The problems of "lift and shift" into SharePoint
I was in the speaker’s room at the San Diego SharePoint Saturday earlier this year and when asked by another speaker about my presentation, I replied with “It’s a case study on one of our recent large-scale digital transformations”. He responded with “I wish I could do a case study on my clients.”
When I inquired as to why he couldn’t, he noted that his current projects were fixing SharePoint implementations that had gone awry and that most organizations aren’t too keen on sharing their failures on the platform. After some conversing, we both agreed that one of the biggest root causes of a poor SharePoint implementation is when organizations choose to “Lift and shift” content into SharePoint.
“Lift and shift” is just as it sounds, a simplistic means of migrating your content into SharePoint (or any other platform). It typically means bringing your content into SharePoint as-is. For example, this could be simply moving various areas of a corporate network folder structure directly into SharePoint by cutting and pasting or using a tool to migrate the content.
While I haven’t conducted a study, I talk to 100’s organizations on the topic and I’m left with the impression that many organizations take this route and experience the frustration of dealing with a poor SharePoint implementation.
I believe that organizations go down this path for several reasons:
A) They are given an unrealistic deadline to move into SharePoint
B) The project team is given limited budgets
C) They assume that they can fix it later
D) They are unaware of the negative side effects of taking such a path
Notably, the ‘lift and shift’ approach doesn’t take the time to restructure, rework or re-think how you’re organizing your content. Furthermore, it typically is not taking the time to design a robust SharePoint solution to manage the content in a way that takes advantage of SharePoint functionality or optimizes the end user experience. While it may appear, at first, to be fast, cheap and easy, the adoption of the platform is often less than ideal and the value derived are often lacking, especially over the long run.
Perhaps a good analogy for our conversation, would be if you’ve ever seen Holmes on Homes – a Canadian home improvement show where the host Mike Holmes and his team goes into a house that has issues, typically due to poor construction, and through the course of fixing the renovations, the team finds other issues that need to be dealt with. Often the fix is many times more expensive than the original renovation and overall it would have been magnitudes cheaper to get it done right the first go around.
The same is true for a large-scale SharePoint ECM projects. If implemented with short cuts and compromises instead of following best practices and a proper design patterns, organizations can end up with problems surrounding their solution that go beyond the technical implementation. From what we’ve seen, it’s far more expensive to fix a SharePoint solution rather than doing it right the first time.
In this blog post we’ll talk about the issues that typically arise when taking the “lift and shift” approach in the hopes of influencing organizations to take the time to get it right the first time.
Poor user adoption
In talking with many organizations over the past 12 years of my SharePoint consulting career, when I’ve come across a SharePoint implementation that was less than successful it’s typically due to organizations lifting and shifting coupled with a lack of proper training. Granted sometimes it’s due to poor SharePoint design, but if you are lifting and shifting into SharePoint without creating a proper SharePoint solution that you’re migrating into, this will have a negative impact on the end user experience. End users will be frustrated, and they will likely find workarounds like “Shadow IT” solutions such as Dropbox or saving documents on their desktop.
Reinforces bad habits
When SharePoint is implemented poorly, end users will, out of necessity need work around the less-than-optimal implementation which often includes some bad habits such as:
Creating multiple copies of documents (v1, v2)
Creating complex folder structures that are hard to use and manage
Caching copies of content in multiple locations
Locking down content unnecessarily
Breaking security inheritance at the folder or document level
It is both costly and time consuming to fix and clean up the solution when these bad habits are being followed, with additional effort to re-train end users on the proper use of the platform.
Low ROI
SharePoint provides a lot of value if implemented correctly. The base level of ROI is gleaned from the fundamentals like searching, sorting, filtering, version control and security. You get the most bang for your buck with advanced features, including, but not limited to:
Meeting your organizational needs around compliance through records management
Automating your business processes through forms and workflows
Developing high value custom applications
Gaining insight and perspective through reporting and analytics
Creating these solutions is more expensive, and sometimes not even possible if your underlying SharePoint solution is not developed properly. In order to leverage these added value solutions, organizations need to fix their current SharePoint implementation and re-organize content, which is far more difficult once it is in the SharePoint platform.
The degree to which an organization realizes the benefits from these advanced features is directly proportional to the maturity of their SharePoint implementation. These solutions often require the use of metadata (site columns), content types and a proper scalable structure that spreads the content over multiple site collections, lists and libraries. These solutions are all possible in SharePoint and ancillary tools in Office 365, as well as through third-party products like Collabware and Nintex.
Getting SharePoint right, the first time around, requires more effort upfront but will enable your organization to realize the benefits of the platform in a timelier fashion, and with less overall effort and cost.
Scalability
Both SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises have limits. While 30 million documents per library sounds impressive, note that SharePoint libraries tend to slow down with large volumes. Views have a hard limit of 5000 in SharePoint online. You’ll also run into more obscure issues like:
“After 100,000 items are added to a list, library, or folder, permission inheritance for the list, library, or folder can't be changed.”
I have seen an organization cut and paste their entire organizations content into one document library. The most common problems we see with issues around lifting and shifting in SharePoint are:
File path limitations: Often deep folder hierarchies in network file storage can exceed the 400-character limit in SharePoint.
Security limitations: Security becomes harder to manage, if not impossible, if the solution is not designed correctly. We have seen instances where the number of unique security profiles per folder exceeds the recommend 5000 unique security scopes in a given document library.
Performance: Especially true for on-premise environments, interacting with document libraries slows down with large amounts of content.
It’s best to spread content across many lists, libraries and site collections. SharePoint is designed to scale across many site collections, lists and libraries — it can support up to 2 million site collections per organization. Yet, we still see many lift and shift migrations migrating into only one site collection.
It’s the worst of both worlds
We seldom have a problem of adopting tools like Network file storage or email. In most cases, we have too much content in these popular platforms to manage properly. I would offer that their popularity is primary due to both their intuitiveness and performance. They are easy to understand, straight forward to use, and quick to respond to user interaction. And while popular, they are not without their faults, especially network file storage where:
We are only allowed one static view of the content
We often have multiple copies of each document (v1, v2, final, final_final… etc.)
It’s hard to navigate and find content
There’s no metadata for searching, sorting or processing (like a contract end date or vendor name)
Permissions are hard to manage and seldom trusted
It’s easy to lose documents by unintentional dragging and dropping or deletion.
Many studies have pointed out that organizations can expect a 20% ROI in terms of productivity with a proper ECM platform like SharePoint, where the efficiencies are typically driven by:
Less time spent searching
Less copies are floating around as the system provides versioning
Improved trust in the documents that are found
Avoid having to recreate existing documents
Ability to collaborate more efficiency
Ensuring that decisions are being made on current and correct information
Improved ability to share information
Improved discovery and compliance
Now, SharePoint isn’t a perfectly frictionless environment, with the biggest compromise typically being speed. SharePoint is a big platform and pages can often take a couple of seconds to render. This is true for both SharePoint on premises and SharePoint online. This may not sound like a big deal, but for end users that expect an immediate response, it can be a frustration (as a point of reference our SharePoint Online main page took about 8 seconds to load this morning).
This frustration of a less than instant page load is offset by SharePoint’s functionality when executed correctly. You get a great search experience, the ability to sort, filter and create multiple views on your content, as well as developing workflows, applications, reports etc. to help you find, manage and work with the content that you need to do your job.
Unfortunately, most of this great functionality that offsets the slower-than-preferred page loads can’t be leveraged to it’s fullest (or sometimes at all) if you haven’t taken the time to solution SharePoint properly.
What we end up with is the frustration of a chaotic network file storage implementation inside a slow (er) web-based solution leveraging few of the benefits offered by the SharePoint platform. It’s the worst of both worlds.
Decreased organizational trust
Perhaps one of the costliest impacts of a poorly implemented solution is the impact on the end user’s ability to trust the organization in future implementations of SharePoint or other enterprise applications. We’ve seen that often end users become skeptical about their organizations ability to successfully deploy applications and will more likely to push back on or ignore future change initiatives. This steepening of the change curve for future projects can limit the success and increase the costs of future enterprise change initiatives.
Final thoughts
Most organizations that perform a lift and shift, in my experience, almost always run into the issues mentioned above. Almost all the organizations that we talk to that do a lift and shift project into SharePoint are not happy with their current solution and are, at a minimum, trying to persuade the organization to fix the implementation.
Getting SharePoint right, the first time around, requires more effort upfront but will enable your organization to realize the benefits of the platform in a timelier fashion, and with less overall effort and cost in the long run.