I need to migrate approximately 20k documents from one SharePoint instance to another. These documents are broken up into about 6 content types in the source instance and will be going into 4 different content types in the new instance (some content types in the old system have been merged).
Does microsoft provide a way to migrate documents over to a new content type and a new instance and provide a way of mapping old columns to new columns? If not is there a third party tool that will do this?
I do not know of any specific methods Microsoft provides that handle this. If the existing content types exist in the new farm, perhaps you could first migrate the documents and then change the item's contenttype property with PowerShell or a custom application.
As for commercial products, I think Metalogix's Migration Manager for SharePoint can handle this as it provides the option to map content types from the old to the new locations (disclosure: the company I work for has a partnership with Metalogix). I have only ever performed migrations with Migration Manager where the content types remained unchanged so I can't provide any feedback right now as to whether this is possible. They do have a free trial if you're willing to fill their form with fake information (or real information if that's the sort way you browse the internet) and test it out.
We use Axceler ControlPoint which has a 'Çopy list items' option. If metadata information (columns) are not mapped from old to new a dropdown dialog will ask you to map the metadata colums of the old location to the colums on the new location.
We only use 2 custom content types, but whenever I move content to the production environment I always get the metadata catalog if colum names are missing or named differently.
ControlPoint is a commercial product that we also use for SharePoint management, maintenance and governance. If you contact Axceler: they are always willing to give online presentations or demos (and they do have trial licenses ;-) ).
