The Schoolbox Self-Hosted to Cloud migration process is straightforward, with typically approximately 2-3 hours of work required by the school to prepare to migrate. Throughout the migration process, your Schoolbox Engagement Manager and the Schoolbox Infrastructure Team provide full support and guidance to ensure a smooth transition to Schoolbox Cloud for your school.
Schoolbox has migrated 100+ schools to Schoolbox Cloud, and overall 130+ schools using Schoolbox Cloud as at April 2026 across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, MENA and Europe. Below outlines the high level steps of the migration process:
- Get in touch with your School Engagement Manager to initiate your Cloud Migration discussion. Your SEM will be able to provide high level information around timelines, costs and organise a time to meet with a representative from the Schoolbox Infrastructure Team if you have any specific more technical questions you would like answered. You find the contact details for your SEM and book a time to meet with them via My Schoolbox.
- When you are happy to proceed, your SEM will provide you with a formal Quote and Statement of Works for signing via our PandaDoc document signing system.
- Upon receipt of signed paperwork, your Cloud Migration project will be handed over to the Infrastruture Team for actioning and a Zendesk Cloud Migration Ticket raised. The handover typically takes 1-3 business days.
- When handover is complete, a representative from the Infrastruture Team will review your Schoolbox Instance setup and configuration to determine the neccessary steps to complete the migration to Schoolbox Cloud. The includes DNS record updates for A, CNAME, SPF and DKIM records, and can also include updates to your Schoolbox SSO configuration (if using LDAP), and your firewall (if using Synergetic Self-Hosted). In some instances schools may need to work with Digistorm to make corresponding updates to their Digistorm App Authentication configuration. Each school is provided with instructions customised for their specific Schoolbox configuration by the Infrasture Team, however further general information is also available on Schoolbox Help.
- At the same time as Step 4, the Infrastruture Team begins the file upload process from your server to Schoolbox Cloud. This process is invisible to users and can take anywhere from one day to one month depending on the amount of data stored in your Schoolbox Instance and your schools internet connectivity. Typically this takes 3-4 days to complete, at which time your self-hosted Schoolbox instance is cut over to using our Cloud File System. As previously mentioned, this process is invisible to users and at this stage all processing, web traffic serving and the MySQL database remains running on your self-hosted server.
- When the file upload is complete, and the school has complete any steps required at their end, the Infrastructure Team provide a booking link for the school to choose a cut over time that best suits their community. The allocated time for each cut over is one hour, however typical production outages are 15-20 minutes. Popular times to book cut overs include school holidays, student free days and after school timeslots throughout the term. All cut over steps are completed by the Schoolbox Infrastructure Team and upon successfully bringing online your instance in Schoolbox Cloud, we shut down your self-hosted Schoolbox virtual machine to ensure that only one instance is active at once.
- When the cut over is complete, the Schoolbox Infrastructure Team confirms the migration has been successful via the Zendesk ticket and provides steps to finalise the DNS configuration post-migration and cleanup your self-hosted Soolbox virtual machine.