Keep your Dropbox (or other cloud file service) with Microsoft Teams.
Your organisation has made the sensible decision to move to Microsoft O365 because it is the right thing to do.
The IT department have been tasked with migrating documents to SharePoint and OneDrive from Dropbox (or another cloud service).
When migrating documents, it is always best to review what documents exist, who has access to them, if they are shared externally, if there are requirements to keep them as records, when were they last used and do they really need to be migrated? Maybe a lot of documents could just be deleted.
The IT team cannot answer all these questions themselves and must speak with document owners and users. Generally, if a user is asked what needs migrating they will instantly reply “Everything”.
If you ask the same user to go through all documents and decide which document library to migrate them to and what metadata should be added then they will quickly change their mind about migrating everything and say, “Just leave everything where it is and I will start afresh in SharePoint”.
The ideal migration plan would be somewhere between the two.
The way forward is to spend some time making users aware of all the ways that using SharePoint and OneDrive will improve the way they work with documents. Show them a well-built document library as an example. This should allow them to quickly make a well-informed choice about the most important documents to move over, the documents to delete and the documents that should maybe stay where they are.
Generally, it is not a good idea to leave documents where they are but rather create an archive area in SharePoint for these documents. This is mostly unmanaged and read-only so that if a user feels the need to edit a document, they must first move it to the correct place in SharePoint or OneDrive. At least these documents are now searchable, accessible, secure and backed up.
So which documents would you consider leaving where they are?
Users may have been successfully working with Dropbox to share documents with their team and external partners. Whilst these could be moved to SharePoint these would cause major disruption to ongoing projects and require retraining of the team and external partners.
With the Introduction of Microsoft Teams, it is easy to have the best of both worlds in an easy to use interface that shows all your documents in the same place as seen in the images below.
If you are considering deploying Microsoft Teams or would like to know more about the services we offer please call Adepteq on 0800 6444 365 or Contact Us and we will be happy to help.
