Migration from network shares to SharePoint storage

[hanmark]

Our school business manager has just told teaching staff that the school is migrating from using exclusively Windows Server network shares to SharePoint only for file storage in four weeks and he's deleting all of our files on the network drives simultaneously. We are not as I understand it moving to a serverless setup.

 

To my mind this is a suicidal cloud migration strategy. No staff are happy about it not least because there is no period where the two systems run side by side.

 

Our internet connection is provided by LGfL and our network is a fairly ancient Windows 2008 Server setup mostly running on 100mbps infrastructure.

 

I am about to try and explain why I think this is a very bad idea very poorly executed. Your thoughts on this either positive or negative would be appreciated. For those of you who have managed successful cloud migrations, what plan/timescale/essential tools would you advise?

 

Thank you.

Edited May 6, 2020 by hanmark

[keyboards]

The first time we done it, we did a few taster sessions on google drive etc, then got staff to put new resources on google, then gave them a date for turning off but it wasn't four weeks in the middle of a lockdown

[Liam]

Wow

Any consideration for backups?

 

We run a hybrid system. Works well. IMO there is still a place for onsite storage.

[djm968]

Moving to cloud hosing is a good option but needs careful planning and should be lead by the IT team NOT the business manager. I would plan to run both local and cloud storage in parallel at first and put together a business case which explains clearly why this is a better solution. Have a look at this software. https://www.layer2solutions.com/products/layer2-cloud-connector.

 

RANT Alert - It really annoys me when a BM or the SLT thinks makes these decisions without a plan or any consultation with ICT and this would be the point at which I would start looking for another job.

[gomalley]

I don't like the idea of dump it all, there is far too much that people don't know they need until a certain time of year,

that said we migrated our student facing shares in one weekend the week they closed schools as realised the remote access solution we had had a fault that no one had told us about and we hadn't seen.

 

We have subsequently moved all student home drives and the staff shared drive also onto OneDrive/SharePoint.

 

It was not without the odd glitch, but we did it without compromising security and as currently 98% plus of our users are remote it was the right thing to do to continue functioning (we are trying to support running a full virtual timetable!).

 

That said I have a 200Mb on Gig bearer internet and 10Gig backbone around site with Gig to the desktop, with 2016 HyperV's, so will be increasing internet bandwidth on return but happy that our infrastructure is up to it, so we are in a very different position to you by the sounds of it, I'm lucky to have a school that has long understood the need to invest in IT infrastructure.

[rpwillis]

I've seen a successful migration where the network drive was made read-only. So any new or updated files had to go into the new system, but the files were still available. This meant that people didn't just drag all the old rubbish over. Then there was a date set for removal of the old network drive, which was something like a year away. After that files were still available through backups.

[mullet_man]

We are thinking now our staff are onboard with Teams and working from home, it would be the perfect time to try move our staff share onto SharePoint.

 

We have lots of staff who use our remote server just to access files that are on network shares, when ideally it's best on sharepoint.

[fredbayker]

So how do you go about migrating shared network drives to OneDrive/share point? More specifically, do you use 1 OneDrive/office365 account to host/share files from or do you do it through office365 groups?

 

Thanks

[mavhc]

Our school business manager has just told teaching staff that the school is migrating from using exclusively Windows Server network shares to SharePoint only for file storage in four weeks and he's deleting all of our files on the network drives simultaneously. We are not as I understand it moving to a serverless setup.

 

To my mind this is a suicidal cloud migration strategy. No staff are happy about it not least because there is no period where the two systems run side by side.

 

Our internet connection is provided by LGfL and our network is a fairly ancient Windows 2008 Server setup mostly running on 100mbps infrastructure.

 

I am about to try and explain why I think this is a very bad idea very poorly executed. Your thoughts on this either positive or negative would be appreciated. For those of you who have managed successful cloud migrations, what plan/timescale/essential tools would you advise?

 

Thank you.

 

Wait, why is the SBM doing this? Who's supposed to be doing the migration? What the hell is going on? What's your IT support structure in the school?

[thimon]

@hanmark Please learn from our experience and do not migrate anything multimedia over to SharePoint Online. All our users are now using OneDrive for their homedrives, and all shared drives have been migrated over to SharePoint Online. The exception is one folder on our onsite File Server, which hosts any multimedia file, videos, photographs, photoshop files, etc. We initially migrated everything online, however we quickly found that SharePoint was not fast enough for these files to be accessed efficiently. You also need to plan what document libraries you're going to create in SharePoint, ensure permissions are locked down just like your file server shares, as well as ensuring you're up to date with the technical side of SharePoint and how to support it. Also nothing should be deleted from your file server, the migration should be done in parts, with each share being unshared as and when they're migrated, then the files archived. Are you going to get users to access all the shared areas via a web browser, or are you going to map them to File Explorer? I would say you need to take your time with this kind of project, migrate one file share, ask the users who use that share to now access it via SharePoint and report back after a week or so how they've got on.Take on board staff feedback and report it all back to the SBM, who like others have stated should not be forcing this upon you!

[River]

We are slowly moving as much as we can from file shares to the cloud. You can use tools to find out when something was last accessed - anything over 5 years ago we are removing access and then deleting after a while if no one notices as the files are still in backups. We have setup various Sharepoint sites for department and have moved users home drives to OneDrive. The Sharepoint migration tool is really good for copying data. Staff are using the 'sync' option so the files show like a mapped drive and other than a few teething issues all seem to be happy with the way things are going at the moment

[mrstrong]

I've been thinking about this, but am a bit out of my depth with sharepoint / teams / groups and azure/office365

so wouldn't feel confident rushing into this and then supporting it on top of all my other jobs.

Our file shares are a real mess with huge nesting of folders, duplicate files, inconsistencies in structure

naming conventions etc, etc. I call our main share the skip

(maybe because it's yellow and people dump anything in there ).

 

Found this article very good as a starting point:

https://www.itpromentor.com/understanding-file-server-migrations/

 

and this

https://www.itpromentor.com/sync-server-to-teams/

 

e.g.

They had to completely reorganize their file structure in order to move to SharePoint and Teams, which only supports a maximum of 260 characters for any given file path.

 

Therefore, as Robert Crane points out, your structure needs to be wide and flat, not structured and deep.

[supportman]

We are slowly moving as much as we can from file shares to the cloud. You can use tools to find out when something was last accessed - anything over 5 years ago we are removing access and then deleting after a while if no one notices as the files are still in backups. We have setup various Sharepoint sites for department and have moved users home drives to OneDrive. The Sharepoint migration tool is really good for copying data. Staff are using the 'sync' option so the files show like a mapped drive and other than a few teething issues all seem to be happy with the way things are going at the moment

 

This is pretty much what we have done with our shared drives, i'm interested how the personal drives are on OneDrive though?

[River]

This is pretty much what we have done with our shared drives, i'm interested how the personal drives are on OneDrive though?

 

Used the Sharepoint migration tool to migrate one user area to OneDrive, save the migration and then use that as a template to create a csv to migrate all the rest. Have to ensure that you remove users access to the area their files were before otherwise it all gets a bit confusing!

[mullet_man]

I've started this hopefully am going about it the right way or at least a way that will work and be sustainable in the long run.

 

We have a school Team site setup so I've created a

 

Staff Files Channel

Subject Files Channel

 

Then am going to migrate our general staff files share into the staff files channel - this I will GPO out for all staff to have as part of their Windows Explorer.

 

Subject Files - this will have each subjects documents they save on the file server. This will just need staff to click Sync and sync the folders they require access too, rather than GPO as it would be difficult to manage this.

 

We are already using OneDrive for staff to backup their documents on their laptops so in theory staff should be able to make the transition quite easily.

 

My only worry is speed, how do large files work with SharePoint e.g. video files?

[supportman]

How are people connecting onedrive?

[E_G_R2]

 

My only worry is speed, how do large files work with SharePoint e.g. video files?

 

Have your video's in STREAM and then just a link in your document libraries

[E_G_R2]

How are people connecting onedrive?

 

For our staff who don't desk hop (most of ours) we use the onedrive client and then they sync from the libraries they want to access - this is quicker than using the online libraries and with Office365 office they can collaborate and stuff.

[mullet_man]

Have your video's in STREAM and then just a link in your document libraries

 

That's a good idea, not used document libraries in SharePoint as yet!

[thimon]

Be aware that using Stream is much more time consuming for the user. The end result is great, but if they're just looking to dump a load of video files into a shared area for other users to access this is not what they'll want.

[mavhc]

The issue is you don't want them to sync the videos back to the local drive I assume?

[KK20]

We used sharepoint migration tool to move our existing shared folders straight to new sharepoint document libraries. Then we use iamcloud mapper to map these libraries back to their original drive letters for the users. Users have been told that this method is running for two years then no more mapped drive (this is more to see what didn't work).

 

We also incremental sync BACK to onpremises for a local copy, this delta is nightly though so work can be lost throughout the day. The local copy is not accessible by users.

 

Documents were sync'd to onedrive using normal GPO forced migrate of user documents. This was done in stages with the big heavy document holders run almost on a 1-1 basis so we knew they had migrated. No pupils have huge documents so they were done in IT lessons (the pupil GPO was set to run for users on gpoloopback in the IT rooms). This mostly worked.

 

We don't use a home drive, just "documents" and "desktop". So we also scripted people to have a H: drive mapped to their old mydocuments folder, users could copy from H: to "documents" (now using onedrive). We did this just after Christmas, talk about good timing.

[Phildw]

We used sharepoint migration tool to move our existing shared folders straight to new sharepoint document libraries. Then we use iamcloud mapper to map these libraries back to their original drive letters for the users. Users have been told that this method is running for two years then no more mapped drive (this is more to see what didn't work).

 

We also incremental sync BACK to onpremises for a local copy, this delta is nightly though so work can be lost throughout the day. The local copy is not accessible by users.

 

Documents were sync'd to onedrive using normal GPO forced migrate of user documents. This was done in stages with the big heavy document holders run almost on a 1-1 basis so we knew they had migrated. No pupils have huge documents so they were done in IT lessons (the pupil GPO was set to run for users on gpoloopback in the IT rooms). This mostly worked.

 

We don't use a home drive, just "documents" and "desktop". So we also scripted people to have a H: drive mapped to their old mydocuments folder, users could copy from H: to "documents" (now using onedrive). We did this just after Christmas, talk about good timing.

 

Are you still using IAmCloud? If so how are you finding it? We've had regular issues, and are looking into some kind of alternative.

[mavhc]

You can add sharepoint folders as onedrive syncs via GPO now, it's a bit annoying to use the official gpo,but it just creates 1 reg key. Not great for shared computers though, or if you have >1000 users of a shared drive. Appears in the sidebar, doesn't take up much disk space unless the user syncs files, you can stop that

[thimon]

Are you still using IAmCloud? If so how are you finding it? We've had regular issues, and are looking into some kind of alternative.

 

We’re using IAmCloud. It’s usually works fine as long as the client is up to date, their latest client is really lightweight. We’ve enabled auto debug logging so can easily send user logs to their support team if we have any issues. We’re trying to get users to use the web portal for SharePoint as much as possible, with mapped drives more of a legacy option.