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It’s the End of the World for SharePoint 2010 and I Feel Fine
The end-of-life for SharePoint 2010 is on its way, but this doesn’t have to spell doom and gloom for any IT department!
In fact, this can be a golden opportunity to force organizational change and for IT departments to shine!
Below we’ve put together a list of the top five reasons the end-of-life for SharePoint 2010 may actually be a great thing for IT and organizations across the board.
1. This presents an opportunity for organizations to clean up their existing information.
Performing discovery across organizational data and determining what information needs to be kept and what can be left behind should be a part of any migration project. Removing and restructuring information can make everyone’s life easier and, in some cases, can even reduce the cost of operations for a business.
One of my favorite examples of this is an organization that found an entire series of exercise DVDs copied into their legacy environment. These video files, it turned out, amounted to more than 1TB of information!
Reducing organizational content that is redundant, trivial, and obsolete is a time and money saver any way you cut it.
2. The 2010 End-of-Life can be a pivotal moment for organizations to adopt new technologies to increase their productivity.
This could be a golden opportunity to adopt new technologies like PowerApps and the new interfaces that come with SharePoint 2019. Even if there are some applications that have to remain on the old 2010 farm for an extended period of time, keeping ongoing collaboration on a secure stable environment is essential for organizational operations.
IT can assist in adapting user workload tools that’re faster, more user-friendly, and that can bring additional workflow and data recording to the table. PowerApps, modern SharePoint lists, and the ease of modern SharePoint sites are just a few examples of this that even apply to SharePoint 2019.
There are many more ways Office 365 can be used. Flow, online connectors and the simple integrations between the applications in Office 365 are all useful—and this is to say nothing of the ease of collaboration that Microsoft Teams brings to organizations.
At a much simpler level, features like NewsFeeds and interfaces for recently used documents exist in multiple places in newer SharePoint versions, something that makes it much easier for users to find the sites and documents they may need via search.
Concerned about SharePoint 2010 end-of-life? This post has an interesting take: Click To Tweet3. The change from 2010 to SharePoint 2019 or Office 365 can increase organizational security and compliance.
Office 365’s Security and Compliance center brings loads of security tools to the table. Heck, even SharePoint 2019 has compliance capabilities far beyond those of SharePoint 2010. It’s much easier to pull security information from the newer SharePoint platforms, and it’s also easier for users to understand how they’re sharing information via the modern GUI.
4. The change management process from 2010 to a new platform can help organizations better plan for long-term changes and scalability.
IT departments in organizations caught in the end-of-life scenario for SharePoint 2010 can begin to plan for the future to avoid winding up in the same situation again.
What were the factors that lead to such a long delay in a platform upgrade? How can they be avoided? What can IT do, especially when it comes to data governance within the platform to make it easier for the organization to transition in the future?
In addition, IT should keep notes and sufficient documentation along with out-of-the-box options to allow for easy future upgrades as business processes are updated with new software. Make sure that any changes are well-communicated and properly planned to avoid catching your end-users off guard!
5. Any large project is an opportunity for IT to show itself as a hero to the organization!
Almost every organization that has been around for more than a few years has an IT department laden with change management horror stories (often recounted in dramatic detail like an old war story).
Remember, though- there are organizations that LOVE their IT departments! If your change management is properly handled, you communicate well with your stakeholders and users, and if you run through the proper steps of adoption, you and your IT team may just come out of the project as the heroes that increased productivity and made everyone’s lives easier! It’s no simple task but it can definitely be done!
AvePoint can help this process from start to finish!
From solutions to securely move your data—including metadata and workflows—to a world-class services team that can perform the migration for you, AvePoint can help you out as much as you want from start to finish. We can even provide you with a free discovery report to get you started!
When it comes to deeper discovery, we can scan the content of all your files for sensitive or important information. We can also manage ongoing backups, compliance, and governance no matter if you wind up with on-premises SharePoint, Office 365, or both! As Microsoft’s largest ISV, we are your one-stop-shop for everything you need—even governance workshops to assist in your change management process. We hope we’ll hear from you, and that we will be your trusted partner to help you on your way!
