A Files.com site migration automatically moves over all of the files, users, groups, and group memberships from your SmartFile site to your new Files.com site. Whenever possible, other settings, such as notification rules, retention rules and links are also automatically moved over and migrated for you.

If you're migrating from a Normal SmartFile site, the automatic migration should provide a site that is ready for you immediately. Customers upgrading from a HyperPrivacy Mode SmartFile site will need to perform more work to configure their new Files.com site.

User Accounts

Your users are copied to the Files.com site with their passwords, SSH Keys, API Keys, and Two-factor Authentication (2FA) intact. All users are copied, including disabled user accounts. All of the existing forms of authentication will work immediately after migration.

While API Keys are copied to your Files.com site, they can only be used with the Files.com API, not with the legacy SmartFile API. If you are relying upon the SmartFile API for your business needs, please contact us for guidance in migrating to the Files.com API.

User Roles

The Files.com Platform does not support a concept of User Roles, but some existing Roles on SmartFile are used during the migration process to determine the permissions of individual users on the Files.com platform. Other roles are not used by the automatic migration.

The Customer Success team is happy to help configure your users in the way that makes the most sense for how you will use Files.com.

Self-management Role

Users who are not assigned to a role that allows self-management (change their profile information such as display name, password, email, timezone, etc.) are designated Shared/Bot Users in Files.com.

Site Management Role

Users who were assigned to a role that allowed access to site administration and billing in SmartFile are designated Site administrators in Files.com. Site administrators have complete access to your entire Files.com site and can configure any of the site settings.

Files.com uses a separate permission to grant users Billing Administrator access to your site, which allows them to view and pay invoices but does not grant any control over site settings. Because SmartFile commingled the two concepts into the site management role capability, you may wish to "demote" an imported user from site administrator (complete access) to a billing administrator (limited access).

FTP/SFTP Access Role

SmartFile roles include flags to enable access via unencrypted FTP and access via encrypted FTP or SFTP. Files.com uses a slightly different methodology for granting access to FTP and SFTP, which can be allowed for individual users or for user groups. Files.com offers a flag that provides access to FTP (regardless of encryption), and another flag that provides access to SFTP.

These access grants are migrated in a way to ensure that all users maintain their existing level of connectivity. Any user with the SFTP permission grant will be granted both SFTP and FTP(S) access on Files.com. You can modify this after the migration is completed.

Automation Management (Access The Notification Section) Role Setting

Assigning users the equivalent of this access is not included in your automatic migration.

On Files.com, administration rights can be granted on a per-folder basis using the folder admin delegation. Consider granting these Folder Admin permissions to users on certain folders as appropriate. If a user only needs to configure notifications for their own user account and does not need to create any automations that act upon files, you can grant them History permissions for a folder instead of making them a folder admin.

Activity Management (Access the Activity Section) Role Setting

On Files.com, access to file activity history can be granted on a per-folder by assigning the History permission. Your users are not automatically assigned the History permission as part of your migration. A site administrator can grant the permission to users or groups after your migration.

File Upload Limits and File Upload Extension Role Setting

While SmartFile assigned upload limitations to roles, Files.com implements extension limits on a per-folder, rather than per-User basis. This allows for more flexibility and different limitations when users are acting in multiple contexts.

Site administrators can add File extension requirements on folders if you require them, or you can grant users folder admin rights on appropriate folders and allow them to configure those settings.

Delegated User Management Role Settings

In order to manage users on Files.com, a user needs to be a Site administrator. Group Admins can also create new users for their groups, but cannot reset passwords or do any other type of management.

Assigning users the equivalent of this access is not included in your automatic migration. Users who were able to change your site's settings on SmartFile are copied to your Files.com site as site administrators. You will need to grant site administrator rights to any user who must manage other users.

SSO Must Be Re-Configured

SSO, SCIM, and LDAP integrations are supported on Files.com, but are not automatically migrated. Customers will need to reconfigure their SSO, SCIM, and LDAP integrations and re-map existing users to the SSO strategy. This affects a small number of customers, and our support team is happy to help with this process.

User Groups

All user groups from your SmartFile site are copied to your Files.com site, including all of the memberships.

File access assigned to groups using a Normal SmartFile site is assigned as permissions to the groups within Files.com. If, instead, your site was using HyperPrivacy Mode, files and folders shared with SmartFile Groups are not migrated, and you will need to configure the permissions within Files.com.

Relocated Files

Files.com is a case-insensitive platform, but SmartFile is case-sensitive. Because SmartFile uses case-sensitive filenames, it was possible to have multiple items within a folder that differ only by capitalization.

For example, in SmartFile, you might have a Departments folder that contained two folders - Sales and SALES. In Files.com, the Sales and SALES folders would be considered duplicates. Similarly, in Files.com, uploading a file named spreadsheet.xlsx and then uploading another file named spreadsheet.XLSX would be considered an overwrite of the first file.

All of your files and folders are copied to your new Files.com site during the migration process, but because of any duplicate names caused by case-sensitivity, files and folders may be renamed or moved. When a duplicate name is detected within a folder, the name will be updated with a suffix to make it unique.

Let's look at an example of this. In the Departments/SALES and Departments/Sales scenario, this could result in one of the folders being renamed to result in Departments/Sales and Departments/SALES_1. If there were also a folder named sales in the Departments folder, you'd have a third entry for Departments/sales_2.

What happens to the files that were in those folders? They will be combined into the de-duplicated folder. If I have a folder named Departments/Sales which contains spreadsheet.xlsx and spreadsheet.XLSX and I have another folder named Departments/SALES which contains spreadsheet.xlsx, then all 3 files (with two of them renamed) would be found under the folder that doesn't get renamed.

After your migration, all of the files in your SmartFile site will have been copied to your Files.com site. The files may be renamed to ensure the filenames are unique after the migration. Duplicated folder names will be renamed to make them unique.

Share Links

The Files.com equivalent of SmartFile Links is the Share Links feature, and your existing links are available as Share Links within Files.com. SmartFile used a separate domain for links, but Files.com serves them using the same domain as your site; we have found that this reduces confusion for link recipients and helps to foster trust that your securely shared files are secure.

New Share Links created in your Files.com site will use the same domain as your web interface, and will start with https://[subdomain].files.com/f/ . The existing URLs beginning with https://file.ac/ will continue to work after the migration. We will seamlessly redirect them to the new URL.

Links migrated as part of a HyperPrivacy Mode migration will work as expected for the recipients. However, if a user created a link for items that were shared with that user, the user won't be able to immediately access the contents of that link until you complete the post-migration steps to provide access to previously-shared items.

Share Link Notifications

On SmartFile, you could define a notification rule to send an email whenever any link or a specific link was accessed by a web visitor. Files.com does not support this in our Notifications, but we offer multiple notification options for Share Links. After your migration, you can update your Share Link settings to send notifications for activities with your links.

Notifications

On Files.com, Notifications and Automations are separate concepts. The Automation Rule type providing email notification on SmartFile is transformed into a Notification on Files.com during the migration process. We seamlessly map the majority of the notification capabilities available on SmartFile.

Email notifications on SmartFile are triggered by file actions (upload, download, copy, move, and delete) on a Path, by a User, or by a Group, and this behavior is preserved during the migration to Files.com. If you have selected to only send notifications on specific actions, the limits to those specific actions are preserved on Files.com.

Email notifications on SmartFile are optionally recursive or non-recursive (i.e. trigger on operations child folders), and this behavior is preserved during the migration to Files.com.

Email notifications on SmartFile may be optionally delayed or batched into certain intervals. This capability is largely preserved during the migration to Files.com. However, there is one small change. Files.com only supports the following batch windows: Every 5 minutes, Every 15 minutes, Hourly, and Daily. We will map your configured batch interval into a supported window based on choosing the interval that is closest to the batch interval you've selected on SmartFile.

SmartFile supported additional triggers for sending email notifications of non-file activity. These were very rarely used by customers for production workflows and we are taking this opportunity to sunset the availability of these unused triggers. They are: User Login, User Logout, User Create, User Edit, User Removal, Group Create, Group Edit, Group Removal, and Link (Share Link) Read/Access. You will no longer receive an email notification when these non-file actions occur.

Branding and Custom Domain

Your site's logo and login page splash image are automatically copied to your migrated site. Files.com does not support custom CSS to customize your web interface, but you can configure your new site colors to match your brand.

If you are using a custom domain with SmartFile, it will be automatically migrated to Files.com. Files.com automatically provisions custom SSL certificates for all custom domains, so your custom domain will work perfectly with FTPS. If you have a custom domain, we will assign you two dedicated IP addresses just for your site.

Files.com supports custom SSL certificates. If you were already using a custom SSL certificate with SmartFile, it will be seamlessly migrated to Files.com.

Security Settings

Your site's security settings are copied to Files.com during the migration. This includes settings for whether all share links must have a password, whether users are required to enable two-factor authentication and password policy requirements. Files.com offers more expressive control over password policies than SmartFile, and we encourage you to review and optimize these settings.

Unencrypted FTP Connections

Support for unencrypted FTP is automatically disabled on your new Files.com site. As a best practice, we recommend leaving this setting disabled. However, we know that many SmartFile customers rely upon unencrypted FTP connections. You can enable unencrypted FTP access for your migrated site to allow legacy clients to connect.

Webhooks

Webhooks are not migrated automatically from SmartFile to Files.com. Site Administrators and folder admins can create webhooks to meet practically any scenario with very little setup.

Meet With Customer Success

Our Customer Success team is eager to assist with any questions you have from your migration. Our Success Architects will work to understand your business needs to guide you through the transition. This includes helping with specific administration tasks and helping you to adopt the many powerful features your Files.com site offers you.