How to Migrate To Office 365 (Microsoft 365): Box Migration in Three Steps

1-2-3-Migrate to Microsoft 365

Box has found a growing niche with advanced features fine-tuned for business users. However, it would be hard-pressed to beat Microsoft as far as popularity goes. We have all cut our professional teeth on the workbench of the Office (rebranded as Microsoft 365). A Box to Office 365 migration may be a homecoming of sorts, but as with all migrations, it can take a couple of slips to turn on its head. Here are three steps for a Box Migrayion with pointers to smoothen your move as you migrate from Box to Office 365 (Microsoft 365).

Stage 1: Plan Your Box to Microsoft 365 (Office 365) Migration

A well-planned migration from Box to Office 365 will help you identify red flags and tailor the migration to your specific needs. Your first stage to migrate to Office 365 is a thorough plan after analyzing your current state in terms of data, data types, and workflows.

Recce Your Current State: Collate an inventory of your organization’s data, file types, permissions, and metadata. Use a third-party tool if required.
Map Data Workflows: Tabulate the ways the data is being shared. Box has its own set of permissioning such as one owner-multiple contributors, one owner-Box group, Box folders shared externally, co-admin folders. Map them to the access permissions available in OneDrive. The workflows should also adhere to the business logic and fields in Office 365 and OneDrive. (More info: Switch to OneDrive from Box)
Scope Your Move: Plan and document the extent of the Box migration, type of migration, phases of the migration, and migration timeline. Ensure that migration and network performance considerations are met.
Chalk Out an Effective Communication Plan – For a successful adoption of Microsoft 365 (Office 365) org-wide you need the four pillars of stakeholder buy-in, champions, helpdesk assistance and end user support. Chalk out clear expectations of the benefits, business impact to departments/stakeholders, and defined timeline. Develop a plan for sending out the communications.

Stage 2: Lay The Groundwork For the Box to Office 365 Migration

The next stage in your Box migration is to prep the ground work as you migrate to Office 365.

Clean-up Your Data: There’s no better time to clean out the junk than moving time! Clean up or remediate blocked file extensions, invalid/long file names, archived files, etc.
Pre-provision Users: Before you migrate your Box content, you must synchronize your Active directory to Microsoft 365 and then pre-provision your users in OneDrive.
Nurture Champions and Prepare Training: Create training videos and tutorials on the benefits of Microsoft and OneDrive. Nurture champions who can evangelize the new collaborative mechanisms and department/workflow-specific tips and tricks. Train your helpdesk with FAQs and troubleshooting information.
Explore tools and vendors: FastTrack, a Microsoft service (included in your subscription cost) offers helpful onboarding and adoption pointers. Specifically, it also provides Data Migration services for Office 365 tenants with 500 or more licenses. For more complex Box migrations, explore a third-party Migration vendor.

Stage 3: Ready, Get Set, Migrate from Box to Office 365

Finally, mitigate your risks by securing Box migration with a backup solution, pilot, and a feedback mechanism as you migrate to Office 365

Secure the Box Migration: Secure your Box to Microsoft 365 migration by protecting it from data loss. This is an important aspect both from the regulatory point of view as well as to mitigate risks. Zone in on a comprehensive backup and recovery tool that will protect your data in Box as well as your data in Microsoft 365.
Perform a Pilot Migration: Soft-launch your Box to Microsoft 365 migration with an incremental migration on a subset of users that minimizes user impact.
Loop Feedback: Loop back the feedback from the pilot migration to tweak your overall migration timeline and communication plan.
Complete the Box Migration: Adopt an incremental migration for the remainder of the accounts and data. Microsoft recommends a single cut-over event for all users to switch to OneDrive and disable their Box accounts.

Mitigate Data Loss Risks with Office 365 AND Box Backup and Recovery

All the best for a smooth transition migrating from Box to Microsoft 365. Mitigate the risk of data loss from either Box or Office 365 when migrating your data with one easy cloud-based solution that protects both Box and Office 365 data. Secure the Box migration with CloudAlly’s top-rated Box backup AND Microsoft 365 backup trusted by 20,000+ customers.