Dropbox to Microsoft 365 Migration Action Plan for Enterprises

Planning and performing a Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migration at an enterprise scale involves a lot of complexities that can be challenging for IT teams inexperienced in migrations to navigate through. Therefore, it is crucial to have a well-informed action plan that sets the course for the entire migration project.

Having created Dropbox to Office 365 migration success stories for large-sized enterprises, we at CloudFuze, have the insights to streamline large-scale migrations. Here, we have shared insights-backed action plan that you can adopt for your enterprise organization’s migration strategy.

1. Choose a Migration Partner That Specializes in Dropbox to Microsoft 365 Migrations

The first priority to address before moving to the planning stage is to explore and finalize a migration solutions provider that specializes in Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migrations. At CloudFuze, we offer industry-leading solutions for migrations from Dropbox to OneDrive and from Dropbox to SharePoint Online.

We offer the most advanced functionalities in our Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migration tool while ensuring the highest level of security through SOC 2 Type 2 certification, ISO 27001 certification, and GDPR compliance (for UK and EU businesses).

2. Prepare a Proper SOW and Timeline for Faster Approvals

Analyze all the aspects of your organization’s Dropbox environment and prepare the scope of work (SOW) accordingly. Also, take into account your organization’s use case when preparing the SOW. For example, if your organization is planning to leave Dropbox altogether and consolidate everything into Microsoft 365, the best step to take is to move everything over and ensure accurate replication in OneDrive and SharePoint Online.

Similarly, analyze the SOW and prepare a proper migration timeline that aligns with your organization’s time-sensitive needs. By preparing a proper SOW and a realistic timeline, your IT team can streamline the process of getting faster approvals from the finance and legal team.

3. Ensure Proper Conversion of Dropbox Paper

Among the various types of files to migrate, it is important to focus on Dropbox Paper files as they are exclusive to the Dropbox storage platform and are not natively supported in OneDrive and SharePoint Online. Therefore, make sure to transfer Dropbox Paper files in the format that OneDrive and SharePoint Online support in order to avoid compatibility issues.

With our content migration tool, X-Change, you can migrate Dropbox Paper to OneDrive and SharePoint Online in the .DOCX format for seamless compatibility in the Microsoft 365 environment.

4. Plan the Migration of Dropbox Team Folders to SharePoint Online

Apart from migrating content from Dropbox to OneDrive in individual drives, also make sure to accurately transfer Dropbox Team folders to SharePoint Online. One strategic approach to take is to map the Dropbox Team folders to specific SharePoint Online sites. This way, you can preserve the access levels as per the permissions mapping.

Our Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migration tool preserves all three permission levels of Dropbox Team folders in SharePoint Online, including:

• Owner
• Edit
• View

5. Understand the Intricacies of Migration File Versions and Proceed Accordingly

When planning a Dropbox to Microsoft 365 migration at a large-scale enterprise level, it is crucial to understand the intricacies of migrating file versions. This has got to do with the specific property of Microsoft 365 API that leads to doubling of each file version. Here is a simple example demonstrated below:

Not only does the doubling of versions create the need for more storage space in Microsoft 365, but also build overage migration costs. Therefore, it is highly critical to perform a deep analysis and decide whether to migrate all or selective file versions.

6. Perform the Migration in Batches and Validate Them Post-Migration

The key to streamlining large-scale enterprise-grade migrations to ensure high performance and lower the risk of downtime is to segregate the total user accounts into batches. This way, it becomes simple for your IT team to create mappings for each user batch and validate them post-migration. In fact, this user migration strategy has worked wonders for all our enterprise customers till date.