How to: Move work items between team projects
I’ve written about this previously but it’s worth a re-mention.
It is not possible through the Work Item Object Model (API) or otherwise to move a work item between two team projects. The reason for this is that each team project maintains it’s own definition of work item types and they could be different.
The most basic option is to use Excel.
- Open up all the source work items in Excel,
- Copy the contents to a new workbook,
- Bind that workbook to the new team project
- Publish the new work items
- Set the state of the original work items to “Moved” or “Closed”
Obviously this is a very low-fidelity move (no links, attachments, history, etc) but it might be sufficient for you.
Simulating a work item move
Although it’s not possible to do a real move, you might be able to achieve a similar result. One technique for simulating a move is to COPY and then destroy the source work item or mark it as “Moved”.
Eric Lee’s Work Item Moving tool (Codename “Hemi”) is almost able to do just this. It doesn’t do the destroy, you’ll need to do that yourself using “tfpt.exe destroywi” included with the 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools.
Why is this worth a re-mention? Well the link off his blog post has been broken for some time and I just noticed that he’s uploaded the project to Codeplex.
http://www.codeplex.com/hemi/
If you need a tool like this, go and grab the latest changeset and try it for yourself.
Update: It looks like OnePulse have a tool that claims to do Work Item migrations as well: http://www.onepulse.com/products.aspx
