In Microsoft SharePoint, Sites and Drives are two related but different concepts. Understanding their differences will allow you to correctly leverage Universal Migrator's SharePoint backup and restore features.
Sites and Drives
A SharePoint site is a top-level container but it contains no direct documents. Instead, each site has at least one child drive that files and folders can reside in. The default name for a SharePoint Site's default drive is usually either "Documents" or "OneDrive" but any name can be used. Additionally, other drives can also be created for sites.
Mapping Sites and Drives to the Universal Backup
When thinking about Sites and Drives, you will realize that these concepts do not obviously correlate to the Client > Matter > Document/Folder structure you'll typically see with Universal Migrator. It is important for you to understand how we map things and, more importantly, why we made the decisions we did.
How SharePoint Typically gets Used
There are two very different ways that SharePoint is typically deployed. Firms usually have either a global, firm-wide "Client Docs" site that have all documents for all matters OR firms will have a site-per-matter that contains just the documents for each matter. Because it is much easier to consolidate folder trees than it is to separate them out, Universal Migrator is optimized around the site-per-matter deployment. If you want just a single site, consolidating folder trees is easily doable with some basic SQL.
When storing data in SharePoint, we also want to allow consultants to specify which drive in a site data should be loaded to and not assume that all documents should be loaded to a drive's default site.
SharePoint > Universal Migrator Mapping
In SharePoint, we will think of a Site as a Matter and the Drives within each site as the first-level folder.
This means when you backup data from SharePoint, every document will be associated to a matter that matches the name of the site, and have a root folder that matches the name of the source drive. This also means that when restoring data to SharePoint, every document will be uploaded to the site that matches the matter its associated with and to the drive whose name matches the root folder of the document.
Alternatives We Considered but Didn't Take
There are other ways we considered implementing the mappings and we wanted to let you know why we rejected them.
This was rejected because:
- There are many legal technology platforms that sit on top of SharePoint and we were not able to find any that followed this pattern.
- SharePoint already has the concept of Contacts and they don't align with Universal Migrator's concept of a Contact
- Most document-system only care about "Client" contacts (contacts that have matters, not all contacts).
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