Different content management and versioning systems have different methods
on how they track versions. So when migrating from one system to another,
you can run into issues. We recently experienced this when moving some
data from an old CVS tracking system to a new SharePoint system (though this
also affects old Novell systems).
The quickest way to move a large number of file to SharePoint is, of
course, through the Explorer window. That way you don't have to manually
make all your folders and everything else you might need. However, this
can lead to problems, such as these errors:
Error 0x8007011A: The mounted file system does not support extended
attributes.
or
Invalid MS-DOS function
Both of these indicate that the old CMS has some extended file attributes
that SharePoint doesn't handle. Stripping them is the only reliable way
to allow SharePoint to manage these files.
You can let the web interface do this for you, but that means making all your
own folders. Not terribly quick when you're dealing with large
moves. There is a quick workaround that I used, and that is to move the
files to a neutral location, zip them up, and then unzip them. Archiving
them that way actually strips those extended attributes, and Zip doesn't
support them. So now you have clean files you can copy over to SharePoint
(sans any versioning from the old system).
Right now, we're also looking at building an app to automate this process,
and possibly add some intelligence to it.
Also, does anyone know of any tools that can examine this kind of extended data? That would make our lives a lot easier.