The race to the cloud is well under way, and if you aren’t there now, I can almost guarantee that someday you will have some sort of cloud presence. With the increased security, additional tools, and cost savings it’s becoming more and more of a no-brainer. Rarely do we find customers anymore who when doing an honest assessment can’t go to the cloud.
However, before you make that jump to the cloud you really need to understand what you are getting yourself into. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns and if you aren’t careful you could have a failed deployment, grumpy users, and find it difficult to get traction on any other initiatives you might want to get going.
We see it every… single… day… the difference between a failed deployment and successful deployment often comes down to simply being open to hearing an opinion that differs from your expectations and heeding advice from those who’ve been there before.
With all that being said, I wanted to point out the top 5 things I see companies do that can pretty much spell doom for their Office 365 deployments.
Lifting and Shipping When You Should Be Planning and Rearchitecting
Many organizations just want to take their on-premises mess and turn it into a cloud mess. Please, stop… the easy approach would be to just take your existing environment and plop it into SharePoint Online and be done with it. Hey, as long as you’ve kept your customizations to a minimum this CAN be done. However, you shouldn’t take this approach. Simply doing a lift-and-shift means you are depriving yourself of a lot of cloud goodness. A lot of those team sites could probably be moved to Teams, a lot of those sub sites should now be site collections. Those InfoPath forms and SharePoint Designer workflows need to just die. And modern SharePoint pages are far superior to their classic counterpoints at this point.
By simply migrating what you have today into SharePoint Online you are starting off with an outdated system and potentially painting yourself into a corner when support for all that classic functionality, InfoPath, and SPD workflows ends.
PLEASE take the time to do a proper deployment planning. Re-architect your site to work with the new flat structure. Look at Hub sites, Teams, PowerApps, Flow…
It’s a different world, stop trying to treat it like nothing has changed.
Refusing to Change the Way Your Employees Work when you should be giving them better ways to do their jobs
I’m a developer. I get it. You spent a LOT of time developing that cool solution in SharePoint On-Prem. It works well, users are used to using it, and you don’t want to affect your users’ productivity by making them change the way they work.
However, that solution almost certainly will not work on a modern page in SharePoint Online, and there’s a good chance at least part of it will have to be tweaked to work in SharePoint Online. You can either spend hours and hours trying to make sure your users don’t have to change the way they worked or you can look at the new tools and experiences available to you and create an even better experience for your users.
Yes, they may have to change the way they work. Yes, they will likely grumble at change, but don’t let that stop you from innovating! I promise you, if you present a user with a better way to work, they will embrace it! Well, unless they are super stubborn like me, then they will secretly embrace it and not tell you they love it because they don’t want to tell you that you were right.
Save time… save money… and be better prepared for the future. Don’t try to force SharePoint Online to be something it’s not by insisting it work exactly the same way it did before.
Making Decisions for Your Users When You Should Be Determining What They Need
Once you’ve made the wise decision that it’s okay to change the way your employees work, please don’t go off in a dark corner and create a solution without getting their input. Office 365 provides an excellent platform for collaborating with your users to design and create solutions that will meet their needs. Too often, we see business leaders making decisions for the users and then solutions are created that may take the big picture into account but it misses a lot of minutia for how people actually work, and in the end, you have disgruntled users or you have to go back for a lot more hours to make changes.
Keep the actual users involved every step of the way. Get their feedback often. Help them feel like it’s “their” solution and not “yours” and watch the user adoption sky-rocket. Nothing ensures a successful Office 365 deployment like creating a solution that solves a real-world pain point.
Putting up Walls When You Should Be Putting up Fences
Microsoft Teams may be one of the scariest solutions for administrators ever created. Creating a Team creates a SharePoint Site Collection, Office 365 Group, Planner, and more… and out of the box anyone can create a Team! The horror!!!?!?! The first thing many organizations do is shut down users’ ability to create Teams. Stop. Take a breath. Don’t be such a control freak!
Take the time to put some governance in place and retention policies around your Teams. Educate your users and allow them to use the tools you are paying for! As my business partner Stephanie Donahue likes to say, create fenced in backyards that allow your users to play but keeps them under control. Don’t destroy the collaboration you are trying to build. If you restrict your users from using the tools that you are paying for and have control over, they are going to go and start using Slack, Dropbox, Zoom, and a bunch of other tools that you DON’T have control over.
Let that sink in.
Repeating Your Mistakes of the Past
Finally, don’t look at the move to Office 365 as something you “have” to do… look at it as something you “get” to do. Take this as an opportunity to fix past mistakes you made when you were younger and more foolish and didn’t understand SharePoint. Finally get rid of that old content that no one uses. Create a rich mobile experience without having to hack a masterpage. Don’t write code to solve all your problems because you COULD in SharePoint On-Prem.
Use the right tool for the job. Learn the new skills. Create the digital workplace you’ve always wanted. Let SharePoint be SharePoint, don’t force it to be something it’s not. You’ll find your job will be much easier, your users will be happier, and in the end, you will probably save a lot of time and money because you were wise enough to listen to my advice.
Don’t know how or where to begin? Contact a partner invested in your success. There’s lots of great companies out there willing to help you get started. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my own company PAIT Group. This is what we do every day for customers all over the world. But no matter who you get help from, get help, get guidance, and don’t doom your Office 365 deployment before it event starts.