Perform A POC Before Migrating Dropbox to Google Workspace

Once your company has planned to migrate Dropbox to Google Workspace, your IT team must decide on finalizing the right migration tool. To achieve this, you must review the data migration tool’s capabilities by performing a detailed POC (Proof Of Concept) migration.

In this post, we will guide you through the various factors in creating a customized POC checklist for your migration project.

Prepare Pilot Batches to Test Migrate

The first step to plan and proceed with the POC migration is to prepare a couple of demo user accounts as a pilot batch to migrate during the POC migration. The recommended approach is to create fresh demo user accounts that are not part of the existing sharing/ collaboration structure in Dropbox. This way, your team can ensure that the complexity of the sharing structure does not come into play when performing the POC migration.

Migrating File Features

Your POC checklist must include verifying the migration tool’s capability to transfer various file features. It includes transferring sharing permissions,  version history, timestamps, links, external sharing, etc.

Rather than learning about this functionality in a product demo, your IT team can have it work for your organization’s specific migration needs through a POC for Dropbox to Google Workspace migration.

Transferring Dropbox Paper

Transferring files like Dropbox Paper to Google Workspace can be a challenge for your internal migration team due to file format inconsistencies. Your team must verify whether the shortlisted migration tool can automatically convert .paper files into .docx format to make them compatible with the Google environment.

You can refer to how CloudFuze – a trustworthy Google Partner, helped Front move a large number of Dropbox Paper files to Google Workspace here: Front case study.

Overcoming Google Drive Limitations

Before initiating the Dropbox to Google Workspace POC migration, your company must be aware of the migration limitations in Google Workspace. Some of them are:

In your Dropbox to Google Workspace POC checklist, verify whether the migration tool can overcome these Google limitations.

Migrating to Google Shared Drive

Your company’s migration use case might require you to move Dropbox data to not just Google Drive but also to Google Shared Drives. Based on your business requirements, you need to finalize the target. For example, if you want to copy files to a Google environment owned by an entire team rather than an individual, you must transfer files to Google Shared Drives.

Therefore, your POC checklist must also assess the migration tool’s ability to migrate Dropbox data to both – Google Drive and Google Shared Drives.

Delta Migration

When the end-users in your organization continue to work in the source cloud during the migration, incremental changes in files and folders start to build up, which your team needs to transfer to Google Workspace. The tool that your team has shortlisted for the POC migration must be able to execute a delta migration.

Assess this functionality during your organization’s Dropbox to Google Workspace POC to ensure a complete data transfer.

Email Migration

Your POC must also include email migration as part of exploring the other functionalities of the migration tool apart from the primary content migration capabilities. For example, find out whether it can transfer your emails from an existing cloud platform to Gmail.

Delve deep to know the email migration tool’s capability to transfer email attributes like attachments, calendars, distribution lists, etc.

Links Migration

For end-to-end data migration, your IT team must proactively gauge the tool’s ability to transfer links accurately. Links inside files that are pointing to the source cloud no longer work in the destination cloud and cause broken link issues.

To overcome this, your team must include links migration/correction during a POC for Dropbox to Google Workspace migration.

Migration Reports

Businesses can evaluate the outcomes of a migration project and compare them with ideal results through migration reports. This makes it a vital addition to your POC checklist to know whether the migration tool generates clear and detailed reports.

With the help of this elaborate POC checklist, your internal IT team can assess the functionalities of the shortlisted migration tool and understand how it can overcome migration challenges.

CloudFuze is a leading cloud data migration service provider that offers a customized POC for each migration plan of an organization. It also meets the above-discussed POC criteria that make Dropbox to Google Workspace migrations (and other cloud combinations like Egnyte to SharePoint Online migration, Box to OneDrive migration, Slack to Teams migration, etc.) successful.

Contact us for more information.