Migrate Google Apps Content to SharePoint
Metalogix Software has just released Migration Manager for Google Apps for moving Google Docs and Sites content to SharePoint. We spoke with Geordie Henderson, Director of ECM Migration Products at Metalogix about how the product works and the Google Apps migration market. Who is Metalogix? Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Certified software product vendor that produces and delivers products to help customers better manage, store, archive, migrate, and protect SharePoint and Exchange content. We support over 5,000 customers from eight offices around the world in the US, Canada, UK, Slovakia, and Switzerland. |
Geordie Henderson, Director of ECM Migration Products, Metalogix |
Why did Metalogix build a Google Apps to SharePoint migration product?
We heard from customers who originally went with Google Apps that they started to outgrow what Google Apps could offer. These customers have to make do, build expensive add-ons to Google Apps or migrate to a more robust solution. We built this product to help those who choose to move to a more robust solution which is SharePoint.
From our customer conversations, some of the tipping point features to prompt this migration include item level permissions, workflows, rich list and view technologies, web parts, and a customizable integrated user experience for web and document content.
Of course, SharePoint Online has also changed the online collaboration application landscape. SharePoint no longer has to be hosted on-premise which means the additional feature set is now available to a much larger audience – namely, the part of the market that seeks the cost savings of outsourcing application administration.
For Metalogix, this all amounts to a nice opportunity. We’ve specialized in creating simple-to-use products for enterprises to move legacy content to SharePoint for almost 10 years. Our market analysis tells us that Google Apps was a logical migration content source to add to the long list of source systems we already support since customers are coming to realize the shortcomings of the Google platform.
What does the product actually do?
Google Apps and SharePoint provide comprehensive remote APIs for reading and writing content, versions, metadata and permissions. Metalogix Migration Manager leverages these APIs to read content from Google Sites and Docs deployments and write everything to SharePoint in a highly configurable way. Using remote APIs is powerful because it means that everything the product does is fully supported by Google and Microsoft and all of it can be accomplished using a very lightweight Metalogix client application.
Those are the basics, but migration is about much more than moving content. As with all Metalogix content migration products, the Metalogix Google Apps product provides features to manage the entire migration process. Things like content analysis, batching, logging, scheduling, and content re-organization are things that we support.
What versions of SharePoint does Metalogix support?
All current versions of SharePoint Online and on-premise are supported – WSS 3.0, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint 2010. We are already getting requests to move content to SharePoint Office365 beta deployments as well. Support for that is close. Officially, Office365 support will be available when Office365 comes out of beta.
What other content sources do you support?
We enable content moves to all flavors of SharePoint from numerous source systems including file shares, eRoom, Oracle Content Server, Stellent, numerous Blog and Wiki platforms, MCMS, Exchange Public Folders, Documentum or any HTTP accessible web content.
It’s interesting, we seem to be known as the SharePoint migration company but we actually do much more than just migration. For example, Metalogix StoragePoint is powerful way to externalize your SharePoint file content to cheaper storage without comprising performance. As SharePoint deployments grow in size, this product becomes all the more valuable. As they grow even bigger still, our SharePoint archiving products are of increasing value.
Where can customers learn more?
Free evaluation downloads are available on the Metalogix web site, as is the announcement about this new product. We are always happy to provide demos as well.