In many organizations, existing SharePoint deployments are broad but not very deep when it comes to integration with core business processes, especially those that are transactional and complex. While most of those organizations have goals or formal plans to make additional investments in this direction, the entrance of SharePoint 2013 and Office365 into the mix have interrupted some of these plans. Companies now find themselves having to make even more complex and future-looking plans about moving to the cloud.
People want to know -- what should you do next if you already have a SharePoint 2003, 2007, or 2010 on-premises deployment? What are leading companies doing today? What are the mistakes to avoid? What issues should you be considering? How do you convince your manager to move forward?
All important questions to answer, and each deserving of a stand-alone article to walk you through them in detail. But in my conversations with experts and customers alike, there are several recurring themes that I think best encapsulate my thoughts on how to prepare for a move to the cloud:
1. Focus on the user experience.
There are fantastic new end-user features in the UI of SharePoint 2013 and within Office365 that make it a compelling solution -- Microsoft Office integrations, drag-and-drop, content aggregation, personalization, and more. But end-users are not your only users. Don't forget the administrator's experience. Talk with all users and stakeholders about how they use the platform today, and as you prototype and test the next version, get feedback from them as to what is working and what is missing, looking specifically at ways the UI can improve upon key business use cases. Understand how this change will affect productivity.
2. Understand what can be moved to the cloud.
If you begin your planning process by understanding the key use cases and business process scenarios, you will likely identify some areas that may not work in the cloud. The biggest impacts will come from areas of your current deployment where 3rd party tools or advanced customizations were used -- which tend to happen in the most business-critical aspects of your SharePoint deployment. Whether solutions, tools, or data, it is important to understand what you are technically able to move to the cloud. Sometimes it may require redesigning or re-architecting your solutions; other times, it may require re-thinking (or re-prioritizing) your requirements.
3. Decide what should be moved to the cloud.
Not every workload should be moved to the cloud. There are data sovereignty issues, complex business solutions, and transactional systems that should remain on-premises. While maintaining hybrid environments (where some assets are in the cloud, and others remain on-prem) add complexity and additional management overhead, hybrid may make the most sense for your business. As you map out your use cases and prioritize them, decide which use cases make technical and fiscal sense to move to the cloud.
4. Figure out which flavor of cloud fits your business needs.
Office365 is not your only option for the cloud. There are numerous regional and global vendors offering hosted solutions for multi-tenant (shared hardware/platform between multiple customers) and dedicated SharePoint environments. Organizations wanting more flexibility in what they can configure may find Office365 to be too limiting, while others can fit their needs into Microsoft's packaged service. Determine your requirements first, and then figure out which vendor can best provide a hosted service to meet your requirements.
5. Understand how best to utilize your in-house skills.
One reason to seriously consider moving your systems to the cloud is the idea that you can reduce internal IT resource costs. While it is true that you will have less of a need for internal infrastructure people -- traditional IT roles -- the reality is that this cost moves rather than disappears. Instead of needing someone to maintain servers, what you will increasingly require are people who understand and manage your business processes. With the cloud comes the rise of the Business Analyst, and an opportunity for various roles across your organization to step up and fill this need.
6. Plan for a more complex information architecture.
Here is one area that does not entirely translate from on-prem to online: maintaining a detailed information architecture. If you have spent time building out a complex metadata strategy, you will not, unfortunately, find much by way of tools to help you migrate your term sets and taxonomies over to the cloud, requiring you to rebuild. And as Microsoft slowly begins integrating Yammer's social features into SharePoint 2013 on-prem and Office365, be aware that many of these features are disconnected (for the foreseeable future) from the newsfeed. What this means is that your plans to use the social interactions of your users to build out your folksonomy, and in turn, improve your search results, will have to wait. And if you plan to maintain a hybrid model, you will need to plan for the overhead of manually maintaining your information architecture across two systems.
7. Use your upgrade/migration as an opportunity to clean house.
One benefit of moving to a new platform is the opportunity to clean up, reorganize, and restructure your sites, content, and processes. Not all content needs to be moved, not all customizations and features are driving the desired behaviors in your end-user activities. As you prioritize the use cases which make sense to move into the cloud, determine what policies and procedures should also move, and establish healthy patterns at the start of your new deployment.
8. Create a consistent governance strategy across all systems.
Similarly, moving to a new system is an opportunity to re-think all of your governance activities -- or to establish a governance strategy where one was lacking. This might include guidelines for site creation, document lifecycle and retention, storage, reporting, and permissions. Key to successful governance planning is having a firm understanding of the data, metrics, and reporting available to you and your administrators so that you can monitor and manage the platform. This is especially important in a hybrid environment, where these outputs may differ widely.
Conclusion
There is no easy button for moving to the cloud. And honestly, whatever your decision, the technical aspects of your plan are probably going to be the easiest to figure out. Where the majority of projects fail -- especially when moving your SharePoint instances into the cloud -- are around the soft topics: people, planning, governance. One of my favorite one-liners that I use when presenting on these topics is, "One of my goals is to have people leaving my session with more questions than answers." By that, I mean, my goal is to get people asking questions about their plans, thinking through their stated (and unstated) goals and strategies, and working to ensure that all stakeholders have been heard.
In your efforts to simplify costs and processes by moving your work into the cloud, you run the danger of making things much more complex. Don't chase after the cloud because it's the latest, greatest marketing pitch from every vendor chasing after new revenue models. Move when it makes business sense to move -- and no sooner. Move when the benefits outweigh the costs. Move when your business-critical systems are ready to be moved.
