEB Part pages created in this way could be also customized by power users using regular Edit functionality available on SharePoint GUI even without SharePoint Designer. Power users and administrators can manage WEB Parts and some text on these pages.

Large portion of SharePoint itself is implemented using such SharePoint Designer objects. For example, familiar default.aspx home page of SharePoint 2007 team sites is implemented using this technique. Another example is list views, new and update items pages like AllItems.asmx that could be customized by adding WEB Parts and some branding elements.

Right click on site or a list node in MetaVis Migrator Navigation tree, select Objects menu item and select Show SharePoint Designer Objects submenu to reveal SharePoint Designer objects for the selected site or list.

SharePoint Designer Objects viewer looks and works much like any other content viewer in MetaVis Applications. A user can drag and drop or copy and paste objects from this view to sites and lists in the other sites or site collections or even to regular document libraries. There is also an option to view and to copy WEB Parts located on WEB Part pages.

While MetaVis Migrator allows immediate copy of SharePoint Designer objects, MetaVis Change Manager creates activities that could be executed at the later time. As usual, MetaVis Change Manager activities could be executed at once for multiple targets. It could simplify such operations like mass distributing WEB Parts from list view page to hundreds of the sites in multiple SharePoint farms.

Management of SharePoint Designer objects in MetaVis Platform makes it possible to mass distribute branding, navigation and other SharePoint customizations from development to staging to production environments.

Today we start the series of articles introducing new features. We begin with the list and later we will dig deeper into the details of motivation, business case, use and future plans for the new functionality we added.

• Discover all WEB Applications and Site Collections in a server farm
  
• Browse out-of-the-lists database objects and copy them between sites
  
• Bulk import files from file system with their metadata defined in a spreadsheet
  
• Copy / paste or drag and drop WEB Parts between arbitrary WEB Part pages in SharePoint lists or out-of-the list system folders
  
• Bulk user mapping to add or replace domain in login names
  
• Copy content types with dependencies (fields and parent content types)
  
• Browse list or library permissions and copy selected list permissions between lists.
  
• Site and list content reports with the option to include versions for list content
  
• Mass delete site and list permissions, site groups or users from groups and site permission levels
  
• Map parts of the folder path to a SharePoint field when copying documents or items from SharePoint sites or tagging document or items in SharePoint
  
• Easy packaging for accessing SharePoint in Office 365 Cloud
  
• Bulk import files from file system with the simultaneous tagging enabled in SharePoint GUI through Cloud Classifier