Connecting to Sharepoint Online in MOVEit Automation

One of the great new features included in MOVEit Automation 2020.1 is Sharepoint Online as a host type. Previously, it was only possible to connect to Sharepoint Online by writing a custom script and using it as a destination in a task. The downside in doing this (apart from the time required) is that it skewed figures in terms of showing how many files had been uploaded/downloaded (a process doesn’t count file transfers).

Like all new features added to Automation since 2017, the Sharepoint Online host is only available via the web GUI – one more reason to move to the web GUI if you have not yet already done so.

Adding a host is done the same way as for any other host type, simply click the add host and select the Sharepoint host type.

Most of the fields are self-explanatory, the only real choice you have to make is whether to use a user and password (as in the screenshot), or use the ‘App Access’ option, which may make more sense in a batch environment. If required, a detailed description of how to create credentials for App Access is given in the administrator guide. As you might expect, you can override credentials at the task level.

Finally, you need to select a document library. Don’t worry too much about setting different hosts for different libraries as you can override this setting at the task level.

Adding a Sharepoint Online host to a task works in just the same way as any other host type – you can browse to the folder you need, apply macros etc. The Host override just allows you to change credentials.

My assumption is that other errors would appear similarly. If not, it would perhaps require investigation from the Sharepoint side to debug any issue.

In case you wondered, downloading from Sharepoint works in much the same way:

EXCEPT…I can’t rename the downloaded file in the same way that I would normally do (to move a file into an archive folder for example, rename to archive/[origname])

Now for the downside: as far as I can see, there is no facility for interacting with metadata. It would have been nice to have a macro to interact with the metadata, either getting or setting based upon other parameters that you might have available in a task.

Apart from this, I found the process to interact with Sharepoint to be simple and straightforward to follow.

The HTTP Sharepoint Get/Put scripts for use with older on-premise Sharepoint installations are unaffected by this new host type.