Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
In this Podcast, Migrating from Box to OneDrive, we discuss…
Transcript
| Danny Ryan: | Welcome to the Work Together Better podcast. This is your host Danny Ryan. I’m here with my cohost Tommy Ryan. How are you doing Tommy? |
| Tommy Ryan: | I’m doing well. It’s been good crop at Iron Mountain Organics lately.
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| Danny Ryan: | How’s the chard?
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s good.
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| Danny Ryan: | You had your second weekend in the-
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, second weekend and educating a lot of people on what good food is like.
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| Danny Ryan: | Did you have more sales the second weekend or the first weekend?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Actually the first weekend, believe it or not.
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| Danny Ryan: | It had to do with the beer Tommy.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Whenever you’re serving beer to a lot of family members.
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| Danny Ryan: | Family members buying too, that helps as well. Yeah, you’ll see some correlation between people buying alcohol and more sales, that’s why people do that.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yes, maybe we should sell alcohol and good vegetables.
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| Danny Ryan: | And chard. Hey that could work. Today onto the fun stuff. That was fun stuff, but the Box to OneDrive Migration, so Tommy and I are continuing on in our discussions about moving from different platforms to Microsoft 365. We’ve had several conversations about this, for a couple weeks we focused in on social platforms, we talked about workplace by Facebook. Also social platforms like that and making the move over, along with Slack. Now we’re into a new one here, what Gartner would call was it content, was it content collaboration? I’ll have to look it up here. Gartner calls it… I’m pulling up the report here. Content Collaboration Platform, CCP. It used to be called Enterprise File Storage and something, but we’re talking here primarily about document management and about storing content. The one that we’re starting off with here is going to be Box in talking about Box and we’re also going to get to Dropbox as well in an upcoming podcast.
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| We’re looking at this primarily from the standpoint of migrating from Box over into… we didn’t say Microsoft 365, this primarily is contents going over into OneDrive, is that right?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Well what’s interesting to me is I think Box is kind of the combination of OneDrive and SharePoint teams maybe because I think there are shared folders for collaboration that are not someone’s personal folder that they’re sharing out, but a team that is sharing a common set of files. I mean similar to Dropbox, you have these shared files, you have an administrator that’s setting that up, but it’s really not Tommy’s box, but it is a box location for a team or a project.
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| I think the easiest way to think about it is OneDrive, just because of the amount of functionality that has been traditional with Box, which has been more of a file synchronization technology that in the more recent years getting into more the collaboration side that you see in teams working on files. With all things they’re not a direct mapping, but I think in its early days it was more like a OneDrive because of the synchronization technology, but I think they’re trying to position it more of team collaboration around files, which is not really OneDrive. OneDrive is one way to do it if you’re owning a personal file, but if you’re doing it as a team that’s usually a team side or a SharePoint side.
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| Danny Ryan: | Is SharePoint on the back end?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. It was interesting as we were looking at this as well, how Box is broadening out their story as well with some of the stuff with workflow and collaboration, some of their note taking.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Their note taking yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | Functionality, which it was sort of like they’re positioned right now to, as a best of breed type of solution that fits very well into Microsoft 365 and then they’re also taking the position as far as they also have more than just the document storage piece of this as well.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, they have a strong emphasis around putting Box and Microsoft 365 together that that’s a better solution working together, and I think Box in its early days just had a very strong competitive advantage for being a very purpose built file collaboration to ’04 cloud based files storage. The synchronization and technology that SharePoint had back in those days it had something to be desired and then that’s Box kind of got in that space and same with Dropbox. Now as people are looking at, “Well I have a lot of these capabilities over on the Microsoft 365 side, do I need Box to continue the type of collaboration I do and try to integrate it with Microsoft 365 or do I just bring it over?” I think that’s the challenges that people are facing.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, in prepping for this we were trying to sort a lot of the stuff we look at, we’ve done so many of the Jive migrations and is it a similar or how is this similar to that story, which is there’s… some of this is why have two systems that do very similar types of use cases and the overlap. I think the issues that we’ve seen with customers has been if you have multiple places where, for instance, you’re storing documents, you run into the same reason why we did lots of integrations very early on with SharePoint, which was the search problem, the where do I share it problem, the security problem. Those sort of all come into play for us now when you have two different places where you’re putting, in this case, documents and what would be addressed if we were storing them just in Microsoft 365.
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| You really have to share what’s the value in having it outside, what does that present because it looks like and there’s probably some use cases for Box maybe on the security side of things or some maybe the ease of use that give it an edge over OneDrive, but is it really so much that you want to have a totally similar solution, a similar thing that is already provided to you within Microsoft 365?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, especially when you’re looking at the price comparison. You really look at what you get in their entry level business versus closer to enterprise. You’re comparing to the same pricing of licensing and Microsoft 365. They’re the E3 of Microsoft 365 being list at 20 and then they’re kind of midstream business enterprise version is 25 and even goes up from there. That’s interesting to see something that’s just file sharing that only has a more recent workflow component and a more recent collaborative document collaboration capability. You kind of say, “Wow, they’re a little bit behind in some of those other technologies but their pricing is not behind. Their pricing is lock step or maybe you could even say more expensive than Microsoft 365.”
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| Danny Ryan: | Well because you get so many other things in Microsoft 365 as well.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right.
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| Danny Ryan: | It’s more than just you’re storing the content piece of this or document piece of this, so there’s a lot more to Microsoft 365.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, yeah, just let alone the web content management that you’re trying to create and enterprise portal or area to do collaboration, well what does that home for Box except for file locations or these notes? To have a cohesive story Microsoft 365 has such a strong foundation there to be that one stop shop for collaboration versus having to piece together things. They talk about the integration and it’s an enhanced solution when you integrate those two together. We all know the integrations are going to have some unnatural feel to it, there’s going to be some jarring experience when you go natively in one of those platforms and then get linked over to the other platform and it’s different. As much as you try to “brand” it and centralize the theming of it, it’s going to have different UI behaviors that you’re going to like one or the other, and then, like you were saying before, “Well now where do I put things? If I like Box do I put in Box, or is there organizational strategy to say these things are in Box, these things are in SharePoint?”
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| Danny Ryan: | Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the best of breed idea of the let’s use the best tool. I see a lot of benefits to that, but there are also so many. For some of the organizations it moves beyond just the features and functionalities of the different platforms as well. I think a lot of our customers will keep other products around just to keep the vendors honest when pricing comes around. I mean we got a little bit into this and we were talking about G-Suite Microsoft 365, link that up Austin, but especially when you talk about larger organizations or maybe… What’s interesting about this is we’re talking about documents, primarily about documents here, and so with that it’s not like it’s an application or something that is very unique like line of business type. I’m sure you can build some solutions out of this and they have metadata and are adding workflow and those types of things, but is this primarily document and probably the metadata associated to it, that document.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, very purpose built and infused… Think about what we do with Dropbox, we have a certain set of information we have in Dropbox because it’s just simple purpose built, it does the trick, and why change that unless you have some security concerns, unless you have price concerns of you’re paying too much money to have that extra system. You’re always going to find some diversity. The neat thing about the cloud is that there is lightweight integration to be able to connect from one system to the other, but it’s not going to be a seamless, simple experience. It’s going to have some clunkyness to it.
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| Danny Ryan: | I would argue that Microsoft wouldn’t be a seamless experience sometimes inside their own tools. Because they [crosstalk 00:11:58].
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, it’s hard enough to do it when you own both the tools.
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| Danny Ryan: | Different teams yeah, so that is… You would think that that’s the overwhelming reason is the integration within the same company, but it’s difficult. We’re talking about software ladies and gentleman and that’s difficult to do. You’d have different product teams that are developing, even with the new Microsoft it’s sometimes difficult for them to get their integrations in between products right, but you would think that you have a better chance with that.
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| The next part of the conversation where I wanted to go with this was if somebody is listening to this and they’re looking at making the move, and we did a little bit of research just to hopefully to help folks out with this as they’re looking at moving from Box over to Microsoft 365. What are some of the options that are out there, and I think we ran into I’ll call it three big ones. One is is that one of the things that is out there that if you meet a certain criteria, like a certain number of accounts, what Microsoft would consider for a program that they call FastTrack and so FastTrack is Microsoft providing some services, a very sort of like a cafeteria offering. They’ll do this and exactly that and you can use that in order to do things. One benefit of FastTrack is data migration and Microsoft calls out on their website link to this, I’ll show you where the link is. Calls out on their website what are the data migration offerings, and one of those offerings is migrating from Box over to Microsoft 365.
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| That’s probably, if you’re using the FastTrack program, I would say take a look at what’s available. They’ll show you what can move, what they can’t move. We also want to point out with that is engage Microsoft for that, we have actually, ThreeWill helped out with those sort of as a… Because it’s not going to do everything, we come in and help customers who utilize FastTrack services to do everything from the communications piece of this to sort of all the different… because it’s usually one facet of a larger migration or some people will call this a digital transformation or how people need to move. That’s sort of one area, I just want to point that out that if you are using FastTrack services that you’ll want to take a look at that.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, and I think depending on the characteristics of your environment, if you have things that fall well within those guidelines, that there’s only a few things that you have to handle, you really should consider FastTrack. Then sometimes there’s situations where there’s too many things that don’t apply and then the cost of integrating that “free program” with an overall program to do the migration it’s not worth the hassle.
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| Danny Ryan: | The second option is there are… this is something that organizations have looked at so there’s tools that are out there, we ran into a couple of them like Mover.io and was Bittitan.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Bittitan.
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| Danny Ryan: | And Skysync was another one, so there are products that are out there and tools that are out there that you can use to do this migration. Since we’re talking about something that is moving files from one cloud over to the other cloud, there are tools that are out there, and again, whether you do that as an internal team versus engaging somebody like a ThreeWill to manage that, that’s something that definitely… or even if you need help to evaluate those tools to do that migration, we’ve just through the years have built up a lot of expertise around the different tooling that are out there for doing these types of migrations over to Microsoft 365.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | I love that, yeah.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | The air conditioning just turned off. I hope it turns back on, it’s a little hot in here. Last one is just from doing these migrations through the years and working with lots of different types of clients is sometimes doing the manual things is the right thing for certain folks. Especially where we’re talking about documents here and yeah, there’s probably the chance of losing some of the metadata that is a part of those documents doing a manual migration, but I really think this is something that people can look at either doing the option of hiring a consulting company or using an internal group to do a manual migration, but also the self-service option. Telling folks that you’re migrating off by a certain date and that if they want documents to move forward, giving them a self-service manual process that they can do to move the documents over to the appropriate places.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, and I think the thing that you can overlook in these scenarios of migrating is thinking about what is the future? What is your digital workplace within Microsoft 365 and how do you have that organized? How are you bringing on those services and helping your community find things easily, know how to create the things they need to do their collaboration, and if you’re doing a migration and taking the structure that’s over in Box and just plopping it over on the other side, you might miss some transformation opportunities, and opportunities to clean house. Take out the crust that builds up in these platforms and really get it down to the essence of what’s the core information that you want to move over, so when you’re looking for it it doesn’t get cluttered with all this other information that maybe doesn’t apply anymore to your organization. I think that’s one thing no matter if you go manual to a full blown end to end consultant managed migration opportunity, you really want to think about what’s the future and not overlook that because you miss an opportunity.
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| When you migrate things, no matter if it’s manual or you’re paying someone to do that, it’s expensive and if you’re going to make that move you want to get the benefit. I’ve made this comparison before is if you move and you don’t do that work of understanding what should come, where it should go, and that seems like a simple thing to determine but it’s not simple when it comes down to it, you end up creating problems. You end up going backwards if you’re not thoughtful about that. Even though maybe that new platform has nice new shiny things, you can easily go backwards if you’re not thoughtful in terms of how you transform and clean that content in the process of migration.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep, well great. I hope this was helpful for people who were taking a look at migrating from Box over to OneDrive, in a bigger sense Microsoft 365. If you’re looking at doing this probably a great way to get the conversation or continue on this conversation with us is we have an offering called a Digital Workplace Briefing, and it just gives a chance for us to spend a couple of hours together either if you’re in the Atlanta area in person or if you’re outside that virtually. It gives us a couple hours to really focus in on the digital transformation that companies are going through and take a look at what you want to do with Microsoft 365 and how you really can get created into a place where work gets done.
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| If you’re interested in that just come to the ThreeWill on our contact us page. We’ve got an option on that page just to say I’m interested in the Digital Workplace Briefing, so that’s a great place to go to if you’d like to continue on this conversation with folks like Pete Skelly, who are in this day to day and want to continue on with this conversation. Definitely go take a look at that, and Tommy thank you for taking the time to do this.
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| Tommy Ryan: | You’re welcome.
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| Danny Ryan: | What’s next? Is it Dropbox next? So another content collaboration platform?
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| Tommy Ryan: | That works for me.
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| Danny Ryan: | Well do Dropbox next, so we’ll pick back up with that. I think we have a couple more that we’re going after and then that’ll wrap up this series and we’ll probably look at adding some additional content to what we’ve got out there and maybe doing some updates every once in a while as we hear what people are really interested in doing and where some of these things get traction. It’ll be interesting to see.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, where the customer experience is, what’s the real world look like in these types of transformations?
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| Danny Ryan: | Absolutely, so thank you everybody for taking the time to listen and have a wonderful day. Thank you, buh-bye.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Buh-bye.
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