Timely Migration communicates to TFS servers using the Microsoft TFS Object Model and works with TFVC based Team Projects. The TFS Object Model handles version compatibility for 2008 through 2020 on-premise TFS / Azure DevOps Servers as well as Microsoft's hosted Azure DevOps offering.
During the migration process, Timely Migration will group individual file revisions into TFS changesets. This brings one of the benefits of TFS to the existing source tree as changesets provide a more coherent view of the changes that occurred and what they were related to. Having changes grouped into changesets is especially useful when looking at source history to research issues in the current product.
Timely Migration can either migrate an entire project, including all branches, labels, and folders, or pick and choose what is migrated through folder mappings and label filters. This provides the ability to prune the source tree and omit content such as large binary files that may have been checked into the source tree or dead projects that never got off the ground.
When two related branches are selected for migration, Timely Migration will preserve the branch relationship between the items in those two branches in TFS. This allows users to make use of the built in merging capabilities of TFS when merging changes for files and folders.
Timely Migration provides the ability to augment the names of the labels it is migrating. When running multiple pre-production test runs to determine what you may want to selectively migrate, this allows labels to be uniquely prefixed so that the results from each test run do not get mixed together. Similarly if multiple small projects are being migrated to the same TFS project, prefixes can be used to prevent files from the different projects from mixing together.
Timely Migration provides the ability to map users in the origin source control system to users in the TFS domain. Users that are no longer active in the TFS domain can be mapped to local read only audit accounts.
Timely Migration has an option to locally cache files that are being migrated. When running multiple preproduction test runs to determine what you may want to selectively migrate, file caching can improve the performance of subsequent migrations, especially when the origin source control system is remote. Additionally if the origin source control system is corrupt and certain revisions fail to be retrieved, the file cache can be manually updated with the correct version if the file revisions are available from some other location.
The evaluation edition of Timely Migration does not restrict a migration to an arbitrary number of files or changesets. Restricting an evaluation edition in that way often makes it hard to gauge what exactly the final output will look like or how successful a migration will be because there is a lot of history outside of a limited subset of files. Instead Timely Migration takes the approach that all file revisions will be migrated, including changeset creation, comments, branch relationships and labels, while replacing the content of each file revision with the version information for the revision. With this approach the user can see what the final output will look like and feel confident that when a purchase is made, Timely Migration will meet their needs.