ReplaceMagicHelp

Update: 13th of April, 2020

In case days/weeks Microsoft is noticing increased usage of SharePoint Online and OneDrive. To decrease risks for the environment Microsoft has take temporary measures to ensure that critical services remain available and reliable for users in remote work scenarios. As a consequence Microsoft is enforcing tighter throttling limits for 3rd party application like ReplaceMagic but also migration applications.

As far as we know those new limits are enforced during working hours only.In the evening or weekend hours for the region where your tenant is you should not be impacted.

To allow you better understand how time is split during ReplaceMagic processing we introduced SharePoint performance metrics option (see Configuration => Logs):

If you select this option in log files you will find entries like (btw. this when throttling was slowing ReplaceMagic processing; during normal processing we see between 4 and 10 better performances for same document):

• Binary Load Document: document.docx: 2143,2041 ms (comment: this is where we download documents from SharePoint)
• Preparation for Meta Data processing: document.docx: 1270,1174 ms (comment: access to the SharePoint)
• Replacement process: document.docx: 0,9958 ms(comment: processing done on your computer)
• CheckIn/Out or Publish/Unpublish update: document.docx: 2007,0992 ms (comment: access to the SharePoint)
• Preparation for save: document.docx: 89,7238 ms(comment: processing on your computer)
• Upload to SharePoint: document.docx: 3177,0676 ms (comment: access to the SharePoint)
• Set document Metadata back: document.docx: 16490,9978 ms (comment: access to the SharePoint)

During our tests we observed that performances are 4-5x slower than usually.

IMPORTANT REMARK: One scenario that we cannot confirm but is possible - if ReplaceMagic starts to write to your SharePoint.Online and Microsoft is stopping writing process before it is finished if not proper error handling is done on SharePoint side (roll back to document before save started) we can assume that document will be corrupted. Once when save is triggered ReplaceMagic does not control what is happening on SharePoint but you might find update in Additional Info tab. We assume that there is very low probability that this happens but it still exists.

Some recommendations to reduce SharePoint workload here.

Additionally, ReplaceMagic includes now possibility to create multiple SharePoint users which will be used during document processing to split workload across them. Target is that one users is not throttled due to multiple users:

To do that, before you start to enter user credentials click on "Use multiple users" and then when you enter user data click on "Add more users". In case that connection works (you'll be notified) ReplaceMagic will store user data in "Additional SharePoint users" table. Later during processing ReplaceMagic will for each document use sequentially SharePoint connections which will "split" workload across entered users.

From Microsoft article: General migration performance guidance