Migrating between SharePoint and Box

Published in

Couchdrop

4 min readNov 30, 2020

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Both Box and SharePoint have their place in the enterprise content management arena. Sometimes it is a preference based on features or it is due to an option to save financially.

If you are looking to migrate your business from Box to SharePoint or from SharePoint to Box there are tools out there that can help, but there are some catches and features you should look for when searching for your migration tool — aside from its ability to support your platform and move teams.

The below list will be covered in more detail through this post.

Scan Functionality
Platform Security
Accessible Support
Error Handling
Reporting
Cost

Scan Functionality

sharepoint to box migration — Part of the scan output from a migration tools scan function

This is key when looking to migrate any size or number of users and shared data. When looking through specific platforms such as SharePoint and Box they use slightly different ways to calculate the data, one file may only be 0.2KBs different, however when you add this up, it can quickly increase to TBs. Additionally, when you have file versions and Google Docs these may not show up in your own investigation. Another reason to do the scan is to see what actually is going to be moved and to identify any errors before the transfer starts — for example SharePoint has a file path and name character limit of 400 characters.

Platform Security

Data is important, sensitive and not something you want in the hands of the wrong person. Also, sometimes there are geographic restrictions which means that data must remain within a country (data sovereignty). When working with data you should check where the company is hosted, see whether you can decide where your migration is run from and also speak to the team to get a feel of who is going to be processing your data. An example of a secure provider is Movebot who runs dedicated infrastructure for each individual migration, on completion of the migration the compute server is destroyed.

Accessible Support

move between box and sharepoint — Accessible **human** support is key to migrations and building trust with your migration tool

Moving data isn’t easy and often comes with its challenges, as per any technology environment, they are all different in one way or another. Due to this issues can occur and when they occur it’s best to know you can reach out and get assistance to help. Before migrating, reach out to the company and get a feel on how they respond, communicate and their response times.

Error Handling

migrating between box and sharepoint — Not everything goes right the first time, knowing what issues you may encounter will help

As mentioned earlier some platforms have different requirements or support an array of options; for example Google Drive supports duplicate files, SharePoint has character limitations and path lengths and Box depending on your subscription has file size limits. Look for a provider that resolves these automatically, or at least notifies you of these issues in a scan so that you know what to expect. Along with this, there should be detailed reports to inform you what went wrong and provide you the opportunity to re-run the failed files.

Reporting

transfer sharepoint and box — Reporting helps you understand your data, its structure and provides visibility

When dealing with data you want to know what is happening, how much is being moved, what was not moved, the file types and in depth logging to know what is happening in real time. It’s not good just starting a migration job but have no idea what is happening and whether any files are being transferred. Look for a tool that can provide you in depth information and doesn’t hide anything — especially rate limiting issues.

Cost

sharepoint and box migrations — Affordable and reasonably priced migrations could be a huge factor in your decision

There is always going to be a cost, whether it is your time waiting for data to sync between providers or monetary cost that you’ve invested into a third party tool to help you. There are free tools out there, but as most free tools, they have their limitations and support doesn’t exist. When it comes to cost some tools out there cost $1 per GB which is heavily overpriced, where as others are cost-effective and scale with your data. In the end you don’t want to be paying more to move your data than your yearly storage subscription cost.

From the above you can see there are some more ‘softer’ features or requirements that you should look for when identifying your desired migration tool. Movebot is a solid choice with a helpful team and encompasses all the features and skills you need to move your team between platforms, whether it’s SharePoint, Box, Dropbox or Google Drive.

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