It is primarily through a well-crafted strategy that it becomes possible for businesses to navigate through the technical complexities when planning a Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migration, especially at a large scale. The strategy must address all the core focus areas that shape the overall outlook of the migration project.
Here are some insights-backed strategies that you can adopt as a framework and reiterate it as per your organization’s specific Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migration needs.
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Choose the Right Dropbox to Microsoft 365 Migration Service Provider
The primary area to focus on is choosing the right migration partner. The migration functionalities and support capabilities of the migration service provider will play an integral role in determining the project’s success for your organization. When researching migration solutions, make sure that the service provider specializes in Dropbox to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online migrations.
Migration solution providers specializing in this migration combination, including CloudFuze, have decades of experience in strategizing and performing Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migrations securely and extensively. The highly advanced tool functionalities and process methodologies of such providers can enable your organization to plan the migration’s roadmap to meet all the desired outcomes post-migration, such as cost savings, etc.
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Prepare the Scope of Work as Per the Use Case
When planning the migration’s scope of work, many businesses do not delve deep enough to align it with their use case. As a result, they either overspend on the migration or do not fully achieve the expected migration results. To avoid this issue, make sure to first have complete clarity on your organization’s use case and align the scope of work accordingly.
For example, if your organization is planning to integrate user data with native apps of Microsoft 365, then it is important to preserve the sharing permissions of the files and folders from Drobox to OneDrive and SharePoint Online with 100% accuracy. And to do this, accurate conversion of the permissions (as per the user roles of Microsoft 365) is important.
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Segregate Individual and Shared Data for the Migration
Another important factor to consider is to segregate individual and shared data. The best practice to follow is to migrate shared data in Dropbox to SharePoint Online and individual (non-shared data) into OneDrive for Business.
This way, you can accurately replicate Dropbox team folders and the files within them in specific SharePoint Online sites and non-shared data of individual users in the My Files section of OneDrive. This content segregation approach also plays a critical role in avoiding security loopholes by keeping the file and folder access levels intact in OneDrive and SharePoint Online.
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Plan the Migration Timeline as Per the Use Case
It is equally important to plan the migration timeline as per the migration goals of your organization. For example, if your company is planning to leave Dropbox altogether and consolidate into Microsoft 365, it is crucial to plan the migration’s completion before the Dropbox license renewal period arrives.
In such time-sensitive use cases, it is critical to optimize the timeline and use it to monitor the migration’s progress. Make sure to add all the phases of the migration to the timeline, including pre-migration assessment, scope of work planning, user mapping and batch segregation, batch-wise one-time migration and validation, delta migration, and the final cutover phase.
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