The Trouble with SharePoint today

The history of SharePoint has brought the corporate world to its latest emergency in the IT data centre.

Firstly, SharePoint sites proliferated because they could be run on a desktop with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), SharePoint server released in 2001 through to SharePoint 2013/2016 and SharePoint Online (an optional component of Office 365) often without IT oversight and the promise of a ‘free’ platform for collaboration was too attractive to turn away.

I have a saying ‘ Nothing Free is Easy and Nothing Easy is Free’ which holds true here.

The second ‘trouble’ with SharePoint has always been the ‘blank’ canvas approach to what ‘it’ is, e.g. Admin department comes to IT and asks for a document repository? SharePoint can do that? Legal department comes to IT and asks for a search engine for legal files? Sharepoint can do that too?

You get the picture here, Sharepoint can do so much for so many businesses but to get the most out of it requires strong in house SharePoint knowledge and skills which leads into the third problem with SharePoint,......

Third, SharePoint can do so much that its set up and configured for many departments and subsequently doesn’t end up being used for 20-40% of these departments, often because the initial design wasn’t good enough to attract users and so they stayed with their legacy approach etc, file system, email folders etc.

And so this great collaboration platform moves around the organisation penetrating each and every business unit, some parts of the business use it and some won’t.

Some business units will go outside the IT department and build their own SharePoint instance without IT guidance, meaning that the day that the hard drive fails it becomes IT’s problem for not backing up the service, when IT never knew about the problem in the first place! as being in IT means we must have a sixth sense to these ‘islands’ of information outside of IT’s control.

Now we find todays biggest push is to the ‘Cloud’, if you’re well seasoned in IT then you understand that the ‘Cloud’ is not anything new or different to what we had before, but now it has a sexy name! this aside, IT managers are being asked by the Executive for a ‘cloud’ first strategy, ensuring IT again have additional work on their plates to get the company to the cloud as rapidly as possible without additional people or budget.

This is where SharePoint pops up again, IT asks the question ‘how do we migrate our on-premise SharePoint instances to Office 365?, where do we start?’.

Dell Software helps many customers across Australia and New Zealand migrate their SharePoint data to Office 365 or even a modern SharePoint On premise environment and can help your organization complete a SharePoint migration successfully and affordably.

The Dell Software methodology for SharePoint consolidation/migration benefits the organisation by:

• Reducing infrastructure costs by minimising and removing Legacy hardware
• Reducing Storage utilisation by removing/archiving unused SharePoint data
• Reducing the licensing costs of maintaining SQL server, SharePoint server, backup Agents etc
• Centralising SharePoint infrastructure by removing the legacy organic growth that occurred when SharePoint was initially implemented
• Minimizing user effort and minimizing end user outages during the migration

The 4 step to consolidating SharePoint with Dell Software:

• Assess the existing SharePoint sites, farms, servers and understand their usage. Complete assessment will aid your organisation to successfully migrate to Office 365 in a rapid and successful manner.
• Are discovered SharePoint sites all being used?
• Which sites are a candidate for archiving and storing offsite
• Which users and groups have rights to Sharepoint data that shouldn’t?
• How much data is being stored that isn’t in use?  
• What web apps run on your SharePoint sites and which will run after migration?
• What sites have code or other logic that may not be suitable for migration?
• Migrate the SharePoint sites to the new target.
• Pre-stage the data migration to test and confirm the resulting SharePoint performance and look/feel
• Schedule the migration for out of business hours to minimise impact to end users
• Consolidate Document libraries, lists etc based on best practise and business requirements automatically
• Remap user permissions if needed
• Co-existence with the source SharePoint infrastructure during migration
• Changes made to the internal SharePoint sites should be updated to the target SharePoint sites automatically
• Switching from the legacy SharePoint infrastructure to the new target should be seamless  
• Manage the resulting Office 365 tenant
• Manage SharePoint Online from a central console
• Manage Office 365 Mailboxes and administer users
• Management reporting and auditing of the target Office 365 platform.

This methodology is well tested and proven across many 10’s of thousands of successful migrations with Dell Software.

Dell Software is the number 1 migration vendor worldwide, we can ensure your organisation is successful in moving SharePoint On-premise to SharePoint Online.