But Does It Work?

Content Migration from BOX.com to OneDrive/SharePoint: Comparing the tools (Metalogix, Sharegate, and AvePoint)

I was recently asked to evaluate the thee tools (Metalogix [Essentials for Office 365], Sharegate [Migration], and AvePoint [Fly Migration]) for a migration from BOX.com to OneDrive and SharePoint.

This post is a really short and sweet comparison of the three tools.

Spoiler alert:  I liked  Sharegate Migration the best, by far.  Although you must use Powershell scripts, they are not too difficult and Sharegate does a good job explaining what you need to do.  If you are confused by the online documentation, Sharegate's support is superb!

Sharegate was robust, while Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 was not.  Metalogix felt like it was still under development and there were a number of show stopping bugs that I could not get around.

1. Metalogix failed on numerous file naming issues.  Something as simple as have three dots in a row: x...dcox.
2. Metalogix had trouble migrating all the various versions of a file with fidelity.  SOmetimes the versions failed to copy.  SOmetimes they copied, but they were ein the wrong order.
3. Metalogix was quite slow, slower than Sharegate's tool.
4. Metalogix was 6 times as expensive as Sharegate for the content we were migrating.  Furthermore, Metalogix charges you per megabyte of data transferred, Sharegate does not.
5. Sharegate's support was superb.
6. I did not kick the tires very hard on the AvePoint tool.  The major limitation that had me stop was that they only support a migration from BOX.com to OneDrive.  They do not support a migration directly to SharePoint.  AvePoint suggests that you migrate content to OneDrive and then use a different technique to get content over to SharePoint.

 

SharePoint (Office 365) & Microsoft Word - Issues with External Users

Over the years I have had many clients in the Pharmaceutical industry.  They use SharePoint (Office 365) heavily and one of the primary ways of using SharePoint is to collaborate with external partners on writing documents, using Microsoft Word.   Sounds straight forward, but it isn't.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen issues with external partners not able to open and edit Word files directly from SharePoint.  4 out of 10 times I have to advise the partners to follow the steps:

1. Download the file
2. Edit the file that is on your local machine
3. Upload the file back to SharePoint.

The root causes vary, but there are two primary categories of issues:

1. There is a version mismatch between Microsoft Word and SharePoint  The partner is not using the latest version of Word.
2. 'The partner for some reason is logged into Word with a different account than the account that is logged into SharePoint.

As an example of #2, I just saw the following:  The external partner had a OneDrive and was logged into the OneDrive with a different account than the account used to login to our SharePoint site.  This meant that Word was also logged in with those credentials.

The number of hours lost on these issues is phenomenal.  Many of the companies I work with are ready to make a switch.  They do not experience these issues when the files are stored in BOX, Dropbox, Egnyte, etc...

Please Microsoft fix these issues!