Overcoming Limitations When Migrating to SharePoint Online
[ Overview]
Introduction
The path to migrating to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business is not straightforward as Microsoft has set several limitations in Microsoft 365. The limitations, in turn, create roadblocks for seamless business data migration.
This guide is designed to help businesses, and their IT teams, identify limitations in SharePoint Online (and even in OneDrive for Business) and set up solutions to overcome them.
1. Resolving Special Characters Unsupported in SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online does not support these special characters in file and folder names:
OneDrive for Business does not support these special characters in file and folder names:
When trying to migrate files and folders to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business that include these unsupported special characters, IT teams raise the risk of data transfer conflicts.
And since removing these unsupported characters from TBs or PBs of data manually is not feasible, businesses must rely on an automatic resolve solution.
CloudFuze’s migration tool has a built-in function to automatically replace these unsupported characters with a hyphen (-) or an underscore (_).
In this example of Box to OneDrive migration, CloudFuze’s migration tool offers the automatic character replacement option:
2. Resolving File and Folder Names Unsupported in SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business do not support these specific file and folder names:
File and folder names unsupported in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business
To overcome these naming limitations when migrating files and folders to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, businesses must ensure that the unsupported names are either removed or replaced.
CloudFuze’s migration tool identifies source cloud files and folders with these unsupported names and transfers them as _CON to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
3. Overcoming Long File Path Limitations
Microsoft does not support a total decoded file path of more than 400 characters in Microsoft 365. And since, in many cases, the total decoded file paths are very long, migrating files with long paths to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business becomes a major challenge.
Manually trimming long file paths is out of scope for businesses considering the fact that there will be a lot of files in the source cloud.
For this limitation, CloudFuze has a sophisticated function that identifies files with long paths, creates a folder called “Long File Folder” in the destination, and migrates the respective files to that folder.
This example of Google Drive to OneDrive migration illustrates how CloudFuze’s long file path resolve function works:
5. Converting Unsupported Files to Supported Formats
When migrating files to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, source cloud-specific files such as Google Docs and Sheets, Box Notes, and Dropbox Paper are not supported across Microsoft 365. Therefore, businesses need a solution that converts these proprietary documents to formats supported in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
With CloudFuze, businesses can migrate Google Docs and Sheets, Box Notes, and Dropbox Paper to SharePoint and OneDrive in .docx format.
6. Mitigating the Risk of Data Transfer Rate Throttling
Writing more data in the destination (SharePoint Online) in a short span of time increases the risk of throttling. API throttling, in turn, slows down the data transfer speed.
Businesses that need to migrate data to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business within a tight deadline must mitigate the risk of transfer rate throttling. CloudFuze helps Enterprises, MSPs, and SMBs lower the risk.
CloudFuze has a built-in function that automatically identifies when the usage of APIs is reaching a throttling point. And as a precautionary measure, it automatically slows down the data read/write process.
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