Screenshot of Alert Migration Utility

Here is the Alert Migrator in action, and here's how it works.

1. You choose your SQL Database instance at the top left, and add your sql credentials. (User must be a sysadmin, or have read access to all SQL databases on the server).

2. Then press Connect, the utility then goes to the backend, and gets a list of all databases that it recognizes as valid Sharepoint databases. It puts this list together, and then shows that list in the 'Select a source Sharepoint database'.

3. If you click on a database within the 'Source' list, it will populate the Data Grid below with all the Alerts that it found for that particular database.

4. You can select alerts you wish to migrate, and check off the Migrate selected Alerts only.

5. If you click Refresh, this will show all the potential Site Collections that can have alerts migrated to.

6. At this point it's up to you, the user, to make sure that the site collection that you are migrating to has the structure necessary to accept the alerts that you are migrating from. Sharepoint likes to add tokens to the URL and this sometimes confuses the issue (and it's likely the reason they decided to NOT bring alerts over, because of this confusion).

7. You can make an adjustment to the numer of tokens to strip from the Source, by changing the 'Number of Tokens to remove' text box in the upper center portion of the form. If you have a Site of /a/b/c in your database, and you want it to go to a site collection that looks like /d/b/c, then you put 1 in the number of tokens to remove box, and this will strip out the /a/ in the source site, and deposit it behind the /d/ in the destination site.

8. Select a destination site to move the alert's to, and then try the 'Test Migrate Alerts' button. This will tell you if any of the Alerts are going to have problems when you try and migrate them.

9. Once you are satisfied that all Alerts will be going the right place, then click the Live Migrate Alerts button, and watch the utility do it's work.

That's really all there is to it, comments on this app are welcome.

Alerts

I am a software developer working for a municipal government organization. We recently went through a re-organization here, and because of this numerous sharepoint sites and site collections had to be moved around and placed into different sharepoint directories.

The way that we accomplish this is by using the default export/import functionality of sharepoint. It was soon discovered that Alerts do not make the journey from source to destination, and we needed to create a way for those alerts to be moved over.

Because of this issue, I created what I call the 'Alert Migrator'. It is a 32bit/64bit windows application built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, in the language of C#.

I have a working copy of the application, and you are welcome to contact me about it's use. I plan on documenting it's creation here within this blog site. If you are interested in using it, or would like to see it have the ability to do something, let me know.

You can reach me at getref@hotmail.com, please put the title Alert Migrator in the title.

Thanks,
Jay