Migrate SharePoint 2010 Term Store to SharePoint Online with PowerShell

Last week I worked with a customer on migrating one SharePoint 2010 site to a new SharePoint Online.

I can qualify the site as Knowledge Base designed for optimal discoverability of the documents that are uploaded. To achieve a good discoverability you will need some good metadata describing the resources. Many times the metadata that is used is actually managed metadata that needs to be migrated/recreated in SharePoint Online.

If you have 10 or 20 terms it will not be an issue to recreate them, but if you have 400 for example it will not be very practical to manually recreate all terms.

There are many powershell scripts out there to export/import terms, but the success rate and the complexity might vary. This is why I would like to share how I did it and it worked out pretty well for me.

For the purpose we are going use the custom cmdlets provided for free by Gary Lapointe.

For demonstration purposes I will export one term set group with one term set that has limited number of terms. You can check it out below, it also has some parent/child terms.

In order to export the term set group you will need to deploy the WSP that will add the custom SharePoint Server 2010 commands. By doing so you will add the additional 2010 commands directly to the Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell snap-in.

To export taxonomy object as xml we are going to use Export-SPTerms. You will need to supply some taxonomy object as input parameter, this will be a taxonomy session if you want to export everything, for more examples see the cmdlet help. You can see how the Legal term set group looks as  xml below.

As you can see all essential information that is needed is exported, even some that will be an issue if you are importing the terms to a different environment or SharePoint Online. This is the Owner or every attribute that represents on-prem identity that you might have. The import command will also try to set this properties with the same values and it will fail because the identity as it was exported cannot be found. The way to workaround this is just to set different value for Owner that will be a valid Online identity. Now it is up to you to decide if you want to do this tradeoff and migrate the objects with different Owner than the source. Below are two lines (3 to make it fit better) that will take the content of the exported XML and will set new Owner for each XML node where the Owner attribute is not empty and later the same XML object can be used for input of the import command.

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[xml]$termXML = Get-Content "C:\Legal.xml"
($termXML.SelectNodes("//*")) | Where {$_.Owner -ne $null} | `
ForEach-Object {$_.SetAttribute("Owner", "i:0#.f|membership|admin@MOD******.onmicrosoft.com")}

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To import the taxonomy objects in SPO you will need to download and install the SharePoint Online Custom Cmdlets. 

This will actually install a new module called  Lapointe.SharePointOnline.PowerShell.

The command that we are going to use for the import is Import-SPOTaxonomy. For InputFile parameter we are going to use the variable from the above lines after we have set all identity attributes. If you are importing an object that is not a top level term store you should specify ParentTermStore(can get it with Get-SPOTermStore), if not you should switch on the parameter "Tenant". Before all that, you should connect to a site in your target tenant using Connect-SPOSite. Below are the lines to import the Legal term set group.

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Connect-SPOSite -Url "https://mod******.sharepoint.com"
Import-SPOTaxonomy -InputFile $termXML -ParentTermStore (Get-SPOTermStore)

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And this is it. Our Legal term set group is recreated and available in the entire tenant. One nice thing is that the GUIDs will be copied as well.

I hope that this was helpful and big thanks to Gary Lapointe for writing this great tools! The same approach should work for SharePoint 2013, but I have not tested this.