Our purpose is to act as an intermediary between various web technologies that don't play nice together. We take your files from one place and copy them to another. No downloads and nothing to watch over—our web-hosted app does all the work!
Undertaking any corporate migration is a daunting task. When moving from Box to Office 365, there are many things to consider. Our team has done this enough times to have learned a thing or two. We hope this guide helps you migrate successfully from Box to Office 365.
If you experience any issues, please do not hesitate to ask us questions!
When we transfer a file, a temporary copy is downloaded from Box to a temporary server and then uploaded to Office 365. Upon successful upload, that file is deleted from the temporary server. When your migration is complete, that temporary server is destroyed. Any log data expires in 90 days and is never retained by us. We do not perform any actions beyond copying files and folders and sharing permissions. We never perform delete operations.
A migration is a significant undertaking for any organization. Trying to grasp the entire extent of all data and communicating with your employees is complicated. We sympathize!
Before, during, and after a migration, it will be of utmost importance to communicate clearly and effectively with your user base. We will provide timely support and communication materials to your transition team to help you communicate these changes with each stakeholder.
Management — Management will need good, succinct information about the how’s and why’s of the migration such as costs, benefits, and expectations. You will need to paint a clear picture of what a successful migration should look like. Granular information is important when running a department.
For example, the Sales Manager needs to know how operations will be affected, such as: can employees still work over the weekend if needed?
End Users — These are your bread and butter employees. They need to know when changes are taking place and who to go to with questions or issues.
Key questions to address:
Third Parties — If people outside your organization have access to collaborate on documents, this could potentially be interrupted and require re-sharing of data. We talk about best practices for this later in our guide.
IT Helpdesk/Support Staff — If your organization is large enough to have specific support staff for other employees, they will need to understand each step of the migration.
Planning is the hardest part of a migration. It is also one of the most critical phases to get right. To have a smooth and stress-free migration, you need to gather relevant organizational information, determine project timelines, and mitigate any surprises that may appear.
Prior to migrating, it is important to gather all the information you need to run the migration smoothly. Make sure you have confirmed the information from the checklist below.
Migration Information Checklist
To help with your planning, we offer a scanning feature. Our scan identifies how many users own data and how much there is to move.
This scan is effectively a simulated dry-run migration, with no set destination, which helps to identify any problematic files/folders before you begin migrating data.
Note: the scan is available in our Migration Manager once you have first set up a migration.
Keep reading through our guide to better understand the full migration process or skip ahead to Setting Up the Migration. For detailed instructions on how to run the scan, go to Scanning.
Each "user" is defined by a unique source and destination pairing.
For example:
These would be considered two separate "user licenses" because they have different destinations.
Migrations are run on a per-user basis. Because of our app's scalable infrastructure, it is feasible to run dozens of users or thousands simultaneously. Any number of users can be migrated in whatever pre-defined order or grouping you desire.
Collaborators-only: Your fiscal budget need only include users that own data in Box. Anyone that strictly engages as a collaborator in Box (i.e., they only share other users' content) will not have any data copied and therefore will not incur a fee.
Setting permissions is free. Users that strictly collaborate in Box will receive equivalent sharing permissions in Office 365 for free.
Data ownership needs to be considered. If a user has only shared data, and absolutely no owned data, we will transfer 0 files from Box to Office 365 for that particular individual.
Definitions:
Determining the distribution of data across the user base is an extremely important component of a migration because we copy data in a highly parallel manner, and our servers transfer data as fast as each cloud storage provider can handle. Both Box and Office 365 have rate limits for how fast data can be downloaded and uploaded.
The more users simultaneously being transferred, the higher our throughput for your migration. We highly recommend that users with very large data sets be broken into smaller accounts to facilitate faster transfers.
Note: To maximize throughput, users should not own > 5 TB of data. The more users you have and the smaller the amounts of data they own, the faster your migration will go.
For example:
If one user owns 10 TB of data, we recommend dividing that between 10 users so that each one owns 1 TB.
If data cannot be broken up, this should not hinder other users from migrating. But as a general rule, users with a lot of data require a lot of time to migrate.
Knowing the total volume of data you are moving helps to create a more realistic timeline for your migration.
Establish a migration team to lead your organization through the project. The team’s role includes liaising with us, undergoing training, and notifying employees of each change during the migration process.
An IT Manager or the Head of IT could be a good choice for our point of contact because they will understand the ins and outs of your organization's systems. To ensure a smooth, successful migration, we will work closely together and be with you every step of the way.
The amount of time required to plan, execute, and wrap up a migration depends on many factors. Organizational requirements, budget, security reviews, and support from management are just a few.
We typically see corporate transfers take a minimum of 30 days to plan and execute. Ensure you allot yourself enough time for each stage, which we cover later on in this guide.
It is critical that you plan which users are migrating and when. Ask yourself questions like these:
We recommend migrating during a slower organizational period, such as the weekend, to avoid work interruptions.
When migrating from Box to Office 365, you need to ensure all your users are active and accessible. Knowing exactly when your Box may shut down or expire is key to safely planning enough time to migrate.
We're the fastest way to migrate your data, but the speed of your migration may still be affected by bottlenecks. Speed bottlenecks include, but aren't limited to, the following:
What may be surprising is how large of an impact factors other than the size of the data you are moving can have.
For example, it is common for there to be half a second of overhead per file being moved. If you are moving 200,000 files, this would be 200,000 seconds or more than two days' worth of overhead alone!
Suffice to say, we cannot give you exact estimates on time because there are too many factors at play at any given point. By the time you have read this section we could have easily copied several files totalling many GB or a few hundred files equalling a small amount of data.
We are always happy to have a conversation with you about estimates.
Your employees have different needs with respect to their data, and it is paramount to know what those are. Take a shopping list of all departments, contact their managers, and identify key concerns in their processes and applications.
Keep in mind that while cloud storage is sometimes just a container for files, people might also be using it with third-party apps or for more advanced collaboration.
Subject: ATTENTION: Decision to Migrate from Box to Office 365
Message: A few months ago, management decided we will leaving Box and transition to Office 365. In Office 365, all employees will have access to cloud storage and its included apps.
We will manage the migration to ensure all of our data gets transferred securely and efficiently. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about the process.
Subject: ATTENTION: Important Information Regarding Cloud Data Migration
Message: As you know from prior emails, we are moving from Box to Office 365 as our cloud storage provider.
To assist in this migration, we ask all employees to finish working and upload any last changes to files in Box by 17:00 PT on Friday, April 7, 2020. Changes to files or data in Box after this time will not be moved.
On Monday, April 10, 2020, all employees will be using Office 365.
Questions and concerns can be directed to your immediate manager and/or our technical support staff via the usual channels.
