If you are planning your company’s Box to Google Shared Drives migration, this guide can be a great starting point to understand the process and steps involved in the entire journey. This article will walk you through everything you need to know to transfer files and folders from Box to Google Shared Drives.

1. Introduction

Having a cloud suite such as Google Workspace with a wide range of apps that cater to all business needs outweighs the need to stick to a standalone cloud like Box. Many businesses that plan a Box to Google Shared Drives migration as part of embracing the Google Workspace cloud suite often prioritize the benefits that come with the move, such as cost savings, eliminating the complexities of multiple license structures, and more.

If your company is also planning to switch to Google Shared Drives from Box for any such use case, your IT team must have a proper strategy and work with the right migration service provider.

Box to Google Shared Drive Migration

Moving your entire team or your organization’s data from one cloud storage to another seems straightforward but can be quite a challenge in real-life scenarios. To ensure a successful Box to Google Shared Drives migration with no failures along the road, it is best to partner with a reliable and Google-trusted migration solutions provider.

We, at CloudFuze, can help your company migrate the entire Box data to Google Shared Drives securely, quickly, and in a structured way. Check out our Gartner reviews and learn how we have helped businesses migrate successfully over the years.

Watch the video below to learn how to transfer files from Box to Google Shared Drives account by following simple steps.

2. Box to Google Shared Drives Migration Trends & Use Cases

A lot of businesses around the world have been migrating to Google Shared Drives from Box and other standalone cloud storages as part of consolidating into the Google Workspace cloud suite. With total consolidation, businesses can simplify their cloud licensing structure, improve user collaboration and productivity, and improve security.

Other trending use cases for businesses to migrate from Box to Google Shared Drives include:

  • Mergers
  • Acquisitions
  • Cost savings
  • Data governance

3. Box to Google Shared Drives Business Migration Challenges

From the images below, it is clear that the way files are stored and accessed in Box is completely different from that of Google Shared Drives, which many challenges during the Box to Google Shared Drives file transfer.

Box All Files

Figure 1: All files and folders are stored in “All Files” in Box

Shared Drives

Figure 2: All folders and files stored in a drive-in “Shared Drives”

Below are the challenges that organizations face when migrating to Google Shared Drives from Box.

1. Mapping the Users and Path

As simple as it seems, mapping source users to destination users can be quite challenging, especially if change of mappings paths are to be made.

2. Migrating and Matching All Permissions Appropriately

The permissions in any cloud storage are different from others. Similarly, Box and Google Shared Drives have a difference in permissions usage, and how you match the permissions while you migrate Box files to Google Shared Drives is challenging.

3. Migrating All Types of Files

Being a user of Box, you might have created, worked, shared, and received different types of files where a few are only supported by Box, such as:

  • Box Notes
  • Word Document
  • PowerPoint Presentation
  • Excel Spreadsheet
  • Google Docs
  • Google Slides
  • Google Sheets
  • Pages Document
  • Keynote Presentation
  • Numbers Spreadsheet

Migrating all types of files to Google Shared Drive in an organized way with all the permissions, versions, comments, and timestamps is crucial and must be done with a systematic approach.

4.Google Shared Drive’s Restriction for No. Of Items

A shared drive can contain a maximum of 400,000 items, including folders, files, and shortcuts, a limit set by Google. If you have more than 400,000 items in Box, the exceeded limit won’t get migrated.

5. Folder Limits

A shared drive folder can support up to 20 nested folders, and folders exceeding the limit won’t get migrated from Box or any source cloud storage.

However, the CloudFuze cloud data migration tool can help you overcome these challenges and make your move from Box to Google Shared Drives smooth and secure.

4. How Can CloudFuze Solve These Challenges?

As it is evident, the journey of switching to Google Shared Drives from Box is not without its challenges. But with us as your migration partner, you can overcome all the challenges that come along the way and make the transition secure and seamless. With our non-disruptive migration methodologies, we can help you transfer Box data to Google Shared Drives without interrupting your day-to-day business operations.

Let us see how our Box to Google Shared Drives migration tool overcomes each of the challenges discussed above.

1. Mapping the Users and Path

To transfer the files to appropriate folders in Google Shared Drives with the permissions, versions, comments, and timestamps, we use CSV mapping, where users and root folder/file path in the source are mapped to the destination users and drive path as shown below.

CSV Mapping

Table 1: CSV Mapping

Contact our migration professionals to understand more about how the mapping is done when you migrate Box to Google Shared Drives.

2. Migrating and Matching All Permissions Appropriately

Our tool matches the file permissions of Box with Google Shared Drives as shown below:

Box Permissions Shared Drive permissions
Co-Owner Content Manager
Editor Content Manager
Viewer View
Previewer View
Uploader View
Viewer Uploader Contributor
Owner Manager

Table 2: Matching Box file-sharing permissions with Shared Drive permissions

3. Migrating All Types of Files

Our tool can migrate all types of Box files to Google Shared Drives. The table below gives you a clear picture of the format in which files will be available after the successful transfer of Box files to Google Shared Drives.

Box Supported File Format Shared Drive File Format (after migration)
.boxnote .docx
.docx .docx
.xlsx .xlsx
.gSheet .gSheet
.gSlides .gSlides
.pages .pages
.key .key
.numbers .numbers

Table 3: Matching Box file formats with Shared Drive file formats

All the files are migrated as-is except for the Box Note files and Box Note Form Templates as they are Box-specific file formats and not supported by any other cloud. Hence, our tool converts them to Word documents.

4. Item Volume Restrictions on Google Shared Drives

If your source Box account has more than 400,000 items, including folders, files, and shortcuts, we create a new shared drive and migrate the items that exceed the limit into it.

5. Folder Limits

While a shared drive folder can support up to 20 nested folders, we create a “Long File Name” link in the 20th folder, leading to the 21st folder. This way, we overcome the limitations set by Google Workspace for our users.

5. Box to Google Shared Drives Migration Case Studies

We have helped a lot of businesses around the world migrate successfully from Box to Google Shared Drives (and to the overall Google Workspace suite). Here’s an example from a case study excerpt:

Case Study Highlight: Intuit, a leader in the financial technology industry, needed to migrate to Google Workspace from multiple cloud storages, including Box. With an initial attempt to self-migration, Intuit faced a lot of challenges such as Google Workspace restrictions, API rate limiting, etc. After they turned to us, our team helped them structure the migration and implement approaches that helped overcome all the challenges. Overall, the migration was a resounding success. Learn more about the Intuit case study here.

Explore more such case studies and gain insights into our solutions and the way they have helped businesses migrate successfully throughout the years.

Streamline Your Box to Google Shared Drives Migration With Us

Avoid the heavy lifting that goes into planning and performing complex Box to Google Shared Drives migration. By aligning our solutions with your company’s use case, we can help achieve the planned goals.

6. CloudFuze’s Box to Google Shared Drives Migration Tool

Our migration solutions can enable your team to migrate all users and data from Box to Google Shared Drives while keeping the metadata, access levels, hierarchy, and admin structure intact. Our Box to Google Shared Drives migration tool:  

  • Supports one-time migration
  • Supports delta migration (migration of incremental changes) 
  • Migrate all file types
  • Migrate all or selective versions of files 
  • Migrate all versions of files
  • Migrates root folder permissions
  • Migrates subfolder permissions
  • Migrates root file permissions
  • Matches the source permissions with destination permissions
  • Migrates external shares
  • Migrates shared links
  • Preserve timestamps
  • Suppresses email notifications for each folder and file migrated

Planning and performing the migration in-house involves a lot of challenges and complexities for IT professionals. So, to ease the process for you, we can assign a dedicated migration team who will work with you collaboratively and manage the entire migration process. Our managed migration team also offers post-migration support. 

7. Steps for Box to Google Shared Drives Migration

Before you move Box to Google Shared Drives, there are some essential prerequisites to consider. Here are the pre-requisites to transfer files from Box to Google Shared Drives:

  1. A CloudFuze account (Enterprise trial available on request)
  2. Box admin login credentials
  3. Google Workspace (G Suite) admin login credentials

Migrating to Google Shared Drives from Box using the CloudFuze tool involves several steps. Here is a step-by-step process to perform the migration using our tool: 

Step 1: Log into CloudFuze

To transfer data from Box to Shared Drives, you must have a CloudFuze account.

Open CloudFuze webapp and create an account. Cloudfuze offers a free trial account for users who wish to test the platform. Enterprise users with large and complex data migration needs can reach out to our migration team for a demo or quote.

Login Credentials for CloudFuze Webapp

Step 2: Add Box Business or Box Enterprise Account

You need to add and authorize your company’s Box account to CloudFuze to be able to move Box data to Shared Drives.

All you need to do is click on the Box logo in the business clouds list and enter the Box admin login credentials.

Locate Box under Business clouds

Step 3: Enter Box Admin Login Credentials

Enter the Box’s super admin login details and click on the Authorize button.

Enter Box Authorization

Step 4:  Review Account Permissions and Provide Access

The following is the list of all permissions CloudFuze needs in order to map and copy Box data to Google Shared Drives.

Click on the Grant Access to Box button to complete the cloud addition process.

Provide access to Box account

Step 5: Now, Add Shared Drives Account

Click on the Shared Drives logo in the business clouds list. Since this is Box to Google Shared Drives migration, we need to click on the Shared Drives logo.

If it is a Box to Google Drive migration, select the G Suite logo instead.

Locate Google Shared Drives

Step 6: Add and Authorize Google Account

Enter your Google Workspace account login details and authorize it the same way we authorized the Box account earlier.

Authorize Google Shared drives

Step 7: Verify Whether Clouds Added

Go to the Clouds section by clicking on the Clouds logo. Then, check the Manage Clouds tab. You should be able to see both Box and Google Shared Drives accounts successfully added there. The cloud addition process sets a solid foundation to migrate Box to Google Shared Drives with complete success.

Box to Google Shared Drives clouds added

Step 8: Visit the Team Migration Panel

Click on the Team Migration icon in the navigation menu on the left to copy files and folders from Box to Google Shared Drives. 

Box to Google Shared Drives click on team Migration

Step 9:Select The Source and Destination Cloud

Choose Box as the source account and Shared Drives as the destination account, as you want to move Box data to Google Shared Drives.

Box to Google Shared Drives select source and destination

Step 10: Create a CSV Mapping with the List of Users

With CSV mapping, you can create custom user mappings to transfer data from Box to Google Shared Drives in specific ways as per your IT team’s migration strategy. Make sure to upload the CSV file with the user mapping to the CloudFuze webapp.

This step can be confusing for first-time users of CloudFuze. Keep in mind that CloudFuze has a dedicated migration team that assists IT admins, during every step of the migration.

Upload Excel file

Step 11:  Download in the CSV Format

Download in the CSV format and then upload again to CloudFuze. The CSV file then populates the list of users for migration.

Download Box to Google Shared Drives CSV file

Step 12: Select The Users to Migrate 

Click on the users that you want to migrate from Box to Google Shared Drives accounts. There is no upper limit on how many users can be migrated. However, for this demo purpose, we have selected one user to demonstrate the tool’s capabilities to transfer files from Box to Shared Drives account.

Select user Box to Google Shared Drives

Step 13: Choose Migration Options

In this migration configuration page, you can give the migration job a name. You can enter additional email addresses for notifications.

Apart from the straightforward approach to transfer Box files to Google Shared Drives, you can also migrate Shared Links, External Shares, sub-folder permissions, and in-file comments by ticking the appropriate option.

Choose Migration Options

Step 14: Preview and Click on the Migration

Preview the migration options and click on the Start Migration. This initiates the transfer of Box files to Google Shared Drives.

Preview and Click on Start Migration

Step 15: Box to Google Shared Drives Migration Is in Progress

CloudFuze displays the status as In-Progress during the Box to Google Shared Drives file transfer in process. In addition to this, you will also receive regular updates on the migration status in your email address.

Box to Google Shared Drives Mirgation In Progress

Step 16: All the Data Has Been Migrated

Once the transfer of data from Box to Google Shared Drives is completed, the status will be changed to Processed.

Box to Google Shared Drives Completed

8. Box to Google Shared Drives Migration FAQs

1. How Much Does the Migration Cost?

The cost for Box to Google Shared Drives migration depends on various factors such as data size and features you choose. Contact us and get a customized quote for your business to migrate data from Box to Google Shared Drives.

2. Where Do I Check the Data Size of the Team/Organization in Box?

Open your admin box account and click on “Admin Console”.
Box
Figure 3: Box Admin Account

Now a window opens where you can see the number of users and data size of your team/business.

Box User Details

3. Can the Team Continue Working on Files While Migrating From Box to Google Shared Drives?

Yes! The amount of time it takes to migrate files is determined by the number and size of files you’re migrating. In the meantime, the team members can continue working on the files, which will be migrated later through the “Delta Migration” feature in CloudFuze.

4. Can You Migrate Box Note and Box Note From Template?

Though Box Note and Box Note From Template are Box-only supported files, CloudFuze migrates them to Google Shared Drives successfully in the form of word documents.

5. Will the folders and files look different after migrating to Google Shared Drives?

Even though the design and features of Google Shared Drives are different from the Box, CloudFuze migrates the folders and files with the same names and same file types except for the Box Note and Box Note Form Template (migrates it to word document). 

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By Published On: May 5, 2024Categories: KnowledgebaseComments Off on Box to Google Shared Drives Migration Guide for It Admins

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