Visual Studio Team Services Import History

Question

We are looking to migrate Visual Studio Team Services from on premise TFS 2010. However we have a large amount of value in our checkin history and work item history. We are looking to migrate our local history to Visual Studio Team Services.

I have seen some older posts (which cause various issues like loss of actual dates) but can't find any clear answers for updated service.

Is it possible to import local TFS checkin/history etc into Visual Studio Team Services (formerly Visual Studio Online, Team Foundation Service)? If it is possible is there a guide anywhere?

Answer 1

UPDATE: There is a free migration utility for migrating data from TFS 2010+ on-premises (and other systems) to Visual Studio Team Services available from OpsHub: http://aka.ms/OpsHubVSOMigrationUtility. Microsoft has promoted this tool on the Visual Studio ALM blog and in other places. It's probably the path of least resistance.

Original Answer: The most official tool for this process is called the "TFS Integration Platform." You can find it at codeplex and the Visual Studio Gallery.

It's a very temperamental application (not very polished), but will get the job done. We recently migrated VCS, about 18000 Work Items, and 1000 Test Cases from TFS 2010 on-prem to Visual Studio Team Services. We had about four years of history, of which all migrated. It is true that you lose the checkin/change timestamp, but the change history include the original date in the comment.

Best suggestion is to practice the migration to a sandbox/temp Visual Studio Team Services account so that you can get the .xml configuration exactly they way you need it and then do it "for real."

Notice, the tool will create a rogue workspace on the machine you are doing it from (in some cases). If you do this from a development machine, you'll likely notice some of your mappings got lost when you go back into Visual Studio. Just keep an eye out for that.

Part of the download for the Integration Platform tool includes some guidance papers on how to plan, test, and execute the move. I'd suggest combining that documentation with blog posts for best real-world results.