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The Six-Stage Document Migration Workflow
Every large document migration — SharePoint tenant-to-tenant, file-share to SharePoint Online, cloud-to-cloud — follows the same six stages. Most migration tools own the first stage (moving files) and the last stage (post-move sanity check). The four stages in the middle are where projects succeed or fail, and where ReplaceMagic and the SmartMapper engine fit in.
Why the middle four stages matter
SharePoint Migration Manager, ShareGate, Metalogix, robocopy, PowerShell scripts — they all excel at moving files. None of them look inside the files. When 200,000 hyperlinks, OLE references, Power Query calls and connection strings point at the old location on Monday morning, someone still has to fix them. Historically that is a spreadsheet, a junior consultant, and a lot of prayer. ReplaceMagic replaces the spreadsheet; SmartMapper replaces the consultant.
Tool-specific workflows: after ShareGate · after AvePoint · after Microsoft Migration Manager.
Stage by Stage
1Discover Shared
Goal: Know what content exists and where it lives before any migration decision is made.
What happens: Inventory the source content — file shares, mapped drives, SharePoint sites, tenants, Google Drive / Box / Dropbox folders. Capture folder structures, sizes, ownership and access controls.
ReplaceMagic role: Runs a scan across every folder or SharePoint location in scope and writes results to the the document index table — filename, folder, size, template, docID, SharePoint URL variants (DirectLink, OrganizationalViewLink, OrganizationalEditLink, AnonymousViewLink, AnonymousEditLink) and link counts per type. This inventory is the foundation for every stage that follows.
- Scan file shares, mapped drives and SharePoint (Online + On-Prem) natively
- Handle throttling, authentication (MFA, App-Only, Legacy) and large libraries
- Capture every SharePoint URL variant for later ID-based resolution
2Analyze ReplaceMagic
Goal: Know every link that will need to keep working after the move.
What happens: Extract links from every scanned document and classify each one. This is not a filesystem operation; it means opening the internal structure of Office files, PDF, OneNote, LNK and text formats and pulling out hyperlinks, OLE object references, Excel link sources / Connections / Pivot caches / Power Queries, VBA code paths, header and footer content, comments and field codes, plus SharePoint Canvas and Wiki page content.
ReplaceMagic role: Populates Hyperlinks, OLE, link sources, pivot tables, Power Queries tables. The SmartMapper engine then classifies each link as Absolute, Relative, SharePointDocID, OneDriveID, PowerQuery, ConnectionString, OneNote or SharePoint-special — and extracts the real link from any long-string wrapper (Provider=, DSN=, OPENROWSET, File.Contents(...)).
- All Office formats plus PDF, OneNote, LNK, text and SharePoint pages in one scan
- Link type classification across relative, absolute and every ID-based cloud system
- link extraction pulls links out of PowerQuery commands, connection strings and SharePoint URL specials
3Generate Mapping SmartMapper
Goal: Turn business-level intent into technical search/replace patterns without a person writing them by hand.
What happens: The migration team defines Source → Target mapping rules (for example \\ServerABC\Finance → https://company. sharepoint. com/sites/financenew). Redundant patterns are consolidated automatically.
Why this stage is the difference between a good and bad migration: Traditionally a project manager writes hundreds of search/replace pairs into a spreadsheet, guesses at what SharePoint will name each library, and hopes nothing has a typo. SmartMapper generates the patterns deterministically from the actual resolved links.
- Business-language input (Source → Target), technical output (the generated patterns)
- SmartMapper consolidates redundant sub-folder patterns into one
\Finance\rule - Folder-context-aware patterns handle identical relative links resolving to different targets
4Validate SmartMapper
Goal: Know the outcome before a single document is written.
What happens: SmartMapper simulates every generated pattern against every resolved link. For each pattern it reports correct (replaced correctly), unchanged (link untouched) and incorrect (pattern matched but produced the wrong result). Per-pattern accuracy. At run level, accuracy and coverage are reported as two independent figures — a run can be fully accurate and still leave part of the in-scope links uncovered, so the two are never blended into one score.
Human review: Every pattern carries a status — Generated, Accepted, Rejected, Modified, Conflict. The project owner reviews the list, accepts or modifies patterns, and Conflict groups (identical SearchString mapping to different ReplaceStrings depending on the document folder) are surfaced for explicit decision. Only patterns you have approved are used in Stage 5.
- correct / unchanged / incorrect per pattern; nothing runs blind
- Run level: accuracy and coverage reported separately, never collapsed into a single score
- Conflict groups flagged for human review; auto-rejected until one is chosen
- Full audit trail: the original pattern / the modified pattern preserved if user modifies a pattern
5Repair ReplaceMagic
Goal: Apply the approved patterns to the real documents, in bulk, without opening a single file by hand.
What happens: ReplaceMagic executes the accepted patterns across every scanned document. File date/time stamps are preserved (for SharePoint this requires Site Admin permissions); passwords for open and modify are respected. Documents are never opened in the Office application — ReplaceMagic edits the internal XML / binary structures directly, which is why it scales to hundreds of thousands of files.
- Only patterns you have approved are ever applied; anything you reject or leave unresolved never touches a document
- Bulk multi-threaded execution across the whole document estate
- Original timestamps preserved (for SharePoint requires Site Admin permissions), password-protected files supported (you need to provide the list of passwords to be used)
- PowerQuery
File.Contentsrewritten toWeb.Contents/SharePoint.Fileswhen targets are in the cloud
6Verify Shared
Goal: Prove the migration succeeded — no dangling links, no unexplained gaps.
What happens: Re-scan the target environment with ReplaceMagic and confirm residual broken links are either zero or explained (mailto:, javascript:, internal cell references — the categories that go into unresolved links with reason codes are supposed to stay unchanged). Compare the pre-migration and post-migration scans, report deltas, and hand a sign-off document to project stakeholders.
- Post-migration scan and diff report
- unresolved links with reason codes make gaps explicit, not invisible
- pattern history + RunID isolation give a permanent audit record
Which Edition For Which Stage?
| Stage | ReplaceMagic edition per format (Word, Excel, PDF, …) | ReplaceMagic.Office / Total / Ultimate | ReplaceMagic.SmartMapper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Discover | Yes (single format) | Yes (all formats) | Yes |
| 2. Analyze | Yes (single format) | Yes (all formats) | Yes + type classification, ID-based resolver, long-string extractor |
| 3. Generate Mapping | Manual (customer writes search/replace pairs) | Manual | Auto-generated from Source → Target rules |
| 4. Validate | Search-Only preview mode | Search-Only preview mode | validation + accuracy + the acceptance workflow |
| 5. Repair | Yes (single format) | Yes (all formats) | Yes |
| 6. Verify | Search-Only re-scan | Search-Only re-scan | Re-scan + RunID audit trail + pattern history |
Ready for the next migration?
Small project with a known mapping? ReplaceMagic.Ultimate covers Stages 1, 2, 5 and 6 across every supported format.
Project with thousands of links, ID-based URLs, PowerQuery / ConnectionString content or multiple migration waves? ReplaceMagic.SmartMapper adds Stages 3 and 4 — the mapping engine, validation and confidence scoring that turn a hopeful migration into a defensible one.
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