Getting started with the Box migration: Personal files

Description of the video:

[Tom] Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to this afternoon's session of Getting started with the Box migration: personal files edition. My name is Tom. I work with a group called IT Training here at IU. I am joined by a large group of additional panelists today. If the morning session is any indicator, this is going to be quite a, an active session for them. We've got a group of people from Digital Education Programs and Initiatives. And we also have joining us today Jake George from Support Center Tier Two to answer any sorts of questions and concerns that we all — that we come up with at the end of today's session. We are using the Q&A pod today to — the Q&A feature today to record questions and answers. However, we do kind of ask that you hold off on your questions if you can until we get towards the end of the presentation. What this will do is this will help kind of prevent the ability — er, prevent all the duplicate questions that may arise as we come through this session today. One of the issues we had in the morning is the same question was asked multiple times and we are going to try to address every question that comes into the Q&A pod. [Jake] And we did this morning. [Tom] Yeah, we did this morning. So we want to try to keep that duplication down, but we do also want to get your questions answered. The upvoting feature is turned on in the QA pod so you will be able to give a thumbs up to questions that you also have and that will bubble them up to the top of the list. So we'll answer the most common, most popular questions first. Kinda go on from there. Okay, so that's my sort of housekeeping introductory portion of the webinar. We're going to jump into the content today. If you've been to other Getting Started webinars with IT Training, there is usually a bit of a hands-on demonstration. This session is not going to be that. This session is almost entirely me conveying to you information and then our team answering questions when everything is over at the end. So this really is an information dissemination session and it's less of a "this is how to do something" session. So let's get started. What is in this webinar? This is important, an important thing to kinda keep in mind as we're going. We're going to be talking about what's happening to Box, what's currently happening in the process, how Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive compare to Box, we're going to be answering, like sort of a lightning round common questions and answers. We'll talk about some of the known issues and then give you some places where you can learn more about the migration process. Ok? Now this next slide is just as important as this slide. What is not in this webinar? So we are not able to talk about group, team, department, IU, or incident — institutional data in the migration process, we're not able to talk about Entrusted or Box Health accounts. We have no details about migrating group owned data, team owned data or department owned data, or their associated accounts. And we don't really have information about the data owned by those accounts and what's going to happen with it. All of these things are still being decided. Any questions you have about this, we don't have answers for them right now. We can only answer questions related to personal account migration because much of that has been decided as you probably saw when you got in the room, I was editing this slide show. There are things that still are not decided yet. And those things are kind of, as we speak, changing. So, that being said, just a quick review. Here's what we're doing today. We're going to be talking about what's happening, what's going on right now, some differences between destination services, but we, we're not going to be talking about group data as it relates to the migration. We are going to talk a little bit about how to deal with group data that may be in your personal Box account. That's very different than answering questions about what the, what's going to happen to group owned data during this migration process. So let's jump into the first thing on the list, what's happening to Box? So IU's agreement with Box is ending in the Spring 20 — of 2021. This is because Box has exponentially raised their prices. And it's not in IU's best interests to keep paying for Box. The reason for that is because the two identified services to replace Box, both Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, are already being paid for by the university as part of our agreements with Microsoft and Google respectively. Those are the places where personal file storage is going. Everything I'm talking about today is personal file storage. We're not talking about groups. There is a different solution for group content. So keep that in mind as we're going through today's session. IU is working with a vendor called SkySync. SkySync is going to be transferring the content from Box to one of the replacement services based on your choice in the Find My Drive survey linked on storage.IU.edu. SkySync is only going to move your content once. And whatever your most recent response to that survey is, is where your content will go. We'll talk more about what exactly gets moved later. But this is essentially what's happening to Box. Right now, IU faculty, students, and staff are being asked to look at the way they're using their personal documents in Box, look at the two services and decide where they want their content to go. Okay? The migration of our personal documents will take at least four months. At least four months. And that's prepand — with pre-pandemic bandwidth capabilities, right? So everything is moving slower now than it was before we all — before March. So that's why this process seems — feels a little accelerated because we need to kind of push things forward in order to make it out of Box by the time our agreement runs out at the university. I already talked about this slide, I got ahead of myself. So let's talk about how to define a personal file. And we're going to talk about this, this through two different lenses. And these lenses are important, okay? Because the lenses are one, what does IU identify as a personal file, and two, what does SkySync identify as a personal file. So let's talk first about IU's definition and what is actually — what, what that means for us, right? So a personal file is essentially a file. Oops, sorry, I got ahead of myself again. Like I mentioned before, content of personal, in your personal Box accounts are what's going to be migrating. That's the first part of the migration phase. Group owned content and content owned by your department is going to migrate later. Okay. A common question we get is, "do I have to migrate my own content?" No, do not migrate your own content. We're — you don't even have the option to migrate your own content. I mean, you do, but it's going to cause problems. It's going to cause duplicate files, it's going to cause duplicate permissions, okay? Your best bet as a, as a user of these services for your personal content is to wait and let SkySync deal with the migration. Once the migration is done, any sorts of changes to the content that got migrated, any sort of collaboration or sharing changes you want to make, that's the time to make it, okay? During the migration, you don't want to move things over to the new service on your own. So now let's talk about how IU views personal content. Personal content is anything in your Box account that does not directly relate to the work, your work at IU. Okay? A good example of this are things like pictures of your pets, videos of grandkids, copies of your resume, cover letters, maybe archival tax return documents. These are personal files. The main governing distinction, like, the easiest way to decide if it's personal content or if it's content that should be managed by a group account at IU, is to answer this question. If I had to leave my job at IU tomorrow, would all my colleagues have everything they need to do to keep doing their work? Now that's assuming that your — when you leave IU tomorrow, all of your Box content is shut off. Nobody can access it anymore. Anything that you own in Box is turned off. If the answer to that question is yes, everyone will still be able to do their work, then you don't have any personal — er, non-personal content in your Box account. You don't have any department content, institutional contact, group content, team content, IU content in your Box account. That's what — that's how we want this to be. Okay? Now this is how SkySync decides, and this is how you can tell, if content is owned by you or if it's owned by a group. The distinction that the migration vendor is going to make is based on who owns a folder in Box. Okay? So if you look at the two images I've got on the screen, the one on the left is a folder that I own. I have invited one of my colleagues as a collaborator in that folder. But I own that folder because I'm number one at the top on the list indicated as owner. The one on the right is content that's owned by a group. Okay? You can see that IT Training is the owner of that content. I'm a co-owner, but IT Training owns that content. Okay? This is the distinction that is — that SkySync is going to use to determine whether or not something is migrating in this phase or its migrating in the group content phase. Okay? What we want to do is we want to make it so that in our account, we want all the things that are — that are identified by IU as a personal file to be owned by us, anything that's identified by IU to be a group or team or department or organizational or institutional or IU content, we want that owned by a group or departmental account in Box, not an individual person, not a person, a group account. That's where we want to get. And that's one of the things we are going to be talking about as this kinda goes, as this presentation goes on. So if you're like me, you may have some institutional content that is — falls in this personal ownership category. So what do you do about it? Part of what you can do between now and the 22nd of May is start working on organizing your Box account. You can remove things that you own that you no longer need. You can transfer ownership of things that are departmental files to a departmental or group account. And these are two ways you could do that. Number one is to invite the group account as a co-owner to that folder that contains departmental information, departmental data, university data. Once you do that and they accept, you can turn your permission to a lower level, probably editor instead of co-owner. That will ensure that the ownership gets transferred to that other account, that group account, that departmental account. The other way to do this is to have the owner of that shared account, group account, create a folder in Box and invite the team as a collaborator. Then everybody on the team can move content from their Box folder into that collaborated folder and then demote themselves accordingly. These processes are documented in the Knowledge Base and on Box's website. So if you have questions about the specifics of how to make this happen, you'll find the documentation there. As far as the logistics, you need to look at your data and determine, is this something that the people I work with need? And if it is, you need to look at the ownership of that particular folder and get that sorted. And the way you sort it is with these two, these two methods here. Some of you may be asking, now, I don't know if my team has a Box account, a group Box account. If you don't know the answer to whether or not you have one of these shared, group, departmental, university owned, whatever Box accounts, you can talk to your IT Pro, they will have the answer for you. If you don't have an IT Pro or don't know who that person could be, you can also ask the Support Center. Through this whole process, your IT Pro can request a new group account to have access to Box. Okay, so again, to kind of summarize this whole section before we go onto a feature comparison, content that you require to do work should be owned by an account that's owned by your group, not owned by an account that's owned by a person in Box. This should have been the case for a very long time, but especially now in this process, we want to make sure that that's true. Anything else that you don't require from your Box account to do work, that's personal stuff and you probably don't have to change anything about it, okay? Okay, let's talk about how these new services compare to Box. Okay? This is a really common thing people are concerned about, like which, which of these services has the most features? I may be the first to tell you, I may not be, but it's not so much the set of features that matter. What matters is your familiarity with the product or the types of things you're going to use with that storage, or whether or not it has a feature or two that you prefer to use over the other product. Oh — went too fast. The one thing I will tell you is that most of the common features, capability — and capabilities for Box exist in both of these, these storage providers, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive. They can do a majority of the things that a majority of people in Box were able to do. Okay. Now it's some fringe cases, some really specific features that are going to be different or be missing in these new services. So what I'm gonna do is point out the things the most, the biggest sort of feature, missing features of OneDrive and Google Drive. There is a much larger feature comparison document that you'll see linked on these slides as well. So first of all, compared to Box, here are things that both OneDrive and Google Drive do not do. You cannot set up an email address and have everything sent to that address show up in a folder. That's a Box only feature. OneDrive and Google Drive don't allow that. Neither of them have embed widgets. So you can't embed a folder on a page, for example, so that somebody can see the contents of the folder on that page. You aren't able to customize shared URLs, so you won't be able to do something like iu.box.com/v/cutecatpictures. That's not a capability of OneDrive and Google Drive. Both the services also do not offer commenting on a file level. You can comment on things within files. So if you're familiar with using Microsoft Word's commenting features or Google Docs commenting features where you can comment on a word or a paragraph. That's the kind of commenting you can do on these services. And you're not able to comment on an entire file or an entire folder. So those are probably the biggest feature changes that are common between both of them compared to Box. Now as far as the individual services go, these are the things, the biggest things that are different. First of all, it's permissions. Box has a very robust, very detailed permissions model. In OneDrive, the uploader and previewer permissions do not exist in OneDrive, compared to Box. In Google Drive, you only get "can edit", "can comment", and "can view" permissions. Any other level of permission doesn't exist in Google. Now back to OneDrive, the other big missing feature is the inability to set an expiration on a lock. So if you were to lock a file in Box, you could set a duration. So you could say, I'm going to work on this for 30 minutes. After those 30 minutes, let someone else work on it. You can't do that in OneDrive. If you set a lock, you have to remember to remove the lock. Google Drive, you just can't lock, and you can't prevent others from modifying a document when you're modifying it. In Google, there are also no desktop applications for Google Drive's native file types. You also can't change your sharing defaults, and you can't create custom tagging or custom metadata on files in Google Drive. Okay, lightning round, common questions and answers. First question, do I have to migrate my files — files? No, SkySync will do that. Don't migrate your own content. Don't try to get ahead of the game and move your things before this migration happens, it'll just cause headaches for yourself. What will SkySync migrate? All the files and folders. Any collaboration permission that it can mimic in the destination service, which means anything except viewer and previewer, I'm sorry, what was it — uploader and previewer in OneDrive. And however it can map Box's permissions to the "can edit", "can view", "can comment" permissions in Google Drive. Box Notes will be migrated. They will become Word documents, the .docx extension. And during the migration, table formatting and list formatting will get garbled. But as far as the tests have proven, the content does, for the most part, stay there. It's just the content will be garbled in with the formatting. Can you, uh, Once the migration's over, can you only use the service that you chose during the migration period? The answer to that is no. Everybody at IU is going to be able to use OneDrive and Google Drive. What this migration is doing is it's taking the content you have and the permissions associated with that content and moving it to another service. Okay? You will be able to log into both, you'll be able to use both. It's just the migration will go from Box to one of these services. You cannot choose to have your content migrated to both. It will go to one or the other. Can you change your mind after you make a decision? Yes, you can. Just go out — go and fill out the Find My Drive survey again from storage.iu.edu. Now about Canvas integration. Is there Canvas integration? Yes, but right now it's only for Google Drive. Microsoft is working on a solution for Canvas integration and it will likely be part of the group migration process, but it's not part of the personal content migration process. What if you miss the May 22nd deadline? Well, if you miss the deadline or you don't make a decision, the default service is Microsoft OneDrive. And this really isn't IU endorsing OneDrive over Google Drive. This really just comes down to our relationship with Microsoft is a much deeper relationship that our relationship with Google. And there has to be a default. So we went with the one with the stronger relationship with the vendor. When will there be information about group owned or departmental content or team content, university owned content, any content that's not personal content during this migration process? It's going to be after the personal migration process is over. The data stewards are currently looking at the possible storage solutions for group content. They're evaluating the security, they're evaluating the privacy, the privacy and the practices for those kind of things. They're also taking a look at how the personal migration is going. And once all of this is done, there'll be some guidance about what to do with your departmental content, your team owned content, and the content that is owned by a group at IU. Right now, this is just personal content. I can't stress that enough. It's just personal content. We don't know the details about group content because they're still being decided. When will my stuff migrate? That's a very good question. The migrations will begin after May 22nd. Ok. That's the deadline for everybody to say, this is where I want to go. After that deadline, SkySync will start working on the migration process. You will receive a notice one week before your migration and you'll be able to use your content in Box all the way up through until the end of your migration. Once the migration is done, you will be able to, you, you'll only be able to view the content in your Box account. Anything and everything in Box will be view only starting in March 2021. Now that's not just personal content, that's every piece of content in March. Er, in Box. March 2021 is when it will be view-only. After your particular migration, everything in your Box account will remain view-only until the service gets retired in spring 2021. Okay. Alright, so that's it for the lightning round. Let's talk about some of the known issues with this process. Okay. So number one, any comments on a file or folder will be lost. SkySync cannot associate those because those are not capabilities in the destination services. Box Notes will be converted to Word documents. Tables and bullet points will be lost, but the data seems to be preserved from initial testing. So just keep that in mind. There are other file naming limits in these services, so SkySync may have to change the names of some of your files or folders depending on if you use certain special characters when you name them. As is true with any sort of file moving, there is a chance that files may get corrupted. It's a very small chance, but this is mostly a disclaimer for, for us saying, look, some — there may be an error somewhere. Just — it's not going to be common, but it's possible. Now if the file in Box is already corrupt, SkySync can't uncorrupt it to move it. But there is a chance that anytime you move a file, even on your own computer, file may become corrupted. [Jake] And just to piggyback off of that, this is Jake with Tier 2. So again, very small chance. And at the end of the migration, you'll receive a personal report summary of everything that's migrated and all the permissions as well as any errors. So you will know as soon as your migration is completed whether or not there were any issues. And that as long as the file is fine in Box, we can recover it just fine. [Tom] You'll be able to download from Box and then reupload to the new service. Any file larger than 15 gigabytes will not be automatically migrated to OneDrive. Any — so Box saves up to like a hundred versions of documents. And that's a really — what defines a version is difficult to define in Box, but a bunch of old, so older versions of documents may not be migrated. It all depends on where your versions fall. So like a hundred versions of a Box Note is different than a hundred versions of a Word document. So just know that your older versions of documents will not be migrated, but you will get a version history in both OneDrive and Google Drive that represents the most recent versions of a document. And again, like we were talking about before, uploader permissions are just going to be removed. I mean, there, there's no analog — analog in Box, and I'm sorry, in OneDrive or Google Drive. So the permission will just be removed. So where can you learn more? Well, here's a list of links. April is going to be adding these to the chat. And I'm gonna talk about each of these briefly before we jump into our Q&A. Number one is Storage at IU. That's storage.iu.edu. This is kinda the, the homepage for this migration. There's a series of question and answers there, that's also where you can find a link to the Find Your Drive survey. That's kinda like the — and links to the pertinent knowledge base documents. That's the place to go to start. There's also a Knowledge Base document about the Box retirement. It goes through some of the specifics and some of the things that I've talked about today. The FAQ has some of the questions that people have been asking about the service — in fact, from the morning session, Jake made a bunch of notes. to have things added to this FAQ. So all the documents here are constantly being updated with the exception of the contact your support center document, that one is pretty stable as far as these documents go. There is a matrix that compares the features of Box, Google Drive and OneDrive on the Knowledge Base as well. It's really robust and a lot more in depth than what I can get to in this presentation. And if you have any questions, you can always contact your support center.