Migration Report: Moving 120GB from Slack to Microsoft Teams
By Michael S.
Case Study – Pure SEO
The Challenge
Following the COVID-19 lockdown, it became abundantly clear to Pure SEO operations and systems manager, Joel Madden, that a Slack to Teams migration would result in cost savings and improved operations.
”The main decider was that we were paying $6,000 a year for Slack as well as the Microsoft licensing fee for the Microsoft suite of products,” said Madden. “However, Slack also had a limitation to the number of people who can be in a call, which especially for calls within the company, didn’t work. We had to use another program called 8×8. We looked at Zoom but the free version had limitations and we didn’t want to pay for another version.”
There were other advantages to cloud consolidation as well.
”We also wanted to trim the fat with the programs, passwords, maintenance of systems and incorporate that into one core product, which was Microsoft 365.,” said Madden.
Pure SEO had about 120 GB in Slack that it wanted to move to Teams, but it wasn’t just about the files hosted within the chat platform.
“How we previously had used Slack was to have each individual client have their own Slack channel, which equated to 820 odd channels,” said Madden. “The most crucial thing for us in this migration was migrating the conversation history and the files associated with those channels….We used the channel as a communication file locker as well so client NDAs, contracts and all that stuff was stored in that channel.”
Migrating conversation history proved to be a challenge as other providers were either inexperienced, costly or would only export the conversations as an HTML file.
“We actually looked at number of other solutions. Our external sourced IT team we approached initially had never done a Slack to Teams migration so they weren’t super comfortable and couldn’t guarantee they could carry everything over,” said Madden. “We then approached other vendors that quoted us [a large amount] for the project and secondly they could only guarantee they would extract the conversations from Slack to an HTML and upload it to the appropriate channel in Teams.”
The AvePoint Solution
That’s when Madden came across AvePoint’s FLY solution and began to consider doing the migration himself.
“I searched online, found FLY and jumped on a free trial. It did exactly what we needed it to do,” said Madden. “It was the more cost-effective option, the documentation was clear and being able to not have the history as an HTML attachment, but to populate the destination Teams with the record of the conversation rather than having everyone in the office having to go back and view a HTML file was huge.”
During the discovery phase Madden used both internal Slack functionality as well as FLY’s capabilities.
“I primarily used the Slack analytics tool to determine the last usage of a channel to reduce the number of channels that needed to be migrated, but we still used AvePoint’s pre-migration report in the discovery and end phases to make sure everything aligned and matched from Slack to Teams,” he said.
Even though Madden had never done a Slack to Teams migration, he found the process to be straightforward and intuitive with FLY.
“Personally, I had never used Teams or FLY before. I had never considered what would be involved in migration from Slack to Teams. But just playing around in the free trial worked. The user interface in FLY was straightforward and easy to use. The associated documentation was easy to read as well.”
The Bottom Line
As a result of this effort, Pure SEO consolidated their cloud footprint, while shaving off $6,000 from their annual IT budget.
Not only was Madden able to avoid more expensive options, but he ensured the company had access to the full context of conversations and chats that surrounded their critical business files.
His advice to others considering a Slack to Teams migration:
“If you have a large amount of data or channels, don’t do it all in one go. Do it in smaller batches. The first time I tried to migrate all 800 channels it failed,” said Madden. “My recommendation is to do 10 to 20 channels at a time and if a channel does fail to migrate its easier to track and understand why.”
Pure SEO
Pure SEO is one of the largest independent digital marketing agencies in APAC and a Google Premier Partner. The company helps other companies with their online search rankings, content production and adword strategy. They have 76 users and are based out of Auckland, New Zealand.
Read the full case study here.
By Michael S.
Michael is AvePoint's former director of content and communications.
View all posts by Michael S.
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