Corporate IT organizations have deployed numerous platforms over the years to enable users to collaborate on and share unstructured documents, files, and other data. File shares, document management systems, e-mail servers, Web servers - chances are that most of these are still in use in your company. New user requirements and technical capabilities have driven this evolution, and the result is a scattered variety of platforms that have become unwieldy and expensive to manage.

Since the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server in January 2007, companies have been evaluating it to determine if it can host this wide variety of disparate data sources and enable them to migrate off platforms that are in some cases decades old. The good news is that SharePoint 2007 is the first release that can really do the job and enable IT organizations to consolidate collaborative data from all of the platforms previously deployed.

This article takes a high-level look at how companies can migrate legacy content into SharePoint 2007. It covers the benefits for doing so and the issues encountered when handling particular legacy data sources.

SharePoint Features That Enable Consolidation
SharePoint 2007 is a multi-faceted platform that includes considerable improvements and new functionality over previous releases. The features to take advantage of when migrating legacy data sources include:

• Document Libraries: Think of this as highly enhanced File Shares, with check-in/check-out capabilities, simple workflow, version control, and metadata support.
• Lists: A way to store raw data such as contacts, sales info, inventory, etc.
• Wikis: The next level of collaboration, wikis provide rich interlinked content that can be modified with browser-based editing.
• Blogs: Ideal for publishing frequent updates, blogs are fitting nicely into the enterprise; they can also help capture day-to-day working knowledge and expertise.
• Image Galleries: Upload and share photos, diagrams, and other types of images that are important to the organization.
• Templates: Microsoft provides several built-in and downloadable templates, and it's relatively easy to customize these to fit job functions or specific needs.
• Security: SharePoint is usually tied to Active Directory for authentication and validation, greatly simplifying security for organizations already using Active Directory. More granular security and records management make SharePoint 2007 a highly involved and secure platform.