This will be the first post in a series were I will talk about useful SharePoint tools and applications. The tools will be everything from Codeplex and freeware to licensed third-party products. But before we hit of I would like to emphasize that this is tools that I have worked with in my projects and that I neither work for the software providers nor get any kind of royalties for this. Its pure knowledge sharing.

First out is a migration tool called Xplica. The tool helps you migrate documents from on SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint w3 environment to another WSS or Moss environment. It is mainly used when moving from an old unstructured SharePoint 2003 environment to a brand new Moss setup. The tool needs to be purchased but the price very reasonable.

For being a small and simple tool it has a lot of different settings and features. It can maintain existing metadata such as creation date and last modified by, but you can also create a reference file with your new metadata values so that you can move and add metadata at the same time. Other options you have is to schedule the migration (so it can be done by night), keep old versions and remove stinky folder structures so that they end up in a plain list, ready to create views on.

I used this tool quite recently and for smaller migrations I like it and can recommend it. I also initially had some problems (that was security based) so I contacted their support and got a quick and good answer that helped me.

Below are a couple of screenshots.