I have been using this tool for the last 5 plus years and have written on behalf of Metavis documentation around the best practices of migration including a lot of the content on my previous blog about Migration Domination.  I have co-presented with them at SharePoint events and really enjoy the partnership.

However, and I have made it clear to Peter and the support crew that sometimes I do not like their product.  This is usually something that has occurred that is either user error (mine) or just the tool frustrating me because it didn’t do what I expected it to do.  They calmly talk me off the ledge and explain “environments vary from one to the next”  That is the key with all of these products.  They are doing what they are supposed to do but the environment especially the tenancy in O365 are in constant flux and they are doing the best they can to stay up with it.

I am not going to lie, this is one of my favorite tools because it really has everything (ok almost everything) I need to be successful.  They are also really great about taking the feedback you provide and making the enhancement to the tool if they feel it would benefit the great community at large.  Matter of fact I just did this with them last week with regards to the Pre-Migration report for a File Share and how it was inconsistent about the way the report rendered based on the level inside the file share you run the report.  Now it actually provides the detail about the Folder Structure of the file share consistantly through the report regardless of the location you run it against.  This helps when you are trying to create tagging in a Term Store.

Now onto the evaluation.

• Long Term Use: I have clients that are using this tool to run reports even after the migration has long since completed.  Using all of the analytics it provides for security, content, term store, back up etc.  Just makes this an investment you can really get your ROI on.
• Pre-Migration Reports:  This report is pretty darn good, It allows you to customize the reporting criteria based on your individual environment.  It sets a basic level based on migrating to O365 but those are easily adjusted to evaluate on-prem to on-prem.  They are constantly adding to this report enhancements to give you all of the detail you need when it comes to the planning of your migration and doing a thorough assessment of your content.  The report provides details around features, templates, web parts, workflows, master pages, lists and libraries.  Highlights the areas you need to pay attention to using the signal light coloring Green (good to go), Yellow (evaluate and re-mediate the issues) and Red (STOP! we have an issues that really needs to be re-mediated before you do your migration.)  It is a simple process but one that is easily to follow and understand.
• Reporting: When it comes to the reporting, especially for O365 environments it really has it locked in.  Because the logging and ootb analytics are not enabled on O365 this tool does a good job of getting you information you need that is helpful.  It also has a graphical interface that is pretty sweet as well.  The reports can be ran for security at the site, library, item and user level, document types, check-out documents, size of the site collection or sub-site and the list goes on.  It really does help you manage your O365 environment.
• Limitations:  With all good things has to be some bad.  Ok, not really bad just annoying.  In using this tool I find that it has some inconsistencies.  I had a situation where we are trying to do a structure migration that included content types and site columns.  It just wouldn’t bring over everything, and every time we did the migration we got different results.  Now I know that environmental issues could have played a factor in this, but this is basic stuff and just didn’t work as well.  Occasionally it will not bring over the entire structure including sub-sites and lists and library columns.  Again this is where using the validation i spoke about in an earlier blog will help with that during the test migration.

Although I was not going to talk about cost and with Metavis they do not provide a pricing metrics.  The product is tied to how much data you want to move and they offer a variety of price points as well as products and options.