Migrating data to and from Office 365 was a hot topic at Microsoft's Ignite conference in Chicago last week.

Nintex and Sharegate jumped in on the conversation with a partnership that focuses on the SharePoint connection. The new solution enables enterprises to move workflows and forms between versions of SharePoint and from on-premises versions of SharePoint to SharePoint in Office 365. 

To learn more, CMSWire sat down with Simon De Baene, CEO of Sharegate, and Ryan Duguid, vice president of product at Nintex.

Combined Expertise

Montreal-based Sharegate helps businesses migrate information from SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive for Business. It boasts a client-base of more than 10,000 organizations.

Nintex is a Bellevue, Wash.-based company that helps businesses automate workflows in the cloud, on-premises and on mobile devices. (Workflows help businesses move the right content to the right people at the right time.)

The two companies partnered largely because of Microsoft, which has been talking up a storm about moving to Office 365, particularly over the past year.

De Baene and Duguid claim their combined expertise will help companies do exactly that in a way that their competitors can’t manage. As Nintex's recommended partner, Sharegate customers will be able to move workloads into Office 365 without loss of data components like metadata, business logic and security.

The partnership will also enable them to streamline processes on and between SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online. 

"The goal was to get a [workflow automation] product out there that takes people beyond what is available out of the box in Office 365, beyond what’s in SharePoint Designer," Duguid said. "To do that, we said we’d evolve our product to the point that all of our on-premises technology and comes with all the same features and functions."

Before this, he explained, "we had a lot of people that were in Office 365 to some extent or other. Now we have gotten to the point where our Office 365 migration tools have the same level of functionality as of our on-premises tools for migration."

With enhancements to such things as approvals, content generation and field data collection, Nintex Workflow for Office 365 enables users to automate business critical processes in Microsoft Office 365, he said. 

Duguid added that this can mean migrating more than 10,000 workflows. By partnering with Sharegate, they worked out a way to migrate Nintex workflow and Nintex forms to Office 365.

Working Together

De Baene said the two companies want to bring their technology offerings to the same level so they’ll be in lockstep with each other as the partnership develops. He added that Sharegate "invested a massive part of its velocity" to make the partnership happen.

The development teams of both companies are working closely together. "Our teams are talking to each other every day. They build the product together so every time there is a bug or a complication they fix it,” De Baene said.

Meanwhile, in a separate announcement earlier this week, Sharegate said that it will offer support from the new Office 365 Migration API unveiled during Ignite. The protocol released last week allows for unprecedented speed to transfer data to Office 365.

Sharegate said it a statement that is now able to move data from any SharePoint version to Office 365 using what it describes as Insane Mode. Insane Mode lifts barriers larger organizations had to populating cloud and hybrid SharePoint environments with large volume of data and quickly.