If you orbit in SharePoint’s universe, chances are you hope it will fulfill its promise of being a collaboration and productivity solution. Which is partly why Office 365 has attracted attention: Office 365 offers the potential to dissolve the barriers separating collaboration, productivity and communication, solutions. (Office 365 is currently in beta.)
SharePoint 2010 can do this—with the help of third-party products. But Office 365 can do it in one solution, of which SharePoint is one facet.
“I think Microsoft is going to kill with this,” says Peter Senescu, president of MetaVis Technologies, speaking about Office 365’s potential.
“A lot of people are trying to move off-premises. A lot of people are trying to off-load Exchange. I think you’re going to see a ton of people moving to Office 365. It’s a great deal,” Senescu says. He’s seen Office 365 and adds, “It works really well.”
Good news for MetaVis, which chose the agent-less route in creating its SharePoint migration solution. “We connect like a web browser. Others require an agent. We don’t. This allows us to connect with Office 365,” Senescu says.
This week, MetaVis announced MetaVis Suite, its SharePoint migration, metadata management, and classification solution, now supports Office 365 migration.
Migration is just the tip of the iceberg, however. “We don’t simply migrate. We classify,” Senescu says, to ensure content is organized and searchable.
Organizations can migrate and organize content from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, Microsoft Outlook, file systems, and SharePoint implementations to Office 365 using MetaVis Suite’s Migrator, Architect, and Classifier.
And if you’re already on BPOS, you don’t have to wait for Microsoft to upgrade you to Office 365. MetaVis can do it for you.
A free trial of MetaVis Architect for Office 365 is available at the company’s website, and MetaVis also offers a money-back guarantee.
MetaVis also announced its new Exchange Public Folders and Outlook module, which lets users drag and drop content from Exchange Public Folders and Outlook folders into SharePoint. They can maintain the existing Exchange Public Folder structure or reclassify content.
Thanks to the Outlook support, users can copy and share emails, calendar entries or entire calendars, and tasks or contacts within SharePoint. The Exchange Public Folders or Outlook module is available as an add-on to the MetaVis Suite, Migrator, and Classifier tools.
Pricing starts at $4,000 for Migrator. “We do a lot for your money,” Senescu says. Small releases occur “about once a week,” he says and updates go to customers automatically. He demoed the MetaVis Suite and showed how you can drag and drop content to Office 365. When you move items, you can apply metadata and map it. He showed how you can remap users, too—for instance, if a company acquires another company with a SharePoint site.
He showed how you can move content from the file system, copy from a shared drive to SharePoint, grab a whole folder and drag it in, and tag the documents. You can also move workflows and InfoPath forms, which otherwise, Senescu says, would be hard to move. The MetaVis Suite supports term stores and document sets.
A feature I found interesting was in MetaVis Migrator/Classifier—a compare feature. You select two sites, right-click, and the MetaVis tool does a live compare, showing you what’s different between the two sites. Then you can drill in deeper and compare and synchronize. To learn more about MetaVis and its migration and classification solutions, visit the MetaVis website.
To learn more about Office 365, see these SharePointPro Connections and Windows IT Pro articles:
The Scoop on Exchange Online, Exchange 2010, and Office 365, by B.K. Winstead
SharePoint Online is Turning the Microsoft Tanker Around Very Fast, by Caroline Marwitz
To The Cloud! Really? by Dan Holme
