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Migrated SharePoint Page Names Explained

This post goes into the naming scheme WikiTraccs applies to migrated pages.
By Heinrich Ulbricht |

SharePoint pages migrated by WikiTraccs all follow the same naming scheme. We’ll take a look at how those names look and why this scheme is applied.

How WikiTraccs names migrated pages

In contrast to Confluence, SharePoint pages are files and those files have a file name and a title. When migrating a Confluence page to SharePoint, WikiTraccs has to set both the file name and the title.

We’ll focus on the file name (also referred to as page name or just name).

The SharePoint page file name will be derived from

  • the Confluence space key (soon: space alias)
  • the Confluence page title, and
  • the Confluence page ID.

For a space key of HR, a title of Onboarding, and a page ID of 123456789, the SharePoint page name will be HR-Onboarding-123456789.aspx.

This scheme WikiTraccs applies is fixed and cannot be changed.

Why WikiTraccs names pages like it does

The naming scheme presented in the previous section is applied so that WikiTraccs can create SharePoint links between pages, without having to actually migrate all pages that link to each other. It can infer page names from page metadata.

Let’s look at an example of two pages (space key, page title, page ID):

  • HR, Onboarding, 123456789
  • IT, Welcome Package, 987654321

The HR Onboarding page links to the IT Welcome Package page.

Now you task WikiTraccs to migrate all Confluence pages of space HR to SharePoint.

When migrating the HR Onboarding page, WikiTraccs needs to transform the (Confluence) link to the IT Welcome Package page to a SharePoint link.

In general, SharePoint page links look like https://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/sites/<SITENAME>/SitePages/<PAGENAME>.

For each link to a Confluence page, attachment, or space, WikiTraccs needs to create the corresponding SharePoint link.

So, WikiTraccs has to figure out the SITENAME and PAGENAME parts of the each SharePoint link it creates.

For the PAGENAME part of the SharePoint link, WikiTraccs applies the naming scheme that is the focus of this post. It knows that the IT Welcome Package page, once migrated, will get the page name IT-Welcome Package-987654321.aspx.

The SITENAME part of the link is looked up in the Space Inventory.

Having both PAGENAME and SITENAME, the final SharePoint link might look like this:

https://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/sites/ITS/SitePages/IT-Welcome Package-987654321.aspx

How to name pages differently?

Currently there is no way to change the SharePoint page file names that WikiTraccs creates during the migration as it relies on those names to creates links between pages.

Can I rename pages later?

After finishing all migration tasks, you might choose to rename pages via PowerShell. Since I did not conduct large-scale tests in this direction, I cannot say how well SharePoint handles renamed pages and especially linking to those renamed pages from other pages and web parts.

One sample of a working rename operation can be found in the WikiTraccs discussions.

Wrap

In this post we looked at how SharePoint pages are being named by WikiTraccs and how the naming scheme looks. We also looked into how the naming helps to create links between pages.