Getting an Edge with Your Box Migration So It’s Efficient, Fast and Focused

Getting an Edge with Your Box Migration So It’s Efficient, Fast and Focused

by | May 8, 2019 | Content Migration, ECM

It’s all about how to transition data fast and securely with minimal downtime or disruption to the organization and employees. But that’s much easier said than done in most environments – especially when you start thinking about the scale of content to be migrated and what’s technically required to make content “discoverable” through search so users can locate their documents quickly.

If you’ve been following our blog series, you know about our migration-center and how it was designed to overcome many of these challenges. We’re now taking our expertise in migrations to help companies restructure and migrate their enterprise content to the Box Cloud through our upgraded version of the Box connector. Our mantra? Make it easy. Make it painless. The migration-center can connect and scan documents from over 140+ migration paths to migrate large volumes of content from any system to Box. You’re thinking “wow” but what exactly does that mean? It means the migration-center with its powerful transformation rules takes care of where and how the documents ends up in Box Cloud when it moves over.

The Ins and Outs of Migrating to Box

Data migration is arguably the most overlooked part of a change initiative. That’s because it’s labor intensive, repetitive and requires meticulous attention to every minute detail. And it assumes that the data you have to migrate is clean.

Here is what you need to plan for in order to migrate to Box Cloud and take full advantage of its functionality. Consider:

  • Metadata: The metadata helps categorize content and helps to retrieve the content easily. You’ll have custom data associated with your files that need to be imported so you’ll want to be sure your metadata is accurate and up to date. If you don’t have metadata defined now, it will be a good opportunity to set them when importing.
  • Tags: This gives users the ability to mark, sort and easily search for related files. Very often, the originating content might not have sufficient custom metadata specific to how an individual user would like to search. You may want to tag the content based on how the user community would like to search using some keywords.
  • Comments: Often discounted when you migrate from one system to another, forcing you to lose the trail of changes when you omit comments. Plan to include the comments during migration into Box.
  • Collaborator roles: In Box Cloud, you’ll have full controls to set permissions. You can set permissions for users and groups to files and folders, similar to access control list. You may either bring in the same permission set that the source system has or you can set a different permission sets that are defined in the Box.
  • Versions: The source system might have multiple versions of the documents in different lifecycle states. Decide which versions or which state of the documents that you want to migrate. Sometimes, you may not want to bring all the drafts and just bring the important content to Box Cloud.
  • Tasks: There might be documents in pending workflows with some users having tasks in their Inbox. Consider creating tasks for those documents while importing them so that users will have the tasks created in the Inbox of their target system once migrated.
Many organizations moving to Box Cloud plan for all of the benefits of an enterprise-class content management platform that offers a single place to manage and share content. What’s not to like? It’s easy to deploy, it has a graphical user interface (which always gets people hooked), and it sure beats most platforms in terms of collaboration and document versioning, which is essential for compliance and internal tracking. But excitement can quickly turn to despair if organizations don’t plan in advance to take full advantage of what Box offers and have a way to get their data into the system fast.

more on migrating to box

BoxWorks – From the perspective of a Life Sciences Consultant

BoxWorks – From the perspective of a Life Sciences Consultant

by | Sep 26, 2018 | Content Migration, ECM, Life Sciences

Let me start with a quick summary of the highlights:

Box Feed (available as Beta)
Box feeds allow you to get a stream of activities happening in the shared folders which the user can access. This is a nice collaboration function as are you are seeing the content of your coworkers directly in the stream. This has been missing for a while and Box is now delivering a first iteration with the possibility for you to comment on the documents.

Activity Streams and Recommended apps (2019)
With this feature Box is now tracking the way the content is flowing within other cloud systems, so that co-workers can follow all the steps that have happened with the document along the way. For example, if you add a box document to a certain account in Salesforce and afterwards sign it with DocuSign, box users will see these actions as activities with the possibility of directly accessing the content or associated activity within these applications. Integrations with custom applications are possible here as well.

Box Automation (2019)
Box automation is a workflow/rules engine which will allow business users to automate content processes directly within the Box platform. There are a lot of possibilities with this new functionality from simple workflow approvals to slightly more complex processes. There are certain events available which can trigger the flow of your content, and the possibility of selecting from a number of possible actions. There are currently some mockups available but no beta version yet.

Box for GSuite (available as Beta)
Box is one of the first cloud providers to allow integration into the three big content creation/editing platforms. It now has deep integration into Microsoft Office 365, into Apple IWork and with this latest edition now with GSuite as well, allowing users to pick their favorite tool for content editing.

Box Skills / Box Custom Skills
Box Skills allows you to analyze and process content files. It consists of a UI part to display metadata and it also allows service providers to create custom skills. Custom Skills can extract information from audio, image and video files. There will be an SDK made available by the end of the year which will allow to extract and pull in any additional information as skill data which can be used for metadata and content retrieval.

Box Shield (later in 2018)
Box improves the security platform even more with the new Box Shield. For example, it allows you to prevent downloads of content with a certain classification, so that you can configure that only a set of users can access the document. It can also detect downloads of a large amount of folders and documents at once and will generate an alarm. Or it will detect a login attempt from another country.

Other Product enhancements
Box has integrated the ability to activate 2FA for external users. This is very important for larger companies to ensure enhanced security.

These are all great services and enhancements and create a global collaboration and work platform, inter-connecting activities and systems of daily importance to the users.

But how does that fit into core Life Sciences processes?

At the conference there was a separate track with several Life Sciences sessions offered which helped to catch a good glimpse of the current situation.

One of the big items was the GxP Validation package for Box that was announced beginning of the year (Box GxP Validation).
This service package turns any Box instance into a validated platform which can host validated content management applications. Whereas non-regulated processes have been supported before, this now additionally allows for the coverage of regulated processes.

More specifically, this package covers the following aspects:

  • Audit – Quality Management System: Box QMS Documentation and SOPs built on GAMP5 and ISO9001 standards
  • Validate – Validation Accelerator Pack (VAP): Validation lifecycle documentation and tools to make the Box instance GxP-compliant
  • Maintain – Always-on Testing: Daily automated testing reports on nearly 150 tests of Box functionality at the API layer; creates daily reports and artifacts for customers and audits

This definitely provides a good starting point for the deeper use of the platform in the Life Sciences industry, but will only be of value in combination with the robust regulated document management functionalities. In this regard, the message by Box is clear: Box does provide a hosted Core platform, industry use-cases and how to add additional business value through extended functionality and applications is in the hands of the customer and Box technology partners.

In comparison with OpenText Documentum Content Management capabilities there are still some gaps such as the management of document renditions (specifically PDF formats) or the management of virtual documents and relationships. But with API and Web Services the spectrum of possible implementations (and maybe “workarounds” as needed) is large and highly extensible.

Additional benefits on smaller effort scale can be achieved by just adding-on Box to the Core platforms; whether it is used as a publishing platform for Effective documents, as Collaboration platform for In-Progress documents internally but also with external partners (taking advantage of integrations with core business applications), or whether it is to take advantage of the Skills framework to allow the classification of documents before processing them within your Content Management platform (and by that relieving your business users of some of these classification tasks). Several of the vendors at the conference who are involved with the Life Sciences industry have discussed and demoed these kind of integrations to increase the value of their already existing applications.

Overall, Box offers a great set of functionality and is creating a widely integrated work environment for users – a foundation for the “Future of Work”. It does not replace a feature-rich regulated Content Management platform such as OpenText Documentum at this point, but does offer a great platform for integrating business applications.

We are excited to be able to support our clients who are leveraging this platform. Our first focus area is on content migrations and we are happy to announce that an extension of our Box Importer for migration-center will be available in Q4, with newly added key functionalities such as custom metadata, versioning and security support.