Broken Quick Parts (metadata) after SharePoint migration

Have you ever migrated your documents to find the quick parts are actually broken?

When you store documents in SharePoint, the document parser promotes and demotes the metadata column values to and from SharePoint and the Word document.  These values are then able to be used within the document header, footer and body of the document.  

This auto-populates the metadata saving you from having to manually update the document contents with SharePoint metadata and the quick parts can be referenced multiple times throughout the document.  

When migrating your documents to another SharePoint farm or Online, what you will find is that the quick parts relating to the SharePoint metadata will be broken.    After uploading a document you may find that some of the metadata might have been added to SharePoint by the parser during the migration, but the quick parts themselves are actually broken even though they appear to work – this is an illusion as the quick part values are coming from the document, not SharePoint metadata.  

Anecdotal evidence is that Microsoft tell you to remove them before migrating (no official notice I can refer to but in the support forums this has been mentioned) which we all know is not feasible when you are migrating thousands of documents.  

So why is this so hard to fix?    The reason is that it is broken throughout your entire document.  

Reasons behind the broken quick parts

It is complicated and relates to the complex structure of the DOCX file and the numerous XML-type documents used to make up the DOCX. Word is unable to resolve the broken links to SharePoint.

Help is available

If you’re having this issue and would like some assistance, please reach out and we would be happy to help you resolve this issue.   We can very quickly fix your documents so that the promoted metadata works again.   We are bringing out a commercial solution to automate the process and fix broken documents; stay tuned for this.   Let us know if you would interested in trialling this utility.