Exporting and importing data

Meridian Project Portal supports exporting and importing workspaces, folders, documents, file attachments, and all of their related data. This can be useful to migrate data and documents from various sources to Meridian Project Portal or to reuse some or all of a workspace as a template for a new workspace. By default, export and import functions are accessible only to system administrators and workspace administrators and privileged workspace users, but rights can be granted to other workspace users, if necessary.

The Meridian Project Portal export and import commands read and write two types of files: metadata files and archive files. Metadata files contain workspace configuration information and object metadata: folder, document, link, and file properties. Metadata files do not contain the actual files attached to documents. Metadata files are in comma-separated values (CSV) format, are created by Meridian Project Portal, and are compatible with popular applications such as Microsoft® Office. The files that are attached to documents are stored in a compressed archive file in ZIP or TAR format. The metadata and archive files can be separate or the metadata file can be included in its corresponding archive file, such as when importing or exporting a complete workspace.

Data import and export can be simple as a small CSV file containing folder names. Or, it can be as complex as to include all workspace data: properties, user accounts, access groups, folder structures, documents, and file attachments stored in a large archive file.

Note    Depending on the performance of the network, importing or exporting large archives can cause the connection to the Meridian Project Portal server to time out and cause the operation to fail. When performing such an action, contact a system administrator to increase the timeout options on the Meridian Project Portal server or to perform the action directly on the server.

Note    The Meridian Project Portal export and import functions use the ISO 8859, Latin character set to ensure compatibility with Microsoft® Excel®.

Exporting and importing various amounts of data are described in the following topics.