Newly created OSPO from Strasbourg (FR) is reaching out to the community!
We are currently studying some opensource alternatives to Sharepoint and one major question is how to migrate data from Sharepoint to another solution. This is actually 2 problems:
how to export data from Sharepoint?
how to transform it and import it to another solution?
We know we are currently many users of Sharepoint facing this issue and that’s why we are reaching out to you to suggest some collaboration on this. We could develop our own process of extracting our custom data but it would obviously be more interesting to think collectively about a generic solution that could help a lot of users.
So if you’ve already considered this topic or are interested in joining our efforts, please let us know!
Thanks for sharing your concerns here. Let’s be honest, this is kind of a big challenge you’re facing. I’ve personally never faced such an issue, and never heard of it inside our community. However, I do know some French companies who may have done this type of migration. I’ll ping my contact with the link to your post.
I agree with Florent, that’s quite a challenge you are describing here !
I have no idea about how to migrate away from Sharepoint, but I was wondering if you already identified an alternative solution for Sharepoint ?
As for the file sharing aspects of Sharepoint, an obvious alternative is Nextcloud but I am sure there are many others to consider.
Regarding Nextcloud we are also deploying an instance but it is not for the same use case. The alternative to Sharepoint is more dedicated to collaborative spaces where Nextcloud is more dedicated to file sharing and editing.
I’m from XWiki. Depending on what you use Sharepoint for, Wikis are also good solution for collaboratively sharing information (including files) and create interactive web sites.
We at XWiki SAS have created XWiki (https://www.xwiki.org) which does a great job at that. It can help create interactive web sites, wiki pages with plenty of macros, embed office files and can be integrated with OnlyOffice or Collabora to allow editing. There are no great migration tools however.
For creating collaborative drives, which is more what Nextcloud also allows, CryptPad also provides an interesting solution (also developed by XWiki SAS).
I have to say I was a bit surprised with your suggestion because I haven’t thought of a wiki as a truly extensive collaborative space. But having a look at what XWiki offers is really convincing! It will suppose a change in our habits but we could gain a lot from having a more structured knowledge base. Unfortunately it came a bit late in our sourcing and I’ve informed my colleagues but I don’t know how this will be handled. Anyway I’ll have a closer look at XWiki, especially because I know you’re involved in quite a lot in the FOSS ecosystem.
Some of the solutions you listed are open core. So depending on your use case, you will end up with proprietary software.
Over 20 years ago, I discovered Tiki, joined the community and started contributing.
Tiki is 100% Open Source and one of the main contributors lives in Strasbourg. It has tons of features, including a database web app generator (which can replace SharePoint Lists).
