migrationcollaborationdata

How to Migrate VR-Based Collaboration Data When a Vendor Shuts Down Their Service

UUnknown

2026-02-13

10 min read

A practical playbook with checklist and scripts to export chat logs, session recordings, docs, and user mappings from a discontinued VR collaboration service.

Your VR collaboration data is at risk — here’s a practical export and migration playbook

Hook: Vendors can shut down with short notice. If your team used Workrooms or a similar VR collaboration service, chat logs, session recordings, shared documents, and user mappings can become inaccessible overnight. This guide gives a prioritized checklist, verification steps, and ready-to-run scripts to export and preserve that data so your team can continue work elsewhere.

Why this matters in 2026

Vendor-managed VR and metaverse productivity services faced heavy consolidation in late 2025 and early 2026. Major providers announced shutdowns and shifts in strategy; notably Workrooms was discontinued with a deadline in February 2026. That trend accelerated enterprise interest in data portability, open XR standards (OpenXR, WebXR), and storage-first exit plans. If you don’t act quickly when a provider announces an exit, you risk losing irreplaceable meeting artifacts, compliance records, and IP embedded in 3D scenes or session telemetry.

Inverted-pyramid summary — act now

Immediate (0–48 hours): Freeze deletion policies, request bulk exports from the vendor, enable vendor webhook/event replay, start exports for chat and metadata.
Short-term (3–14 days): Export session recordings and 3D assets, run integrity checks, upload to durable object storage (S3/Cold Blob/MinIO), produce a canonical manifest.
Medium-term (2–6 weeks): Map user identities to your Identity Provider (IdP) via SCIM, transform exported formats for new tooling, and automate ingestion into replacement apps.
Long-term: Archive compressed raw captures to cold storage with checksums and retention policies; implement integration patterns to avoid future lock-in.

Quick checklist: Priorities when a VR vendor shuts down

Confirm the shutdown date and any official export APIs or admin portals.
Preserve administrative access and API keys; rotate keys only after exports complete.
Disable auto-deletion policies and message retention purge jobs.
Start streaming live events (webhooks) to your own collector immediately.
Bulk export chat logs and attachments to newline-delimited JSON (JSONL) with metadata.
Export shared documents in their source format plus PDF and plaintext where possible.
Export session recordings including video, spatial audio, and pose/telemetry streams.
Export user mappings (user_id, email, display_name, external_id) and role assignments.
Create manifest files with checksums (sha256) and file-level metadata.
Verify exports end-to-end and store copies in at least two locations: cloud and offline/offsite.

Before you export: governance, legal, and technical prep

Legal & compliance: Confirm retention obligations for PII, recordings, and cross-border transfer rules. Place legal holds if required.
Access & credentials: Inventory admin accounts, service accounts, and OAuth apps. Capture refresh tokens and expiry windows.
Storage targets: Choose durable targets: AWS S3 with versioning and Glacier, Azure Blob Archive, GCP Coldline, or on-prem MinIO. Ensure encryption at rest and in transit.
Manifest & audits: Define a manifest schema to record file checksums, export timestamps, source IDs, and signer info for chain-of-custody. Consider automating metadata extraction and manifest generation (metadata automation).

Example manifest schema (JSON)

{
  'export_id': 'workrooms-export-2026-02-10',
  'source_service': 'workrooms',
  'exported_at': '2026-02-10T14:12:00Z',
  'files': [
    { 'path': 'chat/room-1234-20260210.jsonl.gz', 'sha256': '...', 'size': 1234567 },
    { 'path': 'recordings/session-5678.mp4', 'sha256': '...', 'size': 987654321 }
  ]
}

Exporting chat logs reliably

Chat is often the most business-critical artifact: decisions, commitments, and links live there. The export should preserve message IDs, thread parents, reactions, attachments, and timestamps in UTC.

Format recommendation

Use newline-delimited JSON (JSONL) for streaming export and later ingestion.
Include a canonical message schema: message_id, room_id, parent_id, user_id, user_display, text, attachments[], reactions[], created_at, edited_at.
Compress output with gzip and produce sha256 checksums.

Python example: streaming chat export to S3

This example demonstrates paginated API retrieval, gzip streaming, and upload to S3. It uses single-quoted strings to make embedding in JSON easier.

import requests
import gzip
import json
import boto3
from io import BytesIO

API_BASE = 'https://api.vendor.example/v1'
TOKEN = 'REDACTED_TOKEN'
S3_BUCKET = 'my-vr-exports'

s3 = boto3.client('s3')

def fetch_messages(room_id):
    cursor = None
    while True:
        params = {'limit': 500}
        if cursor:
            params['cursor'] = cursor
        r = requests.get(f'{API_BASE}/rooms/{room_id}/messages', headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + TOKEN}, params=params, timeout=30)
        r.raise_for_status()
        batch = r.json()
        for m in batch['items']:
            yield {
                'message_id': m['id'],
                'room_id': room_id,
                'user_id': m['user']['id'],
                'user_display': m['user']['display_name'],
                'text': m.get('text'),
                'attachments': m.get('attachments', []),
                'reactions': m.get('reactions', []),
                'created_at': m['created_at'],
                'edited_at': m.get('edited_at')
            }
        cursor = batch.get('next_cursor')
        if not cursor:
            break


def upload_room(room_id):
    buf = BytesIO()
    with gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buf, mode='w') as gz:
        for msg in fetch_messages(room_id):
            gz.write((json.dumps(msg) + '\n').encode('utf-8'))
    buf.seek(0)
    s3.put_object(Bucket=S3_BUCKET, Key=f'chat/{room_id}.jsonl.gz', Body=buf)

# usage
# upload_room('room-1234')

Tips

Respect rate limits — implement exponential backoff and retries.
Download attachments in parallel and replace attachment URLs with your stored S3 links in the exported message JSON.
Capture edits and deletions as separate events so you preserve history.

Exporting shared documents and whiteboards

Shared docs and whiteboards are often stored as proprietary blobs plus export-friendly formats. Try to export the original source format, a flattened PDF, and a machine-readable JSON or SVG if available.

Automated approach

Use vendor export APIs to request bulk document dumps. If the vendor provides download links, script downloads and verify checksums.
For whiteboards and 3D scenes, export both the 2D render and the scene graph (glTF, USDZ, or other supported formats).
Convert proprietary formats using headless exporters or containerized tools where available.

rclone quick-sync example

# configure rclone remote 'vendor' to point to vendor export endpoint or S3-compatible bucket
rclone sync vendor:exports/my-org/docs s3:my-vr-exports/docs --progress

Exporting session recordings, telemetry, and 3D assets

Session recordings are both large and complex: they may contain stereo/ambisonic audio, screen shares, encoded head/hand pose streams, and raw sensor telemetry. Export everything, then create lighter derivatives for quick review.

Recording export checklist

Video files (MP4/WebM) — export originals and transcode to a 720p review version.
Spatial audio — capture as WAV or FLAC; keep ambisonic channels if present (low-latency audio considerations matter here).
Pose/telemetry — export as newline-delimited JSON or Parquet with participant id, timestamp, position, orientation, button inputs.
Scene assets — glTF, USD, FBX files; preserve texture maps and materials.

ffmpeg transcode example

# transcode large MP4 to review MP4
ffmpeg -i session-original.mp4 -vf 'scale=1280:-2' -c:v libx264 -preset fast -crf 23 -c:a aac session-review.mp4

Telemetry export schema (example)

{
  'ts': '2026-02-10T14:00:05.123Z',
  'participant_id': 'user-789',
  'x': 1.234, 'y': 0.456, 'z': -0.789,
  'qx': 0.0, 'qy': 0.0, 'qz': 0.0, 'qw': 1.0,
  'device': 'quest-3',
  'finger_state': { 'left': 'open', 'right': 'grip' }
}

Exporting user mappings and identity data

User mappings are key to re-linking messages, access, and permissions in your replacement platform. Export the full directory and all role/group memberships.

Minimum fields to export

user_id (vendor)
email
display_name
external_id (employee_id)
groups/roles
last_login

SCIM provisioning example payload (to import into your IdP)

POST /scim/v2/Users
{
  'schemas': ['urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:User'],
  'userName': 'jane.doe@example.com',
  'name': { 'givenName': 'Jane', 'familyName': 'Doe' },
  'externalId': 'emp-12345',
  'emails': [ { 'value': 'jane.doe@example.com', 'primary': true } ]
}

If live webhooks are still supported: capture events immediately

When shutdown is announced, vendors sometimes offer event replay for a short window. If available, register a webhook and persist events to your collector. Below is a minimal Node.js listener that writes events to disk and S3 for later replay.

const express = require('express')
const bodyParser = require('body-parser')
const fs = require('fs')
const AWS = require('aws-sdk')

const s3 = new AWS.S3()
const app = express()
app.use(bodyParser.json())

app.post('/vendor-webhook', async (req, res) => {
  const id = Date.now()
  const file = `/tmp/webhook-${id}.json`
  fs.writeFileSync(file, JSON.stringify(req.body))
  await s3.putObject({ Bucket: 'my-vr-exports', Key: `webhooks/${id}.json`, Body: fs.createReadStream(file) }).promise()
  res.sendStatus(200)
})

app.listen(8080)

Registering webhooks early and persisting them to your own collector is critical—treat this as an incident response step and automate replay where possible (hybrid edge workflows help here).

Verification and integrity checks

After each export, compute a sha256 checksum and append it to the manifest. Verify file sizes and run sampling checks: open PDFs, play segments of recordings, and validate JSON schema. Store manifests in a tamper-evident location (write-once object store, or ledger entry).

Mapping exported data into a target platform

Targets vary: Slack/Teams for chat, Miro/Figma for whiteboards, internal data lakes for recordings. Key steps:

Transform JSONL messages to the target import schema; preserve timestamps and preserve original IDs in metadata fields.
For chat continuity, add system messages indicating migration slices and original room links.
For session recordings, upload files to the target asset store and reference them in imported meeting objects.
Where direct imports are impossible, provide an indexed archive with a lightweight web viewer for team access.

Case study: how Acme Robotics moved 2 years of Workrooms data

Context: Acme had 18 active Workrooms rooms with weekly product reviews and hundreds of session recordings. When the vendor announced discontinuation, they followed a 10-day emergency playbook:

Within 24 hours they disabled retention and exported admin directory and roles.
They spun up a webhook collector for live events and started paginated exports for chat per room.
They prioritized session recordings by business value, exported raw MP4 and telemetry, and produced 720p review clips for quick browsing.
They mapped vendor user_ids to their Okta IdP via SCIM and rehydrated user links in a static web viewer backed by S3.
They archived raw exports to Glacier and kept a searchable index in Elastic for internal discovery.

Result: zero lost business-critical artifacts and a 30% reduction in the time teams spent re-creating meeting context compared to manual reconstruction.

Advanced strategies to avoid vendor lock-in going forward

Adopt export-first architecture: always record to a secondary archive as events occur.
Prefer open formats: glTF for 3D, JSONL for logs, WAV/FLAC for audio.
Implement snapshot automation: weekly snapshots of rooms, documents, and user directories.
Use abstraction layers: ingestion connectors that normalize vendor APIs into a canonical schema in your data lake. Consider automating metadata extraction to speed mapping.

2026 trends that affect migration planning

More vendors are consolidating VR functionality into broader XR platforms, increasing the risk of sudden deprecation of niche apps.
Open standards adoption (OpenXR, glTF, WebRTC-based spatial audio) improved interoperability, so exporting to those formats gives you future-proof portability.
Cloud providers offered managed migration tools and cheaper cold storage options in late 2025 — take advantage of lifecycle rules and object lock for compliance exports.

Common pitfalls and troubleshooting

Relying on vendor-side bulk export jobs without downloading produced packages — vendors sometimes remove access links early.
Not capturing deleted messages or edits; capture event streams in addition to snapshot exports.
Losing mapping between messages and attachments — always replace attachment URLs with permanent storage references in your export.
Ignoring telemetry formats — raw pose streams are invaluable for UX product teams and can be lost if omitted.

Actionable takeaways

Start exporting immediately when a shutdown is announced — treat it like an incident and prioritize admin access and webhooks.
Preserve raw originals and create lightweight derivatives for quick access and indexing.
Automate checksums and manifest generation for auditability and chain-of-custody.
Map user identities to your IdP early — it’s the key to re-linking artifacts in replacement tools.
Store at least two copies in separate storage classes or locations and implement a retention policy aligned to legal needs.

Which exports are irreplaceable? Chat transcripts, session telemetry, and scene assets. Treat them as high-priority recoverables.

Final checklist (copy for your incident playbook)

Lock admin credentials; collect API keys and token expiry info.
Enable and capture webhooks/event replay.
Export chats to JSONL and compress.
Download and transcode session recordings; export telemetry.
Export shared documents and whiteboards in source and PDF formats.
Export user directory and role mappings; prepare SCIM import files.
Create manifest with checksums and store in write-once location.
Verify exports, store in two locations, and notify stakeholders.

Need help?

If your team needs hands-on help to execute a fast, auditable VR export and migration, midways.cloud specializes in connectors, webhook collectors, and automated migration pipelines tailored for developer and SRE teams. We can help build a rehabilitation plan for Workrooms-era data and automate ingestion into your target tooling with observability and governance built in.

Call to action: Start your migration with a free export audit — contact midways.cloud to schedule a 1-hour runbook review and risk assessment.

Unknown

Contributor

Senior editor and content strategist. Writing about technology, design, and the future of digital media. Follow along for deep dives into the industry's moving parts.