Last November we published a blog post about what to do with your Teamstudio Export HTML Archives. One of the sections discussed how to upload the Export HTML Archives into Microsoft SharePoint Site Pages.

Since that time, we have discovered that the application we recommended for uploading the Export HTML Archive files to a SharePoint Site Page has one major limitation: it can only upload approximately 2000 files at a time. While this might not be a problem for simple SharePoint Site Pages it can cause a bit of a problem with our Export HTML Archives since they can potentially include tens of thousands of files. In some client environments we’ve seen close to a million files being created!

Microsoft’s official response when we inquired about this limitation was “upload in batches.” We didn’t accept this as a “work around” since this would take intimate knowledge of the Export HTML Archive file structure and would take days to upload a large Export HTML Archive. Just imagine trying to upload 500,000 files in batches of 2000; it would take forever!

So, we started investigating other methods for performing this task. We uncovered an alternate method for uploading files to a SharePoint Site Page using Microsoft Windows File Explorer, but this did not meet what we believed would be our clients’ needs, since this alternate method had two significant and unreasonable constraints:

The user has to switch their SharePoint environment to use the “Classic SharePoint Layout” which in turn hides any new features;
The alternate method requires Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Since both of these are difficult for our users (hiding new functionality and using a now defunct browser) we did not feel that this would work long term for our clients.

More recently we discovered a little known or advertised application from Microsoft called the SharePoint Migration Tool. The SharePoint Migration Tool (a.k.a. SPMT) was designed to assist SharePoint clients in migrating from older versions of SharePoint (2010 and 2013) to the newer SharePoint Online environments (both hosted and on-premise). One additional migration option is to migrate files from a network or local file system. Upon further investigation we discovered that the SPMT can also be used to upload a website to a SharePoint Site Page, and since this is exactly our scenario we decided to test this out.

One thing to note is that the SPMT is only available for 64-bit versions of the Microsoft operating systems, so if you are planning to use this new method be sure you are using a supported 64-bit operating system before installing the SPMT!

To acquire the SPMT visit this Microsoft webpage. There is complete documentation for the tool and a download link. The link will take you to the Release Notes for the latest version of the SPMT and provides a link to download SPMT V3.2x

Once you have downloaded and installed the SPMT it is a simple process for using the tool. When you first launch the SPMT you will be prompted to login to your Microsoft account:

Once you have successfully logged in you will be presented with a “Welcome” screen. At this point you can start your first migration by pressing the “Start your first migration” button:

You will then be presented with three migration options. The option that we will be using is the “File Share” option:

Once you select the “File Share” option you will be asked what files you want to migrate. You will want to select the Top-Level folder from the Export HTML Archive:

Then you will be asked for the SharePoint Online site where you will be uploading the files to. Once you enter your SharePoint Online site you will be presented with a selection for the location to upload to. If you connected correctly you should see an option for uploading to Site Pages. When clicking on this option it will display your existing Site Page folders and also allow you to create a new folder. This is the option we are using in this demonstration:

Give your folder a name…

After this information is provided you will be asked to name the migration. This will be used for post migration logs so that you can refer to them later. For our example we used the date of the migration. At this point you can also add additional Export HTML Archive folders if you want to upload multiples at the same time:

Finally, you will be presented with a set of optional settings for the upload. For our example we used the default settings:

Once you have made any additional settings adjustments you will click the “Migrate” button to start the process. This is the point where you just sit back and let the SPMT do its work. The rest of the process is automated by the SPMT itself:

Once the uploads are complete you will be able to see all of the files in your SharePoint Online system. When you navigate to your Site Pages the newly created folder will appear and the uploaded files will be within this folder:

The length of time it takes to upload the Export HTML Archives to the SharePoint Site Page is of course dependent on a number of factors:

The number of files in the Export HTML Archive
The number of attachments in the Export HTML Archive
The speed of your Internet connection

As an example, I used this process to upload four Export HTML Archives of varying sizes and documented the amount of time to upload. Below are the results of these uploads:

From the information above I have also come to the conclusion that there is a series of preamble and postamble actions which do take some time. Even though this is the case it seems to be minimal, although the results from smaller uploads do change the reporting of the Time per MB of files being uploaded. It is also very evident that the larger the Export HTML Archive the faster the upload becomes.

Once the Export HTML Archive files have been uploaded to your SharePoint Site Pages you can then secure and distribute the links to the main page to your users so that they can continue to use the archived Notes databases for read-only access to the data contained within them.

If you have any questions or would like a demonstration of this process, please click below to contact us. Happy uploading!