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Our company decided to move from SharePoint Documents Libraries to OpenText LiveLink for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). We faced the following problem :

We have thousands of documents that reference each other currently in SharePoint. When we move them to the new ECM system these links will be broken. Is there a way to fix this without doing it manually (which is almost impossible) ? We want the documents to reference each other in the new system with the new links. We are using absolute paths in the old system.

Morano88
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3 Answers3

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(Disclaimer: I work for a company which have a lot of experience in these kind of migrations and we have special tools for them.)

You need a mapping between the old (SharePoint) and new (LiveLink) paths of the documents.

A simple two-step migration process is the following:

  1. Copy the documents from SharePoint to LiveLink and fill the mapping table during the migration.
    • The links in LiveLink could be
      • changed to point to a dummy LiveLink node,
      • left empty.
  2. Fix the broken links in LiveLink with the mapping table.
palacsint
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  • The migration tool you choose or have written for this purpose should have no trouble producing the mapping table. Crawling the documents and replacing the links in them usually become more expensive, because the tool must understand the file formats (HTML, text, Office, ...), which can be many. – Ferdinand Prantl Feb 22 '14 at 16:01
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There is a web service API system for any operations in the Livelink(Content Server) such as: uploading a file, mapping more than one files to each other(like what you want to do). You should definitely look at those web services. Almost everything is included in the web services, but if you don't do a very specific(extreme) case with API, you might look at the DB to understand how to do(but this is not an appropriate way and it is very hard and dangerous for the Livelink's DB consistency).

mgokhanbakal
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As the other answers have alluded to, there are two types of links that can be broken by a migration:

  1. Links that the ECM handles, with terminology such as "Related to" or "Relationships"
  2. Links within the document itself, such as linked Excel spreadsheets or an image referenced in a Word document

The other answers have discussed the first where it is primarily a table based approach.

For the second, I've only found one tool that does this adequately: LinkFixer by LinkTek. Recent updates support SharePoint Online. Useful for my needs, they also support OpenText's Content Server. Your mileage may vary but this is what I'd recommend having used it a few times successfully.

They have a free version that just reports on links called LinkReporter.

The primary downsides are the price and that it's quite slow, which is understandable given it has to read every file, locate the linked objects and then fix them after migration if they're broken.

Disclaimer: I work for an OpenText partner but have no financial relationship with LinkTek.

Aidan
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