How do I move Work Items from one organization to another

Question

We have a number of Work Items in a project. Now, there is another organization in our devops and we wish to move all our existing Work Items from the old organization (project) to the new one. How can this be done?

I've seen people discussing this before, and some comments saying "we use excel". But no information about how to actually do this.

Answer 1

There is no built-in solution for this. For Excel there is a trick that does a best-effort migration, you do loose some things.

• Create a Tree based query in Azure DevOps that has all the work items you want to migrate
• Open Excel
• Use the Team tab to pull in the work items you want to migrate
• Click New List and connect to the source organization
• Select the Work Item Query you created in the first step
• Click Choose Columns and add all columns

You now have the data you want to import in one excel file. Create a new excel file to push the data to the other account:

• Open Excel
• Use the Team tab to pull the work items
• Click New List and connect to the target organisation
• Select the Input List so you're not bound to a query
• Click Choose Columns and select all the same columns in the same order
• Click Add tree level and convert to parent child
• Repeat Add tree level to match the depth of the source excel
• Copy all the fields from source to target excel file
• CLEAR THE ID COLUMN ON THE TARGET EXCEL FILE
• Fix issues that appear (usernames, area paths, project name etc)
• Hit Publish to create the work items in the target organisation.

What gets lost

You will loose the following:

• HTML formatting
• Attachments
• Links other than Parent-Child
• Some dates will reset (Created, ...)
• Some process workflows may prevent creating work items in the correct state
• Custom board columns
• Revisions of the work item

Alternative

There are tools like Martin Hinshelwoods Migration Tools that can replay work item history from one account to another. It takes a bit of effort to update all the configurations, but it will do a much better job at copying your work items over.

See:

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nkdagility.vsts-sync-migration
• https://dev.azure.com/nkdagility/migration-tools/_wiki/wikis/docs?wikiVersion=GBmaster&pagePath=%2Fgetting%20started&pageId=5