Head-to-Head: SharePoint Migration Tools
I think it’s time to try and get a handle on how people are migrating content from 2003 to 2007 to 2010. There are some really good tools out there for doing that, but at an enterprise level, how are you going to choose which is most appropriate for your situation?
Here are six migration tools I know of because of their support and visibility within the SharePoint Community:
- Metalogix Site Migration Manager 2010
- MetaVis Migrator
- Quest Migration Manager
- Idera SharePoint Migration Suite v2.1
- Axceler Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010
- AvePoint Migration Tools
I’m not an expert in migration. If fact, I know very little about the process or the tools, so here’s what I’d like to do. I’m willing to put together a “Head-to-Head” demo session, giving each of the migration tool companies 15 minutes of fame.
The Vendor Challenge: Have you got what it takes? Then show us!
Next Wednesday, November 17th at 1:00pm EST, we’ll crank up live meeting and give each vendor 15 minutes to give it their best shot. Pull out all the stops… show us what your tools can do. Pull out the superlatives, show the real stuff. You’ve got 15 minutes… ready, set, go!
With 6 vendors, that’s about an hour and a half, giving us a real good handle on what’s in the marketplace and what differentiates the various solutions. Are you up for the challenge? This should be fun.
Looking for comments to confirm the participant as well as audience interest. Spread the word and “LET’S GET READY TO RUMBBBLLLLLE!”
on
Local Philly favorite Smokin’ Joe Frazier will be running the demo for MetaVis Migrator.
Mark, what would be the audience for this demo session?
If any of these tools can do a single site or single site collection migration, without direct access to the server, I know users who could be interested.
Hi Christophe,
I can’t speak for the other ISVs but MetaVis Migrator is agentless, requireing no server side install. During a SharePoint Migration MetaVis uses remote APIs and webservices.
I can speak for another vendor… Metalogix migration tools are client applications that can be installed on the source, target or some other machine. The content is security trimmed, so users see/migrate content based on their SharePoint rights.
We support web service connections (including our own custom web service that adds functionality) and Metalogix is the only company that is certified to be installed in BPOS-D environments.
Try our free trial download at http://www.metalogix.net
Looks like I will be able to make this one. I’ll be on the road in Edinburgh, but will have a backup in case my flight is delayed.
A brilliant idea Mark, hopefully the vendors will pull out all the stops and convince us with not just another sales presentation.
Quest is definitely in. Marc, send me the LiveMeeting and other logistic details please.
I am all for this. Bring IT!
Looking forward to this one because when we migrated from WSS to MOSS it was a big pain in the ‘A**’. I had to get help from Microsoft support and it was 4 days of work! Hope there is a better way so you can count in me to watch this ‘fight’.
I hope the vendors will make sure to discuss how they license their products. I know of at least one in that list that has a migration related product that is licensed based on how much (in gigabytes) content you are planning on migrating.
Jay brings up an interesting point. I want to get all of that material out front. The presentation shouldn’t be details around the company history, their price point, business model, etc. I’ll get to the vendors and have them put together a list based upon criteria we’d like to see.
If you could ask the vendors three things so we can compare them what would it be?
Please reply in a seperate comment so all the answers won’t show up in “admin orange”. Thanks. — Mark
I hope you can make this video available after for download for us poor folks in different time zones.
Agreed, so what is the answer?
Recordings were made, will probably be up within a couple of days.
All,
As someone who used MetaVis to migrate (and had a productive experience with their tools and support), I find this an interesting presentation.
But what’s left out of the entire presentation, at this point, is what I needed up-front, prior to migration: an outline of the different migration strategies, e.g., full-on exact replication vs. file migration vs. partial migration, etc.
These require very different input from the business-level stakeholders, and in part, relies also on the capabilities of the migration tool selected for the task.
–dave
Dave, I would recommend you start by taking a look at the whitepaper on migration strategies by Anders Rask as a baseline, helping you to understand the out-of-the-box migration options. You can find it at http://andersrask.spoint.me/2010/03/22/whitepaper-on-sharepoint-upgrade/
You may also be interested in my article on migration planning (it’s vendor-neutral), available on ECM Connections at http://www.ecmconnection.com/article.mvc/11-Strategic-Considerations-For-SharePoint-0002
Metalogix is in. Looking forward to this. Just let us know the logistics and what you need from us and we will be all over it!
Just off the top of my head thing I’d say I want to see at the following items covered:
1. What migration strategies does your tool support? (I wouldn’t think we need to predefine those strategies, each vendor should know which their tool supports).
2. What’s the licensing model? Per server, per farm, based on amount of content being moved etc…. This should also include maintenance costs related to licensing. I was recently researching a tool from a well known vendor and they wanted 30% of the overall cost of the tool for maintenance. Absurd, needless to say we didn’t buy it.
3. What kind of documentation, support or training is available? I know it sounds silly but I’ve seen some tools that vendors are selling that have absolutely horrible documentation, limited support and no training. I am not paying someone $2k a day to come in and install and confgure a tool I am going to be using.
What I don’t want to see or hear……..a regurgitation of the product data sheet or company history. Those I can read myself thanks.
Given some more time I could probably come up with more :-)
Now, back to my regularly scheduled bout of frustration with SharePoint Designer workflows.
Jay, I agree that listening to the product data sheet regurgitated is a waste of time. I think your questions are great and what it does bring to light for me is why are *these* questions not answered on the vendor site.
Count AvePoint in as well- we’re looking forward to it! Please keep us posted on logistics, Mark- and in the meantime, I’ll dig out the boxing gloves and start warming up. :)
Love it. I hope this matchup brings about many rematches!!
As a side note this photo is from Ali / Frazier 2. Not Ali / Frazier 1 or the then Fight of the Century nor Thilla in Manilla. Ali avenged his loss from the first match up. Ali won this one but the fight was contested as Ali was allowed to hold Frazier over 100 times.
This will be very interesting indeed. Having worked on quite a few migration and upgrade projects involving 3 of the above products. All I can say is that when you take apart the marketing hype and start working on a real world scenario most of them (which I have used) have pros and cons. Only one has come up trumps so far in terms of reliability/support and robustness and I’d be interested to see what pans out on this!
Great idea Mark. I was wondering how we could do this type of thing in the community more. I think the community is clamoring for this type of content.
After we take a look at Migration, I’m sure people will line up to see Backup/Restore, Admin/Management Tools, Reporting, Workflow/BPM, etc…
Joel
Absolutely! Workflow/BPM would be next on my list, including a comparison with the OOTB features. Scheduling/Project Management could be interesting too.
Totally agree. The community wants and deserves more of it =)
I agree with Joel.. we need more of this.
Nik
Love it! Idera is ready to rock … Mark let us know what the details are and whether you need any help. Great initiative =)
Liked I said on twitter, this is one of the most brilliant idea came in the sharepoint space.. I simply love this neautral discussion. I had always tough times to find the best tools especially if we have such as stellar competition in the migration space.. Keep it up the great work.. Count me in.. I will be there..
Nik
Mark,
Most importantly I would love to know the real face value.. Pros and Cons of each tool… Once we have that, we can combine all the ideas and put together a comparison chart…
Nik
I’m not sure I agree this is the best thing since sliced bread. The issue I see is you’re asking six vendors to get into a ring and market themselves for 15 minutes each. What will be the end result? Canned demos from each of them showing the *amazing* and *stellar* and [insert marketing buzzword here] capabilities of each tool. Nobody will show you the dark side because they want their tool to come out on top. You won’t see the flaws the tool creates (I’ve used a few and know there are areas where they lack) because nobody wants to come out and say “Our tool sucks at this part”. Everyone will feature the creme de la creme of their tool and carefully sidestep around issues and problems and not talk about the features that are missing (or they’ll give you the stock answer, “that’ll be available in an upcoming release”). I think it’s a good idea, I just don’t think you’re going to get an impartial result out of it. That can only come by someone independent of these companies with a real world setup to walk the through their paces and report on the results.
Bil, I agree with you, but I think the comparison doesn’t necessarily stop after the presentation. It could be interesting to have a follow up thread where specific points can be discussed in detail.
So THAT’S why they call you the SharePoint Sheriff. Now I get it!
Where in the world are you going to find vendors that tell you what the flaws are in the product during a demo? That one’s a red herring as far as I’m concerned. Yes, they are going to whip out the best that they’ve got, that’s the purpose of the exercise.
No one is going to buy these products based upon a 15 minute demo. What it does is give exposure to 6 vendors who are providing a much needed service to the SharePoint Community. If the viewers see something they like, they can investigate the vendor to see if it is a viable solution for them.
I like these types of events. They are quick. They get people thinking. They are a lot of fun both for the venders and the viewers. When I produce my first EUSP SharePoint Conference, I’m definitely going to include this format.
What I really think you are asking is to be a referree in this bout. Might not be a bad idea next time around to have a moderator call “BS” when something is really out of whack. You’ll be the first on my list for that position.
Mark
Nice. Far be it for me to blow out anyones balloons, I’m struggling to find the value-add for a reader. You’ve already provided the links to the vendor sites and I’m sure most of them already have screencasts that show off the products. Anyone can take 15 minutes of their time and look over the content and make their own assement. You said it gives community exposure to the vendors or products you listed. Don’t they have that already either by their own advertising (and by being included in your list).
No, I don’t expect vendors to tell me about their flaws which is inherently a problem with tools (in general, not just SharePoint). It takes real world experience to step over these issues and hours or days of googling and questioning the community to find an answer (if ever).
I also don’t expect anyone to rush out and buy product X after watching a marketing demo. You mention the purpose of this exercise is for the vendors to “whip out the best they’ve got”. So again, what is this providing over the marketing materials the vendors already have available?
Hey, it’s your party and all the power to you I’m just playing devils advocate here trying to see what you could get out of it that you wouldn’t get doing your own 15 minutes of investigation.
I can’t agree with Bil and Chandima more. Side by side comparisons will only compare “features” and as someone who has performed (or tried to perform) many migrations with most of these tools I can wholeheartedly say that features have little to do with how these tools will work in specific customer scenarios. I don’t need vendors to tell me what they are supposed to be able to do. That’s what data sheets are for. In fact, I don’t need vendors to tell me anything. I need to see what they can do with actual customer data. For that information I will either read user reviews or trial the product myself.
Mike and Bil,
Evidently these types of “Head-to-Head” events are not for you two. I already have 100 people registered in less than a day to watch this, so SOMEONE is interested. I think people as technically proficient as you two overlook the type of person who follows this site: people who want to see what’s available and don’t know where to begin looking.
EndUserSharePoint.com is the entrance point for a lot of people in the community. I think that’s why it has grown as it has in the past two years. Look at the responses from other people in this thread and you’ll see there IS a need for what we are doing, for a variety of reasons.
What you bring to light, though, is interesting. It would be fascinating to do this at a conference like SPTechCon, Best Practices or TEC2011, and have a panel of people such as yourselves act as moderators.
Mark
@Mark: my three questions:
- who can run the tool (end user/admin/IT)
- which version to version combinations (e.g. direct SP 2003 to SP 2010?)
- option to archive some of the content (outside SharePoint)?
So hopefully Mark doesn’t get too miffed at me for replying in this thread. I think the idea is interesting here but what’s more interesting is what’s coming out of the comments.
To me it’s obvious companies don’t tell you what you need to know, they tell you what they think you want to hear (or something like that, I’m just a code monkey not a marketer).
This blog post raises a call to those vendors and their products listed above (and to anyone out there with a product) that “Hey, what you provide is necessary but not sufficient for us to make our decision on”. Why would people be putting together their top three questions if they can’t already find it on the vendor site? Either the information isn’t there or isn’t easily discoverable.
Like some of the questions Jay posted, all good stuff. What’s frustrating from a consumer perspective is why are those questions not on the website (or maybe they are? I haven’t looked).
If I were a vendor I’d probably be looking at the comments here and going back to the documentation and information on my site to add or update it to fill the gap if there was one or work better on my marketing if the information was there but people weren’t getting the message.
Honestly? Not miffed at all. I’m enjoying the discussion. You and Mike are typically the ones that step up and offer constructive critisism.
As I said in a previous comment, these types of events are not for you if you already have a way to vet the vendors. Most people don’t so they will be watching just to get an idea of what’s capable of being done with these tools and deciding if it’s worth a further investigation.
Mark
No worries. I did truly forget this site serviced all levels of people interested in SharePoint and not just the uber-geeks. All the best on the event but no referree for this one. And yes, I’m still the SharePoint Sherrif (thanks Joel!)
and it puts us ALL (marketing, presales, dev) to the test…not just the products we work “for” (:
I’m sorry to sound like a stick in the mud, but it’s not fair to have vendors do this live. The problem is whomever goes first has the ultimate disadvantage. It’s too easy to for an adept presenter from vendor 2 to build on vendor 1’s flaws or omissions in their demo.
To keep this fair, these demos should be prerecorded and then merged together in random order. This should also be done by unbiased people which means anyone but those who currently works in the SharePoint arena.
If its just about giving people a quick look, then keep it light, have the vendors provide their 15 min overview so people know what’s out there, and then let people go to their websites or schedule a demo if they want the deep technical questions answered. All SharePoint deployments are unique, and people need to be able to ask questions, get direct answers that a 15 minute demo can’t provide.
> it’s not fair to have vendors do this live.
According to who? Every one of these companies is excited about participating. People who see value in it are looking forward to the event. “Fair” is putting on this event, everyone having a good time and then move on from there.
If what you are describing is so much better than what is proposed here, then go for it. I’ll even jump in and help if I can, but for now, this is what we’ve got and I’m looking forward to it.
> Every one of these companies is excited about participating.
And they will participate, but do you not understand how angry you are making some of these companies now? They have no choice but to jump on board or face looking intimidated by the competition. In fact, many of these vendors are reading my comments and thinking “right on” while possibly crafting public responses telling me how much of a dweeb I am. Getting paid is a fickle game.
Also, are you not working for a SharePoint vendor (hello Global360) who is lining up partnerships with some of these companies as we speak? Masquerading as neutral third-party is dangerous territory.
From a user perspective I love this idea, but as a vendor I want to make sure it’s fair. Who knows how long it will be before you start shaking my tree.
Mark, what about the approach similar to benchmark tests where a neutral third party (the Mills Lane of this particular thread’s metaphor?) creates a migration scenario that all six vendors have to present against?
For example:
– same database platform, say MSSQL 2008 SP1.
– x number of site collections, y number of sites in each
– x number of content databases in MOSS2007, at Y GB each. MOSS 2007 SP2 applied.
– BLOBs in MOSS 2007
– xx number of custom webparts, some deployed properly via .WSP, some not (hey, real world!)
– xxx number of ISV components (e.g., Bamboo’s time/temp web part)
– z number of connections to external data stores
– customizations to XSLT in search results
If we’re not all looking at the six vendors in light of a particular fact set or case, it’s too easy (to Bil S’s point) for them to hide behind their strengths.
All in all, I LOVE this idea, and recall discussing this with you at SPSBOS. So glad to see you take the steps of pulling it together! Bring on workflow, management, backup, etc.!
See now, that’s what I call a real smackdown. A real-world scenario that a product has to deal with and not the canned it-always-works demo that we usually see. For that, I would *buy* tickets to.
I love the benchmark smackdown idea!
Awesome idea, this would be a great 2nd round for the Migration products!
I hear what you’re saying, and I also love having this kind of information to help drive the decision making process, but there are really only 2 ways to capture this kind of data appropriately:
1) Download, install and test the products in your own environment. There are many features that are apples and oranges – they have different approaches and provide solutions that may or may not fit your operational and business needs. This will take time and effort, but, ultimately, you need to run the tools in your own environment with your own data to make a decision. There are no homogenous SharePoint installations, so you need to trial the tools on your own.
2) Hire an independent, third-party analyst firms to do this study. It’s expensive and takes time, so either someone needs to pay for it, or collectively we need to push a firm to do the study on their own — and then we all buy the information.
It is one thing to hold an overview session where vendors can provide a preview of their products, side by side, as we did yesterday. It was a good thing, and provided people with a quick snapshot of the value prop of each product – and hopefully spurs interest in downloading a trial of a few of them. I think it was a great idea, and stuck to the mission of EUSP.
But it is a completely different thing to create a controlled lab setting with clearly defined use cases and measurements to capture performance and like feature sets in an unbiased manner.
Great, event Mark! This is definately something I can see value in watching.
It would be interesting for a later event to have a few scenarios run using the same set ups for each of the products to see how they perform in the different scenarios. After all of the migrations I have done I have noted that what is considered a flaw with one migration can be a plus with another migration. It all depends on the end goals of the project. But I think that if we are informed on the capabilities of each and are able to see a migration in action then we can be better informed and can proceed accordingly.
Nothing worse than to get into a migration and see a really big flaw when you are halfway through it. At least by knowing beforehand contingencies can be made and expected.
> do you not understand how angry you are making some of these companies now?
Mike, who are you speaking for? No one, no company, no rep has had anything but good to say about this event. You’re the only one screaming “fix” here.
You’re out in left field on this one.
Mark – Almost didn’t see your response cause its not inline. Is that a bug with the site?
I’m not screaming. I’m merely speaking up for the big guy who can’t defend themselves here. I don’t have any skin in this game except that when I’m selling my products one day I hope someone sticks up for me :)
Mike,
I think you have valid response but some one has to start somewhere. This may not be perfect or seems like pre-recorded tunes but therer may be better approach come out from this.
We need these kind of excercises as a industry. There are many confusion over these tools and no one has time to trial all these softwares. May be something will come out of this and something will catch a eye to the audience where they can do some more research to see if that product fits their bill.
I would really encourage this and like others said, we need many more like this in other areas as well..
Nik
I’ve got to agree with a few comments here.
I’m certainly not an uber geek but I can see where this is going and some of the posts here only make this more obvious. If I wanted 15 mins of marketing speak I’d download the movies from the respective websites.
I’d rather see a benchmarking review of each product based on a test setup like the one proposed by MIke. Its what I’d like to see more of on this site and I’m sure the community would agree especially given that no-one else seems to do this. Thats going to give EVERYONE a real world picture of a products worth. This way we might actually find out some of the stuff these guys cannot do.
On a side note A question to include. What about including the ability of these tools to do backward migrations or even downgrades e.g. MOSS to WSS or SharePoint 2010 to Foundations. A recent corporate purchase has resulted in a need to migrate a reasonable sized MOSS 2007 based intranet into our larger WSS 3.0 intranet. Neither site uses advanced SharePoint functionality that should preclude us from being able achieve this but I rarely find any backward migration information and would be keen to find out what these tools can actually do.
I think it would be great to have someone volunteer to follow this up with a real world benchmark test. I think you’d find more vendors nervous in that than having this 15 minutes of marketing/fun as it’s been described.
Joel
AT Twynham we would be more than happy to volunteer for this we still have our 2007 farm and also test rigs with 2010 installed so if you need anyway to give an unbiased opinion let me know.
Dave
I have a new desktop (Dell XPS 9100, i7-980x CPU, 24GB RAM) ordered for the house and would be happy to do the same after it comes in. I probably need to work through the process anyway :-)
Dave I plan to take you up on that. I think it’s a great idea. At a minimum it would make a great blog series on SharePoint Land and feature on sharepointreviews.com.
Joel
Hi Joel/Mark
If this can be arranged with the vendors that would be perfect as i feel that then everyone would benefit from an unbiased opinion but the vendors have to be aware the we will be very honest (it is a failing of mine) and we will give a totally honest appraisal of the products warts and all.
I also think that the community would benfit from this type of showdown and the resulting blog series.
I would also like to praise Mark for setting this up, i do not think this has been done before and i think this is something that the SharePoint community needs before jumping into bed with any product.
Dave, that would be fantastic, and exactly my earlier point: unbiased, independent group with the facilities available. If you have the hardware and are willing to take charge, companies are going to jump onboard. You just need to make the testing criteria, measurements, and reporting of information clear up front.
Of course, the capitalist in me is wondering why you’d give this away for free? If you take the time to do the work, capture the data, and publish the results, why not sell your report? (I’m like the kid in the back of the class who raises his hand and says “Hey Teacher, I thought we were having a test today?”)
I have to agree that these types of events are very usefull for many reasons. I very much enjoy having 6 vendors to choose from (6 months after RTM) though I have my favorites. Those who remember 2007, 6 months after RTM I think we may have had a single vendor (we wrote our own during the early adapter program), maybe two and for 2003 RTM we had SPIN/SPOUT or in reverse order….
I also agree that it should be more of a real world scenario and to that extent. Have a client agree to the exposureand privide a subset of their environment, have 1 primary source to migrate, each vendor provides the target environment.
In the end its more about features, ease of use, and footprint… Well at least to me…….
Thank you #eusp for having this event and I hope you have many more……
-Ivan
I agree with you. I remember the days of 2003 release where there weren’t options beyond SPIN and SPOUT and that was painful!
It’s great to have this strong ecosystem. Great showing by all. I did prefer the presentations that had the focus on demo over slides, but seeing them all I was able to realize how different they were. That was the real value add. It’s easy to assume that they are all nearly the same, but today I saw at least 4 clearly different approaches to the migration that ended up having their own pros and cons for different environments.
Some very different approaches, indeed. And that’s why people need to download the trials and test them out.
Great “bake-off” and introduction to each of the tools. Thanks everyone.
Thanks for the hosting the Demo session today!
Great presentations and format
It has saved me a lot of time in getting a quick overview of each product.
I have made contact with several presenters and look forward to future events.
Was this demo recorded? If so, where can I see the rebroadcast?
The Demos were recorded and will be up on the EndUserSharePoint site along with additional information from the vendors. I would give it a day or two and check back.
First – Thank you Mark for organizing this. It was a very beneficial exercise. It was nice seeing all products.
To all the vendors – thank you for making the time to present your solution. It was interesting to see how each product was similar as well as what differentiated each of your solutions.
As a SharePoint consultant, I work with a number of clients who are either planning a migration or have messed something and need help. I am always looking for the “right” solution to their problem. Licensing is a big issue with my clients because, in a normal engagement, they have hired me to help them. Recommending that they spend a lot more money on a different tool set is sometimes out of the question. It would be nice to have a tool I could buy as a consultant to help them with migrations without having to install anything on their systems. MetaVis seems to have this solution and i am going to check it out. Obviously, my requirement is different than a typical migration requirement.
I would be interested to hear how you can support consultants in the field that might recommend your products.
You all did great and I will second Christian’s recommendation of AvePoints parties! (Note the subtle attempt to get invited to the next one…)
Good point David, I think most SharePoint consultants would love to use a migration tool that they could use FOR their clients without forcing the client to buy the product. If licensing were affordable in that scenario I believe it would be used by many consulting companies.
Hi All,
In response to Tony and Daves comments… There are a number of free products that you can modify to suit your needs. However, I would argue that once the determination has been made that the complexity of the environment requires the use of tools, then the client saves money by purchasing the tools vs developing tools in-house.
Also, I would be carefull in commiting to complex migrations where the client will not purchase the tools necessary for you to complete the project on time. Its our job to provide guidance to clients and sometimes that guidance is to not move forward until you can afford the correct hardware and software to do so..
-Ivan
I think you’d find as a consulting company that it pays to partner and get trained on the tool of your choice. You’ll get discounts and ultimately more leads for more migration consulting business.
An alternative is to use the tool that fits the job. Seeing the tools today you could clearly say there is no one size fits all… yet.
Great presentation! Thank you to EUSP and the presenters. We’re looking forward to more head-to-heads in the future.
I will say this was the best thing since slice bread for SharePoint stuff.
I hope to see several more similar webinars spawn off of this for workflow, backup/restore, disaster recovery, document classification, etc.
Saved me SO MUCH TIME and eventual spam e-mails from all the vendors to see it all in a basket instead of one by one.
One interesting observation I had was that the only folks who actually never hit “start” on a real migration was AvePoint. We never saw anything actually happen with their product, just some of the options when configuring a job. Kinda lame.
Thanks to Mark for hosting and to all the vendors who participated, it take some guts to do this kind of thing live and I found it VERY beneficial.
Hey Nick, thanks for the positive comment.
The reason I didn’t hit “start” during the Metalogix session–and I had two demos planned–was that I choose to answer the live questions. That was likely the case for others as well.
Looks like I shouldn’t throw AvePoint under the bus then, didn’t realize other vendors didn’t actually do their migration. My bad :-) As I said it was just an observation, poor one at that.
Was a great webinar, one of the very few that as an IT professional I felt was worth my time. Most provided by a single vendor are so well scripted that you don’t even really see the application in use but rather some screenshots and a slide deck. Given the live nature of this webinar it had much more “real world applicability” in my opinion.
Was also very interesting to see the juxtaposition of the several client based apps and those that are web-based too. In my personal opinion it felt like those client based apps were more suited to “down and dirty”/”get-r-done” migrations done by IT and the web based solutions attempted to be a bit more “enterprise”.
Both probably have their place in our market. Myself, I prefer the down and dirty ‘get-r-done’. Some of the web based stuff seemed slow, clunky, and somewhat obtuse. Once you go web you loose that wonderful right click too and interfaces really seem to struggle with the lack of “copy and paste” when we’re so used to windows explorer like interfaces.
In response to your comment on the web based interface. I think what you were shown here was only the web interface. Had it been a normal 1 hr demo, you’d see the scripting interface as well.
I think it’s fair to assume with every product you’d see one way of doing things and a lot of the extensibility wouldn’t get a chance to be shown in the ultimate 10 minutes of the demo.
Joel
I couldn’t make the first part of the presentations because of other commitment. I only seen the last two presentations and from what I seen the migration is ‘EASY’ to do NOW!! As I stated before, “I had to have help from Microsoft support to help with our migration from WSS to MOSS.” If and when we are going to migration from again I will look in to the vendors that presented today. Hope more ‘Head-to-Head’ presentations are on the way and maybe some workshop.
Thanks to Mark & all of the vendors who participated! I found this event valuable.
For future events like this I suggest one possible improvement – 2-3 pre-determined questions presented to each vendor. This nearly came about organically, but I think imposing the SAME questions on every product presenter is fair. It would provide a level comparison point for attendees.
The event was great. The company I am doing work for is in the early stages of evaluating our strategy for a move to 2010, and had begun a few weeks ago to move toward migration over upgrade.
Rather than schedule a series of demos, (which we had started to do), this provided us with a one-stop overview of the features and (t a limited extent) pricing of the contenders we had identified. We’ll be following up with the top prospects.
While some tools won’t fit our particular needs, all of the tools looked well-designed. The toolmakers are to be commended.
Congrats to the presenters on jobs well done!
I definitely see value in doing these kind of events again with different types of tools.
The only thing missing was an AvePoint afterparty :-)
Thanks for a great head-to-head! Half of these vendors I haven’t heard about and it was great to have a quick glance on what they have to offer. Though, our migration is over for now, but there will be others. I’m quite sure of that.
An idea for the next head-to-head: sharepoint administration tools. I’d loooove to have a similar 2h session with a bunch of products from where I could shortlist the one’s I’d like to try. (Just too busy to find out myself what is out there.)
And perhaps a 15 min presentation and 5 min question-time could be in place?
You can count on Axceler’s ControlPoint to be there!
Thank you to everyone who participated as a presenter and an attendee yesterday. There are two follow ups that might be of interest to you.
The first is that the recordings of the session came out nicely. I will be posting them for download on the site. I have offered each of the presenters a chance to write an article about their migration tool and we’ll link to the appropriate recording as the articles become available.
The second follow up is that Dave Coleman in the UK is offering to run an independent test, giving an unbiased critique of the tools for those vendors who would like to participate. I will be working with Dave and the vendors over the next week to establish a set of criteria for running a true head-to-head comparison test.
Again, thank you to everyone who participated. I thought it was a wonderful exercise, giving us a foundation for future events of this type.
Regards,
Mark
Really enjoyed the presentation, all 2 hours of it, not often I’d say that.
Nice to see the interests of the community somewhat dictate what was demonstrated. Wasn’t too much sales waffle in there neither. Upfront pricing is always attractive as it’s normally techies poking around under the hood prior to looking at the price tag. Personally speaking, MetaVis was the one that most caught my eye.
More vendor demo-offs please :)
Hi,
Thanks to all vendors. Very good presentation with key feature. I think It could be event better if each vendor had a common ground of comparison (ex: migrate SPD workflow, migrate to Office365, server side install, web base product, support 24/7…) in order to well understand and compare the products and in a second part the key differentiators.
So i think that the “head-to-head” could be:
- 5 min introduction,
- 10 min feature comparison grid,
- 5 min differentiators from other products.
Thank again, excellent job !