CopyMove for SharePoint – Moving files with metadata, audit details and version history with ease (And style)

SharePoint Products has produced a product called CopyMove for SharePoint since the MOSS 2007 release.  The product is licensed by the WFE (Web Front-End) and is a farm solution (you will need to have your own installation of SharePoint as this is an on-premise solution).  A 30 day eval is available to try it for yourself.

Quick Visual Summaries

Usually I screenshot the bejesus out of things (hey, I’m a visual learner) but they have done a good job already of outlining what it looks and feels like, so here’s a quick summary:

• Quick Screenshot Tour
• Videos for installation, how to copy documents, how to copy list items and how to configure the product (such as restricting access through permissions)

Why it is important

CopyMove allows you to copy and move content (documents and list items) between SharePoint Libraries (and Lists).  While ‘copying’ may seem straightforward (“hey, I can just write a quick workflow to do that or use the ‘send to’ functionality in a library”), ‘moving’ is the real attraction/business value for the tool.

Moving items with version history, authors/dates and permissions for me is the real magic of the tool.  And if your destination library is missing elements, such as content types, columns or matching versioning settings, the tool warns you before you commit. Nice. Safe.

Booyah!

Moving items between lists and libraries is not as straightforward as you would think.  Sure, you could invest in big/expensive migration tools and sure, there is some PowerShell you could run, or you could even attempt to have success using ‘manage content and structure’ by flipping on the publishing features (and using the clearly not upgraded since 2007 interface of that tool), etc. but there really is nothing out there that is for the ‘end user’ and nothing in the SharePoint Ribbon (as is the case of SharePoint 2010).

Click here for a complete list of functionality and how/why it differs from what you can do out of the box in SharePoint.

But Wait, it can do more!

Ok, never mind the elements that already had me jazzed, consider this:

• Copy and move documents, list items, pictures, folders, web part pages (ya, this is cool), publishing pages and document sets – all the while having the opportunity to preserve version history on move or copy, preserve metadata (make sure the target columns/content types exist)
• Export and Import from a zip, into a library. Useful in several situations including moving between farms
• Easily readable/understood warnings to advise on missing target metadata (Columns/content types), versioning settings (possibly not enabled on target) and overwrite situations
• A .NET API for doing more…

For a complete list of functionality and where this product fits, see the Product Overview page.

How its installed

Refer to the installation and setup section of the Administrators Guide.  It took less than 10 minutes to install it in our environment (farm and 3 site collections).

How/Where it is enabled

Once enabled (by activating the site collection feature), it will be available across all webs within the site collection.