Create a new PowerShell Command to use the Export metadata feature
Some users would need to be able to generate the Excel Spreadsheet for their metadata using PowerShell. When automating a complex migration, having an export for all the lists with a foreach loop would be a powerful way to take full control of the data during the migration project.

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Maxime Ouellet commented
Is there any way to generate that Excel file using powershell?
If there is a way to use TreeSize Pro export csv and refactoring with a custom script powershell to a compatible format that is used by ShareGate Import-Document Method, it will made ShareGate a great tool and very usefull
just understanding what is the csv format column that is used, will be awesome
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Kinga commented
I had the same requirement and with help from Nicholas from ShareGate Support team, I managed to automate it: I exported SP lists to Excel, made transformations and imported them, all with one press of a button =)
In case someone is interested: https://dev.to/kkazala/sharepoint-migration-with-sharegate-powershell-4h19
I'm heavily quoting Nicholas -
troy.hostetter commented
We have some 12,000 migrations where we want to change the target location and assign metadata. If we could script the Export, we could then script adding metadata columns as well as perform other metadata massaging. As it stands, we'd need to manually click this command.
This would save time and energy!
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Jim Duncan commented
No need for a new cmdlet, just give us a -SkipContentDownload switch parameter for the Export-List cmdlet.
Consider: Our hourly rate to the customer is $185 and it takes even me (an old hand at this) at least 15 minutes to manually generate each Export file. With 500 libraries to export, that equates to over 125 hours of labor at a customer cost of $23,125 – a sum that effectively kills the cost/benefit of going with ShareGate vs. the competitor.
However, if the Export-List cmdlet didn’t have to export the terabytes of content to a file system (which the customer has no room for), then I could generate all 500 export files with simply a list of libraries and about 15 minutes worth of PowerShell.
Hopefully, the IMMENSE difference this would make for such large migrations is now clear and perhaps a conversation could be started internally there at ShareGate (Gsoft) to at least consider it…
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DorjeM commented
I Agree with Victor on this.
To try and help the product team understand here is my use case, and the response I've had from the support team.
Could you please log a feature request with the product team for the following use case:
As a digital workplace manager I need to be able to migrate 200,000 files (300gb) of data from a file share to multiple different team SharePoint sites. To do this I first need to export the metadata for that file share as a master list of content that needs moving. I then need to match that to the business rules I've agreed with the content owners e.g. files with last accessed dates older than 2 years will be archived. I then need to use the mapping file the content owners have given me to build an EXCEL formula that indicates where each file / folder will go: to the archive OR to one of the X number of team SharePoint sites. Because that process takes days or weeks I then need to export the metadata just prior to migration (to pick up any new files or changes, run business and mapping rules, split the spreadsheet into one per destination site, then do the actual import using the spreadsheets.
Without the ability to create the spreadsheet using PowerShell large file migrations are very staff time intensive.
If it were possible to export the correctly formatted ShareGate metadata file then massive file share moves would be much more achievable, and your customers would be happier 🙂I tried doing this with the existing function, each time I exported the metadata for a 202,000 file 300Gb file share I got a different number of items in the exported spreadsheet. Sometimes 97,000 sometimes 121,000. When I contacted support their answer after checking some aspects of the setup was "just export metadata from items with fewer things in them". Hence I'm posting this here in the hope that the product team see it.
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Anonymous commented
I know that I can import from a file share with an Excel file using powershell. Is there any way to generate that Excel file using powershell? I don't see a cmdlet for it.
If I generated it manually, what are the minimum required columns?
Thanks,
Lance -
Anonymous commented
I am working on this One Drive for Business migration from O365 tenant to 0365 tenant and since i have around 1000 odd users i have chose to user PowerShell as a migration method. In this specific scenario i will be only migratiing one specific folder from each user and i manage to write a script to automate that part. But problem comes when im going to Export Metadata from those one drive accounts. I have read that we can attach Import metadata excel by additional parameter when we use Copy-Content command in powershell but i haven't found any refernece regarding Exporting metadata.
Please help me on this. If you can direct me how to do it in powershell or automate that part without going each and every user manually it will be great. Hope you will get back to me as soon as possible.
Thanks,
Tharindu L -
[Deleted User] commented
Definitely would suggest this as a feature - it is needed for some integrations we are doing, and currently have to perform this manually as opposed to all the other steps which can be automated through PowerShell
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Mike Hatheway commented
This is working. Use the Export-Report PS command.
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Andreas S. ADVIS commented
We would need this feature! We are migrationg thousands of SPWebs addressing single Lists. therefore we get several tousands of entries in the Tasks List of SG-UI.
No way to export the results manually to Excel by Clicking hunderts of Pages in the UI....!!
==> So: how can I get the results of all Tasks in a comfortable way -
Jimmy commented
I would really need this to! As Patrick I will need to genereate 500+ files for the business to analyze and set destinations and metadata for Before actually migrating.
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Patrick commented
I need to generate over 500 Excel spreadsheets and then hand them over to the business to fill out before performing the actual file share migrations into Office 365. Ideally there would be an API for me to call to automate this.
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The export to excel feature is available in the “Bulk edit” screen. I’d like to automate this through powershell as in have the powershell script export all the items in a list to excel (meta data of course, not the actual files).