VSTS Sync Migration Tools

If you need to bulk edit and migrate data between Team Projects on both Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), try VSTS Sync Migration Tools. It's not the most user friendly tool to use, but it's VERY powerful and flexible.

What can you do with this tool?

• Assist in Bulk Editing of Work Items
• Migrate Work Items & Test Management from one Team Project to another
• Merge Team Projects
• Migrate Work Items & Test Management from one account or collection to another
• Assist in changing process templates

You can install this tool, by simply running Chocolatey command as such: choco install vsts-sync-migrator or download the latest release from GitHub and unzip. You can also obviously contribute to the tool: https://github.com/nkdAgility/vsts-sync-migration

A few tips on using the tool:

• You need to add the account that you use to Project Collection Services Accounts group using tfssecurity command
• You also need to add ReflectWorkItemID field to your source and destination. This field is technically not required, but since it is used to make sure that work items are not migrated more than once when you re-run the tool more than once, I find it very important to add. Add this field to the destination if you're syncing work items one way, and add this field to both source and destination if you're syncing bi-directionally. More information about server configuration for the tool, see http://vsts-bulk-editor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/server-configuration/
• This tool is based on processors where you can load a specific processor to do something you need:
  • Use WorkItemMigrationContext processor to migrate the tip revisions of the work items
  • Use WorkItemRevisionReplayMigrationContext processor to migrate the work items with history
  • Use WorkItemUpdate processor to bulk edit the work items
  • Use AttachementExportMigrationContext processor to export all work items attachments to the migration machine. This is used in partnership with the AttachmentImportMigrationContext
  • Use AttachementImportMigrationContext processor to import all work items attachments from the migration machine. This is used in partnership with the AttachementExportMigrationContext
  • Use LinkMigrationContext processor to migrate all the work item links, both between work items and external links.
  • Use WorkItemQueryMigrationContext processor to migrate all shared work item queries

This tool has a bunch of other processors dealing with test objects, Git links, teams, etc. as well as various field mapping options as I said this tool is very powerful. We'll cover those in one of the future posts.