If you like SharePoint -- and let’s face it, here at CMSWire we do -- you’re going to like Sharegate and its migration products. This week, the Montreal-based company has just added a new product, Copy Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint, to its other migration capabilities.

Sharegate and SharePoint

But let’s start at the beginning, because it really looks like Sharegate just dropped out of the sky and hit the ground running.

We haven’t come across them before and they appear to be relatively new, although there is nothing on their website to indicate when the company was created. In fact there is little enough about the company at all except to say that the average age is 28-years-old and that they do a lot of pretty interesting things around SharePoint.

The concept, the website says, rose out of the observation that it is really difficult to migrate content with SharePoint and that after months of banging their collective heads together they came up with Sharegate, which now has an interesting array of tools that are being used by over 1000 organizations worldwide.

Again, the only reason we are interested in the background of the company is because of the importance migration products play with SharePoint and how much more important they are going to become with the release of SharePoint 15, slated for sometime early in the new year.

SharePoint and Exchange Migration

So that’s Sharegate and this week they released Copy Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint, which we’ll call Copy Exchange for the sake of brevity.

Copy Exchange enables users to migrate emails, contact, events, notes and pretty much everything else from Exchange to SharePoint (did I say how much we love email management too?!). We have seen in the past how important email management is for enterprises, and the ability to move email content to SharePoint can only be a good thing.

Sharegate migrations.jpg
Sharegate SharePoint migrations

Copy Exchange works through a drag-and-drop interface that enables users to pull public folders and their content to SharePoint keeping the metadata, authors and timestamps intact.

But it’s not the only release in recent months. Another Sharegate product that was released in March called Bulk Metadata Editor will work quite nicely with Copy Exchange. With it, users simply choose the site where the list or library is, choose the list or library they want to play with, select the documents they want to bulk edit and hit the bulk edit button.

There’s others too that are worth a look if SharePoint migrations are causing your enterprise problems. In fact so sure of its simplicity and competitive is Sharegate that it is setting itself up in its own words as the “ultimate reference in terms of SharePoint migration.”

SharePoint Migration

We’re not disputing that it might be, but there are competitors out there that also make the same claim. There’s Metalogix, or migration specialist MetaVis; Idera does a pretty neat migration suite, as does Quest. You get the picture.

But the differentiator here is that Sharegate for the moment appears to specialize in migrating content through different versions of SharePoint simply and without clients having to take out another mortgage to pay for them.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. In the meantime, if you want to see more, check out the video below.