Often, when working in file shares, networked drives, or on their own workstations, users will create files with standard characters that happen to be unsupported within SharePoint. These characters present an issue when migrating into SharePoint or from one environment to another.  Rather than having to track down all of these characters pre-migration or strip them out of hundreds or thousands of files after a failed migration, the MetaVis suite of products includes and Invalid Character replacement option to pre-empt issues such as this.  The Invalid Characters section can be found within the Profile Manager and allows you to identify and add unsupported SharePoint characters and identify the character that will be used to replace the unsupported characters during import.  The Invalid Characters screen includes characters most commonly encountered during migrations.

Note: In additional to characters, SharePoint does not support a variety of file endings.  The ability to replace these is also included in Profile Manager.

Each of these invalid characters can have a supported character of your choice assigned rather than having a single character to replace every invalid character. This allows for better control over and recognition of your files should they have invalid characters.  Setting the character replacement is as easy as populating the “Replace With” field with the corresponding supported character.

You can add an invalid character to the list by clicking the “Add Invalid Character” button and filling out the fields in the resulting screen.

Once this has been setup, you can go ahead and perform your import/migration, and the unsupported characters will be replaced with the specified supported characters when uploaded into SharePoint.

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Rob Matthews has written 7 post on this blog.

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