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I'm pretty new to the SharePoint world, apologies in advance. Our shop just lit up a new SP2010 farm, and we're in the planning stages for getting content from our existing not-SP intranet into SP. At this stage I'm investigating if it's possible at all, not if it's a great idea or not.

Being a linux fan (yes, I know, we're talking SP here), I'm envisioning writing up a script to do a wget (or curl if you like that) to vacuum the HTML from our existing site and (somehow) spew it into SP. Of course the devil is in the details; the HTML would have to be parsed to get to the real content, it would have to be deposited into some sort of web part, etc. but overall, that's what I'm thinking. Scrape the existing content, parse it, dump it into a new page on the SP box.

Is there anything that does something along these lines for SharePoint 2010, or does anybody have a "here is how we did it" suggestion?

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This is typically a case for a 3rd party migration tool. It isn't as simple as scraping web content and stuffing it into a SharePoint site. There's a lot of planning that needs to be done to set up an infrastructure to handle web publishing. Here is a link to some of the vendors that offer migration tools.

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  • Thanks, the links were useful. I'd rather pick up an existing tool instead of writing one up. No point in re-inventing the wheel.
    – Alan M
    Commented Feb 6, 2012 at 18:22
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Simply taking junk that was most likely dumped into the existing system and automatically dumping it into SharePoint isn't really adding much value to the project.

This is an ideal time to take a step back and look at your existing content and ask your stakeholders "How should it be structured". Odds are very good that you will be doing a lot of manual copy-paste anyway so coming up with the proper content types, master pages, page layouts and such now will make life much easier down the road. Not to mention, doing it right now will allow you to better leverage some of the more powerful SharePoint webparts, like the Content Query Web Part.

So, you can dump now and fix it later or spend the time now and do it right. Either way you are eventually going to go through this exercise and it is a lot easier to get it right starting out than it is to go back and try to redo everything once the system is live.

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  • Please note, I did state in my question I'm investigating if it's possible at all, not if it's a good idea. Trust me, I am the guy here who is telling folks that a wholesale content transfer is not a good idea. What I need to know is if it's posssible at all.
    – Alan M
    Commented Feb 6, 2012 at 18:11
  • As with all things SharePoint, anything is possible if you have enough money and time. That said, the only two vendors I can recommend in this area are AvePoint (avepoint.com) and Quest (quest.com/sharepoint) as both have pretty solid track records. You would probably need to contact them directly with the specifics of your migration though
    – Dave Wise
    Commented Feb 6, 2012 at 20:01

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