Why you shouldn’t lift and shift to SharePoint
One of the biggest causes of an unsuccessful SharePoint Implementation is when organisations choose to “lift and shift” all their content into SharePoint.
“Lift and Shift” is exactly as it sounds – a simplistic way to migrate all your content from an old location (usually a file server) into SharePoint exactly as is.
I know a lot of organisations took this approach as a quick fix way to access all their files in the cloud – a lot of them in response to the sudden need to work from home because of COVID.
Others are simply unaware of the negative side effects of using SharePoint in this way!
Lifting and shifting to SharePoint doesn’t take the time to restructure, rework or rethink how content is organised. It also doesn’t take advantage of SharePoint’s functionality or gives the end user a good experience.
It can take a lot more time (and money!) to fix a SharePoint solution done wrong, than it would have to do it right the first time.
Here’s some of the problems of a lift and shift approach:
SharePoint limitations
Lifting and shifting to SharePoint will most certainly have you running into limits.
Although SharePoint does ‘technically’ allow for 30 million documents per library, there are huge performance impacts that you will experience a long time before you reach this:
Views have a hard limit of 5000 documents
After 100,000 items are added to a list or library, permissions cannot be changed
There’s a 400 character limit on file path URLs – this can be reached very quickly in a nested folder structure
Performance will be very slow
SharePoint is designed to scale and therefore it’s always best practice to spread content across many sites, lists and libraries to avoid these issues mentioned.
With a lift and shift approach, documents are more often than not stored in one single site, or even one single document library!
Poor user adoption
With the frustrations that will no doubt arise from the issues experienced above, users will not have a good experience with SharePoint.
This means that they will likely find workarounds (shadow IT) such as Dropbox or Google Drive, or even saving locally to their desktop which can result in a loss of IP if they leave the organisation.
And worse than poor adoption, is the loss of trust users will therefore have in your organisation from a poorly implemented solution. Future initiatives may be ignored or even pushed back on.
Bad habits
Due to a solution that was not reworked or restructured, users will carry on with bad habits such as:
Creating complex folder structures
Creating multiple copies of a document
Creating multiple versions of a document
These habits are not best practice within SharePoint and can continue to contribute to a costly clean up later down the line. It can make files even harder to find and continues to contribute to reaching the limits in SharePoint.
Low ROI
If implemented correctly, SharePoint can provide massive return on investment. You can be super efficient even just by using the fundamentals right such as searching, filtering, sorting, version control and best practice security set up.
If you’ve set up the structure right, you can then get even more ROI on advanced features such as automating business processes, developing custom applications, utilising reports and analytics and much more!
However, sometimes these features are not possible if the underlying SharePoint solution is not developed properly. For example, some of these solutions require the use of metadata.
Most organisations that perform a lift and shift, will almost always run into the issues mentioned above. Getting SharePoint right, the first time around, requires more time and effort upfront, but will enable you to maximise the benefits of the platform sooner, and will avoid even more costs and effort down the line.