Metalogix Introduces SharePoint Migration Manager

Metalogix Software on Wednesday announced its SharePoint Site Migration Manager for Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Dedicated Suite (BPOS-D), to help companies migrate SharePoint and legacy content to the Microsoft cloud environment.

According to Stephen Cawood, director of product marketing at Metalogix, the new tool is the only one currently certified by Microsoft for the migration of content to Microsoft BPOS–D, which includes passing Microsoft's CAT.NET performance and security testing, and other Microsoft certification criteria.

Cloud-based SharePoint solutions like Microsoft's BPOS, and hosted third-party cloud offerings, let SMBs and others use SharePoint without the initial capital expenses for hardware and software, or the IT administrative costs for management and maintenance.

Brian Babineau, vice president, Research and Analyst Services Enterprise Strategy Group, said, "For SMBs who have been using or considering SharePoint, this is a good time to move to the cloud, to reduce IT capital expenditures, and avoid increased IT admin challenges and costs. Metalogix provides the onramp to a more affordable, less complex use of SharePont And if you also have other content, like file shares, now you can move them directly to the cloud/hosted offering, with a a consistent tool."

However, Microsoft's tools for migrating data from legacy environments like fileservers, or from premise-based SharePoint, have been time-consuming and expensive, or otherwise limiting for users.

For example, said Cawood, "If you're on a 32-bit environment, you can't do an 'out-of-box' upgrade, meaning using just the tools from Microsoft that come free with their standard offering. Microsoft looks to their partner ecosystem for migration tools."

According to Cawood, Metalogix's new SharePoint Site Migration Manager for BPOS-D will allow companies to easily and cost-effectively migrate their existing SharePoint and legacy content into Microsoft BPOS-D and BPOS-S, to third-party-hosted SharePoint environments, and from one hosted cloud SharePoint to another. As Microsoft Office 365 moves out of beta in 2011, the tool will also support migrations to Office 365's cloud productivity services.

Legacy systems include non-SharePoint content managers like EMC Documentum eRoom, Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, OpenText, and legacy content on file servers.

"SharePoint Site Migration Manager for BPOS-D lets a company perform the migration automatically, quickly and transparently, rather than manually, and without being forced to take the existing application, which is presumably mission-critical, down during the process," said Cawood. "This improves efficiency and saves money."

Another reason for using BPOS-D, said Cawood, "You can install Metalogix's Microsoft-certified web service, which gives you a much richer environment. For example, you can maintain all the metadata -- the relationships between data -- like look-up lists, which you otherwise couldn't migrate using the native SharePoint web services."

Pricing for Metalogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager for BPOS-D is based on factors including whether it's for testing or operational use, for term versus perpetual license, and the number of users or the capacity of data being migrated. "For starting and testing we've seen customers come in as low as a $5,000 annual subscription, and operational users with lots of users and/or data can run into six figures," according to Cawood.