Migrate a Non-English TFS Project Collection to DevOps

Question

I'm currenlty trying to migrate a TFS 2018 Project Collection to DevOps. I've tried using the TFSMigrator tool by Microsoft, but unfortunately the migration guide states

Azure Devops Services is English only - TFS supports multiple languages, however today, Azure Devops Services only supports English. If your collection uses the nonEnglish language, you can’t use the Import Service. This is also true if your TFS collection has been non-English in the past, and you have converted the language to English during a TFS upgrade

In fact, the validation fails telling me that the ProjectCollection cannot be imported since it has been non-English. Do you know if there is any other viable way to import the projects in the project collection to DevOps, maybe using a third party tool or something else?

EDIT:

I'm trying to migrate

Work Items/Sprints
Source and commits done with TFVC (we have a couple of GIT repository but they are much easier to migrate, it seems)

Migrating artifacts and release flows will be a really nice to have too because we have a couple of flows currently running but I'm trying to understand if I can simply stop them and restart on the new environment with minor losses

What are you trying to import? What features of TFS are you using? — jessehouwing, Feb 04 '19 at 20:43
Git, TFVC, Work Items, Builds, Releases, Test Cases, Test Results... Depending on the used features it may be easier or harder to use alternate methods. — jessehouwing, Feb 04 '19 at 20:58
Added the info you asked to the original question. Thank you — Daniele Francioni, Feb 04 '19 at 21:57

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 05 '19 at 18:30

At the moment there is no easy way to do this, to migrate TFVC there are a few tools that replay all changes from the source system to the destination system. There are limitations to this process and some information may get lost (original user credentials that made the checkin, the original date of the checkin, the checking ID).

There are tools that can migrate over Work Items. Again with similar constraints. Your work item IDs may change, some dates (changed date for example) may be set to the current date.

Git is indeed much easier to migrate. The distributed nature of Git allows you to create a local 'mirror' clone of the source system and then push it will all its fidelity to the target system.

Tools you can look into are:

OpsHub Integration Manager (paid solution) Work Items + Code
Azure DevOps Migration Tools Work Items
Import/Export Pipeline (built-in feature of TFS 2018 and Azure Devops) to export the Build or Release to json and import it again.

Releases and Builds (artifacts) are much harder since they again contain historical data.

Your options:

Bite the bullet and do this hard migration described above.
Create a new empty instance and use the convert to Git option to migrate your TFVC main branches to git and use git to migrate over with a reasonable amount of history and start with a clean slate.
Wait until non-english collections are supported.

Thank you. I suspected there is no easy way to migrate Artifacts. I think i'm going with OpsHub. Thanks again — Daniele Francioni, Feb 07 '19 at 11:41

Migrate a Non-English TFS Project Collection to DevOps

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