The Bulk Upload tool allows you to migrate your content en masse from local or network file system directories to a SharePoint document library.  It can recreate folder structures for you as well as apply a default set of metadata to the documents.  You can optionally use this tool to update the metadata only for every item in a document library.  This page contains information about both Bulk Upload 1.1 for SharePoint 2003 and Bulk Upload 2007 for SharePoint 2007.  Items that only apply to the 2007 version are marked with a red asterisk (*).

The tool operates in two modes:  command-line and Windows application.  If you're not sure what the metadata should look like or how to create the Xml manifest for Bulk Uploader then just double-click the Bulk Upload executable and it will automatically start up as a Windows application.  Once you fill out the form you can click the Save button to create the Xml manifest to run it from the command-line.  You can then either:

• Run the process directly from the Windows application
• Start Bulk Upload again and pass it the path to the Xml manifest file
• Use the Xml file that was created as a template to create other manifest files to use with Bulk Upload

Here's a picture of Bulk Upload 1.1 for SharePoint 2003:

*Here's a picture of Bulk Upload 2007 for SharePoint 2007:

Once the application is started you have these options:

• You select the destination portal/site
• You select the destination document library
• It pulls all the metadata for that library and you can fill out default values for all documents
• You select the source directory on your local drive (or network-mapped drive)
• You can upload all files from the root, or from the root and all subdirectories
• You can have it recreate the folder structure from the local drive in the doc lib
• You can have it apply the default metadata values to all uploaded documents
• You can have it ONLY apply the default metadata values and NOT upload any new documents
• *You can use a separate set of credentials for connecting to the site and uploading documents and metadata
• *You can configure alternative characters to map to characters that are illegal in SharePoint

You can also run it from a command line if you pass it the path to an Xml file that contains a manifest with all the information to do all the above.  The manifest is mostly self-describing and looks like this for Bulk Upload 1.1:

*Bulk Upload 2007 looks the same, only  it adds an additional EncryptedData element directly below the Upload node.  This node is encrypted using new Xml encryption features of the .NET Framework. They are encrypted using a key for the current user, which means that they cannot be decrypted unless Bulk Upload 2007 is running as that same user.