My journey on converting Attachment to Files in Salesforce

Everyone know that soon Salesforce will remove related list of Attachment & Note in Page Layout(implementation expected in Winter'18). This is indicate that we should start using Salesforce Files that have better features especially for sharing.

I started researching on this exercise somewhere in 2016 and I feel very grateful that I found a very good tool developed by Douglas C. Ayers.I have been testing the tool  in my organization and thanks to him because this app helps a lot of organization 😃.

I am writing here to share experience. I am happy to inform that we completed our conversion successfully.These are few steps that perhaps you find it useful.Bear in mind that this approach may not suitable for you.Please do some research before implementing it.

1. Refresh UAT with the latest Production data , install the app and run a lot of testing till you gain confidence.We hit the Content Publication Limits Exceeded which is annoying because we know our total Attachment is not even reach 200000.So we called Salesforce and it turned up they set it to 25 000 as default.So it's good to give them a call if you know that you should not hit the limit.
2. Install to Production and make sure your setting it based on your need.
3. Before we run , we need to plan conversion properly and to do so we need a report.Data loader can be used to retrieve it.I found that converting to Excel is very useful.Basically you may want to know how many object that have Attachment ,how many Attachment that we need to convert,ParentId etc. The simple query like below might be helpful

Select Id,ParentId,Parent.Type,OwnerId ,Owner.IsActive from Attachment

4. I just get complicated by creating visual force which is something like below.I labeled ParentType as 'Unknown' if the field value is null. 
5. Decide which object that we want to convert, we may want to skip Unknown or 00X.Also we might want to put the sequence on which object that we should convert first.I prefer this approach because we can easily reduce the risk if something went wrong.We might want to start converting the object that has less Attachment first.

Object	Total Attachment	Need to convert	Sequence	Converted	Remark
Opportunity	7366	Y	5
Unknown	3121	N	NA
Strategy	13693	Y	5
EmailMessage	386	N	NA
Marketing Support	524	Y	2
Account	1055	Y	3
Case	95	Y	2
00X	49	N	NA
Operation	1	Y	1
Solution	136	Y	2
Contact	91	Y	1
Project	52	Y	1
Contract	16	Y	1
Lead	95	Y	2
Conga	35	N	NA
Account Plan	4	Y	1
Campaign	7	Y	1



6. Before start converting in Production, communicate with user.Ensure that they are aware on what happen to their Attachment and educate them about Files related list that they are going to see  in Page Layout once the conversion is completed.
7. I copy ParentId  from the  query in previous step and use Excel to remove duplicate.For example, I copy ParentId of Opportunity and paste it into Excel and remove duplicate.We want to have unique parentId. As you can see, instead of running automate conversion for all, I manually paste the ParentId per object.
   
8. Once the job is completed, I manually remove Attachment related list from Page Layout and replace it with Files related list.This will avoid user to keep uploading old Attachment in future.
9. The job is faster that I expected. Once it completed, I checked Convert Attachment to Files log just in case there an error.Luckily we faced no error.
10. Once I finished converted all of Attachment for object that we planned, I go to option Automate Conversion and run the schedule job in case there  old Attachment left over. We decided to run the schedule until end of this year.


That's all. I hope you find this tips helpful.