One of the questions I’ve frequently gotten from customers considering Visual Studio Online is “How do I migrate my on-premises TFS data to VS Online?”
Until now that’s been a tough one to answer. In general you’ve had to cobble together a solution by checking in the latest version of your source code, maybe using Excel to ferry across the latest version of most of your work item fields, etc. In short, I’ve generally told people – Use VS Online for new projects. The one exception is that, because Git is a distributed version control system, you can add a remote to VSO and push your whole repo, history and all, to VS Online. You still have to figure out what to do about work items though.
However, things have changed. We’ve partnered with OpsHub to create a solution. They’ve been in the business of building tools to migrate data from one system to another for quite a while now and have built some good technology for working with TFS.
Working with us, they have created a tool to migrate an on premises TFS project collection to VS Online. The tool will migrate:
- All version control information and history
- All work items and history
- All test cases and test results
They have provided a free version of the tool you can use: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/28a90a17-d00c-4660-b7ae-42d58315ccf2
The free version has some limitations that their paid version does not. For instance, it cannot migrate a project with a customized process template – so you either need to back out customizations or use the paid tool. You can learn more about the paid version here: http://www.opshub.com/main/index.php/products/oim
If you’ve been waiting to try out VS Online until you had some way to transfer your existing projects, I encourage you to give this a look.
Thanks,
Brian