Free Ways to Migrate Dropbox to SharePoint Online Cost More

Free tools and services to migrate Dropbox to SharePoint Online end up costing more businesses in direct and indirect ways. Sure, they can seem alluring as part of the efforts to make the migration project as financially lightweight as possible. However, their limitations raise risks of disruptions that can be costly to fix.

Here are some of the complications of using free Dropbox to SharePoint Online migration tools and their business impact:

Impaired Data Governance Due to Lack of Support for Metadata Transfer

Free tools, such as Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), do not offer deep support for migrating user data along with metadata and inner level permissions. And when metadata is partially migrated or not migrated at all, the end-users cannot access their resources as they would in the source cloud. This significantly impacts efficiency at the individual employee and team level which, in turn, impairs organization-wide data governance.

As a result, the company-wide disruption in data accessibility can be costly in several ways, such as halt in ongoing operations, delay in deliverables, missed project timelines, loss of time-sensitive information, and more.

Loss in File/Resource Accessibility Due to Broken Links

Businesses almost always face the issue of broken links when migrating them in a straightforward way through free tools. This mainly has got to do with the address of the target files and resources in the links; they change when migrating from Dropbox to SharePoint Online, causing the links to break and no longer point to the original address.

Broken links can make almost all files and folders migrated to SharePoint Online and OneDrive corrupt as they are no longer interconnected to the other resources they point to. It can cost a lot for businesses to fix broken links with a manual approach of the IT team. Here is a table that explores the idea of how much it can cost to fix broken links manually:

Missing Out on Moving Dropbox Paper

Free migration tools and services do not support Dropbox Paper migration, mainly because of technical complications. And missing out on moving the entire Dropbox Paper files of all teams results in loss of critical business data.

With a manual approach to migrate Dropbox Paper files in formats that Microsoft 365 supports, it can take a lot of IT man-hours which translates to a significant cost to move all Dropbox Paper files. It is only through a proven migration tool like CloudFuze that it becomes effortless and time-efficient for IT teams to migrate their company’s entire Dropbox Paper files to Microsoft 365 in the .DOCX format.

The Need to Use Separate Services for Email and Chat Migration

When relying on a free tool to migrate user accounts and data, businesses anyways need to use separate paid services for migrating emails and messages from third-party services, such as Slack. And when using several services for a single project, not only does the cost go higher, but it also complicates security and legal compliances, which, in turn, creates friction in moving the project forward.

With CloudFuze as the migration partner, companies can avoid the risks associated with free tools and have all their migration needs met. Our migration team of experts have decades of experience in helping prestigious organizations, such as Michigan State University, migrate from Dropbox to SharePoint Online with complete success.