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This is the most important decision in the whole process, and the one that is easiest to get wrong. The location where you scan determines which link types SmartMapper can resolve.

The short rule
If your documents contain Document-ID or sharing-ID links, you must scan at the source location. If they do not, you may scan either at the source or at the target.

When in doubt, scan at the source – it is never the worse choice.

Why the source is the safe choice

A source scan sees the world exactly as the documents describe it:

• Relative links (..\Shared\Overview.pptx) resolve against the real source folder structure.
• Document-ID links (.../DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=PGTI-644-4324) can be looked up in the scan's own document inventory, because the scan and the IDs come from the same system.
• Sharing links and ordinary absolute links resolve normally.

A source scan also records both addresses for every key – the document's current location and its calculated future location – which means you can apply the repairs either before or after moving the content. See Repair before or after the migration.

When a target scan is acceptable

If the content has already been migrated and the source is no longer available, you can scan at the new location instead. SmartMapper recognizes that the documents already sit at their destination and handles them correctly.

Why ID links cannot work in a target scan: the link inside the document carries an identifier issued by the old system, but a scan of the new location can only see the new identifiers, which the migration reassigned. There is no way to connect the two. Those links are reported as IDMatchNotFound.

How to know whether you have ID links

You do not have to guess. Run SmartMapper and read the report:

• the link-type summary shows how many links were resolved as SharePointID / DocID;
• the unresolved summary shows IDMatchNotFound.

If those numbers are zero, a target scan costs you nothing. If they are significant, they represent exactly the links that only a source scan could have repaired. 

Note: If some DocID links are resolved while others remain unresolved, this indicates that the documents corresponding to the unresolved DocIDs were not included in the scan.

What not to do: scanning a staging copy

Copying documents to an intermediate “staging” folder and scanning there is not recommended. Relative links resolve against the staging folder structure, which your mapping rules do not describe, so they cannot be mapped. A staging location is neither the source nor the target, so neither stored address matches it. 

Summary