Migrating content to Box is one of the most important steps of your digital transformation journey. With Box Shuttle, it's easier than ever to achieve. Box Shuttle is a full-service migration program for Box customers, and can help organizations move content off of any source tool that may exist across the business.
Box Shuttle consists of both content migration technology and content migration professional services. Learn more about Box Shuttle professional services here, and read on to learn more about Box Shuttle technology.
Content migration technology
Box Shuttle's content migration technology provides powerful tools to help organizations execute content migrations off of 15 different source systems, including on-premises servers, EFSS tools, SharePoint deployments, and cloud storage tools.
Box Shuttle is purpose-built to migrate content from these different tools into Box. The technology knows the technical specifications of these tools and how they are similar and different to the overall structure of Box. As such, migration is made easier with simple step-by-step instructions and decision points that are unique to each system you are migrating from. Additionally, Box Shuttle is a cloud-based tool, meaning there is no software to deploy or infrastructure to manage.
The full set of features, functionality, and source systems for Box Shuttle vary between our two offerings: Box Shuttle standard tooling and Box Shuttle advanced tooling. However, across both offerings, Box Shuttle tooling includes powerful features that let organizations execute end-to-end content migration projects, including these critical steps:
- source data analysis
- customize migration job configuration
- simulate content migration
- execute content migration
Box Shuttle Methodology
Source data analysis
Box Shuttle allows organizations to analyze existing source data to define the full scale of their content migration requirements. With Box Shuttle, organizations can get a deep understanding of the data that lives on their source systems, building a blueprint of all of the content they are looking to migrate – which allows organizations to build a robust migration approach and identify then modify potential errors. Box Shuttle analysis capabilities help organizations understand:
- Content volume: Identify the volume of content on a given source, including total files and total folders. Segment volume by files per owner, file size per owner, files per extension, total files per extension, files per category and file size per category.
- Content activity: Understand file creation date, last modified date, and, on file servers, last access date
- Content-level features: Identify files that are password protected or have errors. On file systems, identify files that are linked. In some systems, understand which files have external collaboration.
Analysis reports are fully downloadable, allowing organizations get get quite granular in content analysis.
Customized migration job configuration
Once organizations have an understanding of their source data, Box Shuttle allows full customization of migration jobs. Job setup includes the power to make decisions around:
- Access permissions: Because Box Shuttle understands both the source system as well as Box, it can identify permissions mapping errors and provide a decision on how to manage these errors. Box Shuttle standard tooling provides users with automated resolutions to permissions conflicts. With Box Shuttle advanced tooling, organizations have more granular controls on adjusting permissions, including at the individual content level.
- Errors: Errors that were identified during analysis are able to be skipped or re-assessed during job setup.
- Content ownership: Customize the mapping of content ownership by user and groups on your source tool to Box, including the ability to reassign content to new users if required.
Content migration simulation
Simulate content migrations by doing a trial run of your migration without moving any live data. This step allows migration teams to understand the success rate of the file transfer and build confidence in their migration approach before executing the move to Box.
Simulations provide migration teams with:
- Estimated duration: Based on both migration size and network bandwidth, a simulation provides you with HH:MM:SS view of what to expect from your actual content migration.
- File and folder report: A view of the before-and-after of both number of files and number of folders, and a comparison of the before size and after size of your data.
- File information: Successful file report that includes details on new file names, extensions, owners, and collaborators
If simulations do not provide the results a migration team is looking for, teams are easily able to return to the job configuration step and make adjustments based on simulation data.
Content migration execution
Execute migrations at any scale needed, from gigabyte to petabyte, with speed increased through automatic API and WAN optimization. Because of the extensive analysis and simulation of the migration, execution should be one of the easiest steps.
To reduce end user impact during the migration, Box strongly recommends that organizations execute migrations via a series of delta syncs – smaller migrations of new and updated data. Box Shuttle knows what data has been migrated to Box, and can execute smaller, quicker delta syncs to migrate new data and also transfer over any updated data.
A delta sync strategy also allows organizations to identify and remediate errors such as folder path length, locked files, and un-provisioned accounts. A delta sync strategy allows for users to continue work in the source tool, and migration teams to perfect the new Box deployment – until the migration team is ready to make the cutover to Box. Content migration transfers come with a set of reports of your content migration, which are downloadable out of Box Shuttle for records keeping.
Once you've made your cutover to Box, we recommend decommissioning legacy tools. Because data has been moved to Box in full, your old tools are now obsolete. By removing access, or setting as read-only, you can reduce end user confusion and promote adoption of your Box deployment.
To learn more about migrations from specific tools, including a granular look at features and functionality within, visit the Box Shuttle Migration Guides page.
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