Movebot is a simple, fast and cost-effective way to migrate your users and data into SharePoint Online from other platforms such as Box, Dropbox Business, Google Workspace or on-premise file servers.
Prior to migrating into SharePoint from Box and during your planning phase, Movebot's free preflight scan is recommended. The scan is designed to identify how many users own data, its structure, permissions etc. as well it identifies if there are any flagged issues that need to be investigated. The scan is effectively a dry-run migration that doesn't move a single file. See here on how to run a preflight scan.
Migrating from Box to SharePoint Online
Step 1: Create a new migration
- Navigate to your Movebot Dashboard and click Create New Migration at the top of your screen
- Select the type of migration you are looking to do. Chances are with SharePoint your migration is going to involve multiple users and drives, in this case select Organization/Project Migration
Step 2: Name your Project
- Provide your project a name, then click Save and Continue
Step 3: Configure Box as your Source Platform
- Select Box from the drop down
- Enable As Team Admin
- Click Link Storage and login via the OAuth pop-up using the Box admin account and grant access to Couchdrop (Movebot)
- We recommend enabling Exclude Shared Content (this prevents duplicate content being migrated if it is shared across multiple users)
- Click Save and Continue
Step 4: Configure SharePoint as your Destination Platform
- Select SharePoint from the drop down
- Optionally enter your SharePoint Site URL this is not needed as you can select sites later
- Click Link Storage and login via the OAuth pop-up using the SharePoint admin account and allow access to Couchdrop (Movebot)
- Click Save and Continue
Step 5: Map your folders to SharePoint sites
- Select the means you would like to discover, map and configure your users, shared drives and folders
- When ready, click Continue
| Auto-discover users and drives | Movebot will automatically scan both the source and destination platforms and compare names, based on these names it will map users and shared drives between the source and destination. If it cannot find a mapping you will be able to manually map this later. |
| Import user and drive mapping from CSV file | Upload a CSV of your desired source and destination mappings providing you full autonomy to create many migrations with a single CSV upload, or enabling you to upload stages of migrations. |
| Add User/Drive Mapping | Manually map a user or shared drive between source and destination using Movebot's selector, you can map as many as required in this window. Additionally, you can drill down further into each user or drive by clicking on the hyperlink/name |
Step 6: Persist Permissions and Modtime
- Select whether you would like to preserve permissions based on:
- Individual Owned Shared Folders
- Individual Owned Shared Files
- Note: If your usernames or emails are not identical at both the source and destination, there is the option to manually input the users source and destination username or upload a csv file mapping these. Additionally, contact our team for assistance.
- If migrating from Box, we highly recommend downloading your collaboration report and using this to map permissions.
- Enable or Disable the preservation of modified time
- Enable or Disable the migration of file versions
- Select Save and Continue
Step 7: File Settings
- You can now choose to include/exclude files within the migration, or use REGEX to filter further. By default Movebot will attempt to migrate all files.
- You can also tweak additional settings as below:
| Filename Sanitization | Some providers such as OneDrive don't allow certain characters in file names, we will make amendments so that all your files make it across. |
| Doctype Conversion | Google file types such as .gdoc, .gsheet and .gslide aren't readable from other providers, we will automagically convert the files to .docx, .xlsx and .pptx during the migration. |
| Duplicate Sanitization | Google Drive allows multiple files and folders with the same name, with this enabled and if there are two or more files with the same name, we only move the most recently updated file. |
We recommend leaving the above as default to ensure you migration performs optimally.
- Click Save and Continue when you are ready
Step 8: Migration Settings
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You can configure additional migration settings here to further optimize or tweak your migration
- Click Save and Continue
| Delta Enabled | Only move files that have been modified since the last migration |
| Worker Nodes | Improve performance by adding extra Movebots (computes) to process your data |
| Post Upload Check | When enabled, on completion of the migration we will run through and check that the files made it across. Some providers take time to process the files and having this enabled can make it seem that files have not been transferred and cause the migration to fail. |
| Enable Checksum Verification | When enabled, Movebot will check the hash on the source and destination file to ensure the file integrity has not changed. |
| Worker Threads | We highly recommend not touching this unless you know what you are doing. This is set to the best for your cloud provider by default. |
| Worker Region | Choose the region for your migration to run from to maintain data sovereignty governance. |
| Worker Affinity Tag | This feature is only used if the team at Movebot provide you a tag. |
Managing your Migration
- You are now taken to your migration dashboard where you can:
| Start/Stop your migrations | You can either select all your migrations and run them or select specific ones and run them one by one. |
| Run a Discovery Scan | This will scan your source platform and see what issues we will attempt to resolve, how much data and other information displayed in our analytics. |
| Rerun failures | Sometimes not all files make it across on the first go due to numerous reasons. You can select migrations that have errors and choose to rerun only the files that have failed. |
| Delete | You can delete your migrations |
| Copy and Edit (Clone) | If you hover over a migration and click the ellipse menu on the right handside you can clone the migration to then edit the source and destination folder/user/drive |
| Add more users/drives | On the top right when under a project you can add more users via any of the three means previously described. |
| Alter the projects settings or individual migration | You can alter the overall project settings. Each migration will inherit the projects settings. However, you can modify the settings on per a migration basis (i.e. disable file conversion, add more compute, etc.) |
| Overview/Logs | See the real-time logs for the migration, errors, graphs and analytics. |
Click below to go back to Movebot and Get Started
Should you have any issues or questions, please do not hesitate to email support@movebot.io
Movebot SharePoint Online Migration FAQ
How is SharePoint different compared to other providers?
SharePoint Online is the centralized space for businesses to store content, whereas OneDrive is a users personal space. With SharePoint the organization owns the data within it, rather than the individual users ensuring easy collaboration where those with the correct permissions can access data.
SharePoint unsupported characters, path names and quirks
Movebot automatically sanitises file and folder names to ensure they comply with SharePoint's standards. SharePoint states what they support in their knowledge base article here. Movebot identifies these as part of its scan and on completion these can be found under the flagged issues tab. Movebot automatically sanitizes character and file name issues during the migration, however does not rectify paths that are too long as this can have a drastic effect on the data structure.
SharePoint also has strict rate limiting that can be bypassed by adding additional connectors. This enables Movebot to load-balance your migration across multiple admin accounts.
Does Movebot sync files or support delta migrations?
Movebot offers a source-to-destination delta - when you run a transfer, we compare the destination files to the source and only transfer new or modified files. After the migration has started we strongly recommend not altering your data structure (moving folders or files) or renaming files or folders until after the migration. Doing either of these could cause duplicate files and folders depending the hierarchy and where the item was edited.
We compare the timestamps of the files in both the source and destination and transfer the newest versions only. This can be turned on under your migration's global settings.
Does Movebot delete files?
We do not delete your data from any source. Think of our operations as a "copy and paste".
What happens to external Sharing links?
Movebot does not recreate external sharing links. These will have to be set in the destination post migration. Additionally, we do not re-share links with external collaborators.
Does Movebot preserve file versions?
Yes, this is an option within Movebot to migrate all or some of the file versions related to a specific file. By default we only move the most modified file.
Does Movebot notify users?
By default this is disabled, however this is a setting within the migration global settings. We do however recommend erring on the side of caution as migrations are a behavioural change and excessive emails can cause distress with users.