Changing Network Shares to SharePoint Libraries

Yes, I know have been very quiet this year, but I am determined to get back to weekly SharePoint Blog writing. I could blame the worry of the Villa’s Premiership safety or the excitement at publishing my first threebooks, but in truth SharePoint has just gone a little crazy lately. With different the versions around the UK now stretched from 2003 to 2013. Office Talk now has customers on 4 different versions of SharePoint and that isn't even including WSS and Foundation.

Despite so many versions of SharePoint and it approaching its troublesome teenage years people still ask ‘What Does SharePoint Do?’ The answer is really whatever you want it to do. Well, maybe not make the perfect cup of tea or help Villa climb to safety, but when it comes to storing information it does the lot. It can be a reporting tool for your database systems, it can content manage your website, it can create surveys on what should the venue be for this year’s Christmas Office Party or it can add automation to any paper system. I am sure we could list over 100 polite uses for SharePoint, but the top one for most size organisations is ‘Document Management’.

Whether it is Private or Public Sector they all want to have a system for storing their ‘Controlled’ documents. The type of documents that legally shouldn't be deleted, the type that need some level of security, probably the sort that needs to keep old versions and be have an audit trail. As SharePoint puts a big tick in each of these boxes it is the tool that the majority of organisations turn to. The only issue is that they have had electronic documents for the last twenty plus years and they need a way to get these into SharePoint.   

Often organisations have very large shared network drives that contain lots of valuable documents. Now uploading into SharePoint is not quick but can be done. The popular Explorer View is always and easy solution, but there are drawbacks. The major one being that you lose the author name and date created straight away. It turns into the account used to do the upload and today’s date. It is as if the past never existed and there wasn't life before SharePoint. But we need to Time Travel back to get the original properties.

So how can we keep the original properties from the Network Share and take them into the Document Libraries? Many Office Talk customers already know the answer but for the rest of you I will let you into the secret…….

It is DocKit from Vyapin. Over the last three years DocKit has been Office Talk’s biggest reselling product. To find out more and try it out just visit the DocKit page on the Office Talk website.

If only the Villa could convert their recent good performances into Premiership points as easily. With ten games left I have calculated that they will get ten more points before the final game. I have also estimated that Wigan will get eight points before the last game. So if I am right the Villa will go to Wigan for last game of the season two points ahead. In the words of Sir Alex, ‘it’s squeaky bum time’.