How and When to Adopt the Modern UI in SharePoint – Part 2/2

< Previous post in this series

Introduction

This post is the second in a two-part series where I look at how and when the Modern UI should be adopted in SharePoint Online, including the benefits constraints, and design decisions that need to be weighed up as part of this process. In my first post I covered the first two steps below, in this post I cover parts three and four:

  1. What compatibility problems (if any) are there for existing sites in SharePoint Online, and what do we need to do to address them?
  2. What compatibility problems are there that may constrain or alter the approach for future design and development work, and how might we address these problems?
  3. What requirements/use cases are there that mean moving to the Modern UI provides benefits to either the business or IT?
  4. What options do we have for if/when we roll out the Modern UI, what are the pros/cons of each, and what is our recommendation?

Step 3 – Benefits of the Modern UI

So having spent the previous post unearthing a myriad of reasons not to adopt the Modern UI, it’s only fair that I go into a bit more detail on the benefits of adopting it. It’s undeniable that the UX is better in the Modern UI and offers a far more intuitive way of getting stuff done. Once you become familiar with the new layout, it makes things like menu options easier to find. I’ll go into a little bit more detail in this section.

User Experience – Lists/Libraries

Easier to Switch Views

Minor UI tweak, but the Modern Experience makes it easier to navigate between views of your library/list.

Easier to Customise Views

Users can change column widths, and sort, filter and group information to customise their view. They can then save the view to make it available to other users, without having to go into the hideous ‘Create a View’ interface we all know and love.

Pinning Documents

Important or frequently used documents can be ‘stickied’ to the top of document libraries, helping to highlight vital information to users. This can be really useful in big document libraries where only a few documents are truly useful.

Properties Pane

You can edit item metadata in-line in a nice new pane that appears on the right-hand side of a list/library. This pane also shows a preview of documents, and who they’re shared with. It’s a much easier way of accessing the stuff previously buried in the context menu or in pop-ups.

Properties Pane

List Forms

The out of the box list forms have been revamped and generally provide a much more intuitive experience for end users.

Copy and Move Files Easily

These toolbar items provide a much easier, more intuitive way of moving/copying files to other areas of SharePoint.

Consistency

The Modern Libraries and Lists look like OneDrive, which provides users with some much-needed consistency across different services in Office 365.

 

User Experience – Sites/Pages

Permissions Management

Modern Sites expose the membership options on every page to site owners, and offers a far simpler way of managing membership than the overly-complex, cumbersome SharePoint model.

Page Editing

It’s much easier to edit pages now. You can add a web part far more simply, move them around far more intuitively (it’s nice not to have to threaten death to Bill Gates when web parts inevitably move into the wrong zone or in the wrong order), and the nasty old edit web part pane is massively improved.

Modern Web Parts

The best thing about Modern Pages are the Modern Web Parts themselves, which are all really useful and much easier to set-up than the old-school web parts. You can very quickly get pages looking really good and really useful.

Highlighted Contents

Cross-Device Compatibility

The Modern UI moves SharePoint into the present in terms of mobile device compatibility. Forms, pages, libraries etc. will now display nicely on tablets and smartphones, without the need for custom CSS.

Mobile Form

Integration

Office 365 Groups and Teams

Modern Sites are provisioned automatically alongside new Office 365 Groups, and are intrinsically linked to Groups and Teams. The Modern Site (also known as a Group Site) is the default storing place for files within the Group, and the out of the box ‘Files’ tab within Teams.

Teams

PowerApps and Flow

PowerApps and Flow can be easily integrated into Modern lists/libraries to create business applications/forms and basic workflows. I’ve not worked with any organisations yet that have widely adopted PowerApps or Flow, but I’m sure there are plenty out there who will see this deeper integration as a big win for the Modern UI.

Flow

Increased Storage Capacity

Site collections created as Modern Sites (as opposed to them being upgraded to the Modern UI later) can store a massive 25TB of content, up from the previous 1TB limit. The 1TB limit was already massive and serviced all but the most unusually large sites, but 25TB of storage is truly enormous. This gives even more flexibility to your IA (information architecture) planning, and all but removes site collection storage capacity as a constraint, allowing you to focus on other things like security boundaries and usability for your IA.

Step 4 – Options and Recommendations

Now that we’ve considered the impact to your existing estate; how you’ll be constrained for future work; and the benefits of upgrading to the Modern UI, we can compare different options of when/if to adopt the functionality.

Here are a few general things to consider when you’re looking at options.

Things to Consider Before You Come Up with Options

Consider Constraints Versus Benefits

Probably the best way to approach this decision point to weigh up the constraints of going Modern versus the benefits. Organisations are likely to weigh criteria differently depending on their exact context and business use cases, so it’s up to you what you consider the biggest areas of concern or benefit. In my current client’s case, the constraints around the provisioning, the fragmented user experience between classic and modern lists, and the (current) lack of support for a global navigation were big knocks against the Modern UI, but in other companies these may be more acceptable. Conversely, the business are crying out for a more intuitive page editing experience, whereas in your organisation this might not be seen as especially important.

Consider Whether to Upgrade Legacy Sites

The longer you leave it to upgrade to Modern, the more legacy sites you’ll have to deal with down the line. Sometimes you can ease this concern by coming up with blanket rules, such as “All existing project sites will remain in Classic” (as a project site has a finite lifespan), but most of the time you’ll need to consider sites on a case-by-case (or at least a template-by-template) basis.

My advice is to approach this like you would a migration: unless there is a good reason or a business case to justify putting in the remediation effort to change a site to Modern, don’t do it. Think about it in much the same way you would consider rebuilding a business application running on some old on-premises kit as a provider-hosted add-in in SharePoint Online: if it doesn’t provide some ROI, it’s just not worth the hassle, risk, and expense.

Consider the Fragmented User Experience Between Areas of SharePoint

I’m not talking about the fragmented experience of hopping between Classic and Modern lists here (which I’ve already covered), but the fragmented experience traversing Modern and Classic Sites. During your adoption of the Modern UI, it’s likely there will some sites that remain as Classic either indefinitely or for a period of time, and others that are either born Modern or upgraded quickly (due to them having no compatibility issues). And that’s not to mention the fact that your publishing intranet sites will be unable to adopt the Modern Sites experience for the foreseeable future!

Consider Fragmented Training

Your training delivery and material will likely need to cover both Modern and Classic configurations, as stuff has been moved about in the menus and generally looks quite different. This has impacts on the cost and resources required to train your staff.

Consider the Support Implications

Similar to training, you will need to support two types of experience. This has implications in terms of the knowledge required for support staff, and might make it harder for 1st/2nd line support to resolve issues. You could see an increased number of tickets flowing down to 2nd/3rd line when they might have previously been resolved further upstream.

Consider the Maintenance Implications

Another risk is that you could find yourself having to maintain two ‘copies’ of the same site type/template; one designed for the Classic UI and one for Modern. There’s a very real chance you’ll face a scenario where an urgent change needs to proliferate across all existing and future sites of that type, and guess what? You’re now going to double your test execution effort, and will probably need to spend more effort on design, development work, test scripting, automated regression testing set-up, and deployments to accommodate the two UIs.

Consider the Strategic Direction Microsoft Are Taking Things

The Modern UI is where things are all heading longer-term for SharePoint. At some point, you will have to get on the bandwagon, or you will miss out on useful new functionality and features being rolled out on Office 365.

You shouldn’t really look at “going Modern” as a question of if, more a question of when you do it.

Assessing the Options

As mentioned above, this should be a question of when, not if, you move to the Modern UI. For me, there are a few options worth looking at for when you choose to make the move, and these are:

  1. Go Modern immediately;
  2. Go Modern in c. 3 months (when things like embedding custom JS hit general availability);
  3. Go Modern in c. 6 months (when – hopefully – other stuff like custom page layouts, new web parts etc. hits); and
  4. Do nothing/stay Classic (included in the interest of fairness more than anything).

It’s going to depend on your organisation, your situation, and your stakeholders how you go about recommending what to do. But if you want to take the decision down to a very granular level, you can do something like I’ve done below.

Table

In this table, I’ve got rows for every ‘consideration’, including the broad areas of constraint, benefits, how much remediating action would need to be conducted, and the extra stuff I outlined above. Against each criteria, I’ve given a weighting % for how important it is in the grand scheme of things. Obviously, this is likely to change in your organisation. Then, I’ve given a score out of 5 (with 0 being terrible and 5 being excellent) for how a particular option deals with a particular criterion. Again, this is highly subjective and you may vehemently disagree with my scores here!

Finally, a weighted score for each option can be derived, indicating which is the “best” option for you situation.

I’ve stuck the spreadsheet this table is derived from on my OneDrive here:

https://1drv.ms/x/s!AkfwQi26meWDgegN95w0IwNRaHJR-A

Final Recommendations

According to how I scored and weighted things above, it’s clear that moving to the Modern UI immediately would present too many challenges to overcome. Doing nothing is – despite it’s relatively high score – not a great idea either. For this reason, my final recommendations were as follows:

  1. Adopt Modern (SPFx) Web Part development immediately to future-proof any customisations;
  2. Trial workarounds for the provisioning issues (e.g. we can implement processes whereby an admin or power user adds an app to configure the homepage of a Modern Site how we want it to look, and implement a Proof of Concept for a UI-based execution to do this programmatically);
  3. Build any new templates required in the next 3 months as Classic sites;
  4. Leave all legacy sites in Classic mode for the time being;
  5. Trial the Modern UI with business champions to see if there are specific use cases that will force us to go Modern;
  6. Enable Modern on the tenant and ensure scripts for downgrading incompatible areas to Classic work; and
  7. Reassess things in three months’ time, or whenever additional information is made available on the Public Roadmap.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Hopefully this post helps some of you guide your organisations or clients as to if/when they should adopt the Modern UI. As I noted earlier, this is a bit of a moving feast as Microsoft are continually rolling out updates and making new information available to us about what’s coming down the pipeline, but – for the time being anyway – this post should serve as a useful reference or starting point for your own research.

My TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) summary of the Modern UI would be as follows: It’s great, but it’s not quite enterprise-ready yet.

The problems around provisioning and the limitations it puts on customisation currently means it is not feasible to roll it out in large organisations with a lot of legacy content or demand for new collaboration spaces. The only situation in which I would confidently endorse fully adopting the Modern UI in its current guise is for organisations with brand new, greenfield SharePoint Online implementations.

As it happens, I actually went into this process with the belief that my client should adopt the Modern UI immediately, in order to align themselves with Microsoft’s strategy. It was only after doing more research and testing around the constraints that I was forced to climb down from my original position and adopt a more conservative outlook. For most of us, the Modern UI just isn’t there yet. But I’m hoping my view will change once more updates are released!

Thanks for reading.

< Previous post in this series

Related Reading

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/modern-experience-customizations

https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2016/06/07/modern-document-libraries-in-sharepoint/

https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2016/07/25/modern-sharepoint-lists-are-here-including-integration-with-microsoft-flow-and-powerapps/

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between-classic-and-new-experiences-for-lists-and-document-libraries-30e1aab0-a5cc-4363-b7f2-09e2ae07d4dc?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2017/06/Office-365-dev-wish-list-spfx-modern-sites.html

http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2017/06/SPFx-Application-Customizer-Global-JS-Page-Header.html

http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2017/03/provisioning-modern-pages-and-spfx-web-parts.html

https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-Tools/tree/master/Solutions/SharePoint.UIExperience.Scanner

< Previous post in this series

How and When to Adopt the Modern UI in SharePoint – Part 1/2

Next post in this series >

Introduction

I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks doing an impact assessment of moving to the new(ish) ‘Modern UI’ in SharePoint Online. I looked at it primarily from a technical angle so that my client can decide whether to adopt it now, based on the constraints of the current technology. The conclusion I reached was that it’s not quite ready yet.

This post isn’t an attempt to bash Microsoft or poke holes in this functionality. I actually think the Modern UI is great, and completely the right direction for Microsoft to take things. But for me, it’s not quite an ‘enterprise-ready’ product yet. Hopefully this post helps other customers out there facing a similar dilemma, or at the very least frames how you can do your own assessment of whether or not to ‘go Modern’.

The post ended up getting pretty big, so I’ve split it into two parts:

  1. Part One: Introduction, assessing compatibility for existing sites, and assessing constraints for future work; and
  2. Part Two: Benefits of the Modern UI, and options/recommendations for how and when to adopt it.

What is the Modern UI?

Microsoft have been introducing the ‘Modern UI’ for sites in SharePoint Online over the last year or so. This new functionality provides a better user experience, cross-device compatibility, better integration with other products in the Office 365 suite (namely, O365 Groups), and a 24 TB increase in total storage space per site.

It surfaces at three ‘levels’:

  • Modern Sites, in the form of Modern Team Sites (AKA Group Sites) and Modern Communication Sites;
  • Modern Lists and Libraries; and
  • Modern Pages.

Modern Page

Above: A Modern Page on a Modern Site

 

Modern Lib

Above: A Modern Library within a Modern Site

However, Modern UI offer some drawbacks around the customisations that can be achieved. These constraints will directly affect how, where and when the Modern UI can be adopted within many organisations’ Office 365 environments.

Process for Assessing the Impact of the Modern UI in Your Environment

When I was looking at if/when the Modern UI should be adopted and rolled out in my organisation, I undertook four steps, which I will detail in this blog post. At a high-level, these steps were:

  1. What compatibility problems (if any) are there for existing sites in SharePoint Online, and what do we need to do to address them?
  2. What compatibility problems are there that may constrain or alter the approach for future design and development work, and how might we address these problems?
  3. What requirements/use cases are there that mean moving to the Modern UI provides benefits to either the business or IT?
  4. What options do we have for if/when we roll out the Modern UI, what are the pros/cons of each, and what is our recommendation?

As mentioned above, Steps 1 and 2 will be covered in this first post; Steps 3 and 4 will follow in a second post.

Step 1 – Assess Compatibility with Existing Sites

Before moving to the Modern UI, you are going to need to look at how it plays with any existing sites you have in your Office 365 tenant. There may be bits of customisation and configuration that preclude certain sites or lists from becoming Modern, and mean that you need to do some remediation work or plan for leaving some sites/areas behind in the Classic configuration.

To help with this assessment, the PnP (Patterns and Practices) team at Microsoft have provided a really excellent tool called the ‘SharePoint Modern UI Experience Scanner’. There are some solid instructions in the GitHub repository that even a plebeian like me could understand and follow, so you shouldn’t have too many difficulties getting this up and running in your environment – provided you have an admin account to set-up an app-only principle with tenant permissions.

The UI Scanner trawls through every site on your tenant and outputs a whole raft of CSV files at the end of it. These CSVs provide information on incompatible customisations and configurations at both the site level and the list level. I created a Power BI report to make the information a bit more human-readable, but you can achieve something similar in Excel (or draw your own conclusions straight from the CSV, if you don’t need to represent an impact assessment to a broader audience).

My tips to get meaningful information out of the reports are as follows:

Site-Level Customisations

IgnoredCustomisations.csv is the high-level report that tells you sites with custom Master Pages, custom CSS, or Custom Actions. These things are currently incompatible with the Modern UI.

IgnoredCustCSV

My top tip for this report is to make sure you filter out any Publishing sites, i.e. stuff that is related to your publishing intranet rather than being a collaboration space. You might be able to do this via something as simple as which managed path a site resides under (/teams or /sites), but you may need some slightly more complicated logic to weed out the irrelevant stuff. The Modern UI cannot be used on Publishing sites anyway, so they’re kind of irrelevant for a compatibility report.

It’s also a good idea to find a way to call out any sites with no issues, so you have a clear way of knowing which sites you don’t need to refactor to get them working with the Modern UI.

My Power BI Report for Site-level customisations ended up looking like the below:

SiteBI

List-Level Customisations

The ModernListBlocked.csv file provides a whole heap of information about compatibility issues that might prevent you from switching on the Modern UI in certain lists/libraries. These issues fall into two broad buckets:

  1. Out of the Box Issues: Areas where things outside of your control mean that the Modern UI is not available for this list/library. This includes stuff like the base list template being incompatible; the view type being incompatible; or an unsupported field type (such as geo-location fields).
  2. Customisation Issues: These are areas where you, foolish developer, have caused a compatibility problem by customising something on a list or library. This includes stuff like custom list actions; JSLink; XSL; or multiple web parts added to a list view page.

IgnoredCustListCSV

I’ll discuss these limitations in much more detail in the next section, as they all need consideration, but for the purposes of assessing compatibility with your existing estate, my top tip for this report is to, again, find a way of filtering out the irrelevant publishing sites. A second tip is to find a way of categorising the type, or base template, of the list for each row. The report provides this in the format of a list base template identifier (e.g. 107, 108, 120 etc. etc.) from which you can infer the actual list type. For example, 104 is an Announcements list, 105 is Contacts, 106 is a Calendar, etc.

My Power BI Report for List-level customisations looked like the below:

ListBI

How do I Upgrade?

Enabling Modern

Before you can think about when/where to upgrade, you need to enable the Modern UI on your tenant. This is simple to do, but has the potential to create a massive pain in the a**. Enabling the Modern UI is like an on/off switch. You can’t enable it at a more granular level, only across the tenant. This means you need to then script a downgrade for classic to any sites with compatibility issues, and for any sites you need to provision as Classic Sites. This is a massive pain in the neck. Once Modern is enabled (and you’ve disabled it wherever you need to disable), you can do the following:

Creating a Site as Modern Natively

Obviously, this isn’t an upgrade, but it’s worth noting here that new sites can be created as Modern natively. That said, read on to find out some of the constraints you have around provisioning Modern Sites, and other limitations you’ll experience once the site is up and running! This applies to sub-sites as well as new site collections.

Upgrading an Existing Classic Site

To upgrade an existing site in the classic configuration, you will need an admin to run a PowerShell script. This can be done against one or many sites.

Before doing this, you should – of course – have followed the guidance I outlined above around assessing the compatibility of your existing sites with the Modern UI. You might find that you need to do some remediation work before you can run any scripts.

Upgrading an Existing Classic List/Library

There are a few options as far as upgrading lists/libraries to the Modern UI goes:

  1. Administrators can set the default list experience for the whole Office 365 tenant.
  2. Site owners can switch lists and libraries to the Modern UI on a case-by-case basis.
  3. Administrators can run a PowerShell script to programmatically change the default list experience, or upgrade individual lists across a site or many sites at once.

Again, keep in mind that fact that many list types are not compatible with the Modern UI.

Upgrading an Existing Classic Page

Unfortunately, it is not possible to upgrade a Classic web page on a SharePoint site to Modern. Pages will need to be recreated as Modern Pages.

Recommendations for Remediating Existing Sites

If you’re finding lots of team sites, project sites or other collaboration spaces with custom CSS or master pages, you should consider changing these to something more generic. The general guidance extolled by Microsoft and SharePoint experts for the last couple of years has been to avoid doing these types of customisations to collaboration sites. However, in the real world, organisations usually want – at the very least – a consistent global navigation experience with the rest of their intranet/SharePoint environment. Unless you’ve kept your SharePoint environment extremely vanilla, it’s likely you’ll have some quite extensive work to do here to get these sites ready to go Modern.

As for lists, it’s unlikely that there will be any sites that don’t have at least a couple of lists with compatibility issues. This is due to the lack of Modern UI support for some very common list view types and base templates. But for lists with customisation issues, you should look at how feasible it is to tweak these, keeping in mind that support for some of the things that cause issues with Modern Lists at the moment is coming down the pipeline.

Step 2 – Assess Constraints for Future Design and Development Work

The next step I recommend is to familiarise yourself with where and how the Modern UI constrains what you want to do in the future. To help with this, I’ve looked at a variety of things an organisation might want to do with a SharePoint site, and compared the capabilities in Modern to the existing capabilities in Classic. For anything that the Modern UI does not yet support, I’ve included a bit of detail I’ve gleaned from Microsoft’s Public Roadmap (or bits I’ve inferred from supporting information around the roadmap).

It should be noted here that this blog post is correct at the time of writing (July 2017), in terms of the items on the roadmap and where the gaps are, but it will likely become out of date. I’d also say it’s highly unlikely I’ll maintain the blog post going forwards, so I’d suggest doing some of your own research around the roadmap if you’ve come across this post more than a few months after its initial published date. But

The areas I consider are as follows:

  • Provisioning: How sites can be programmatically created to enforce consistency of structure, look and feel, information architecture etc.?
  • Branding: How can a site be configured to look and feel the way a business wants it to?
  • Custom Pages: What are some of the constraints around editing custom pages on a site?
  • Site Management: What needs to be kept in mind for the management of existing sites, in terms of settings, configuration, and adding new areas to the structure?
  • Site Discovery: How is the discovery/findability of sites impacted by the Modern UI?
  • List Views: What compatibility problems are there for specific types of list view in the Modern UI (building on what I alluded to in the compatibility with existing sites section)?
  • List Customisations: What customisations can you make at the list level?

In addition to the areas I’ve considered below, there are a few extra specifics in this article from Microsoft: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between-classic-and-new-experiences-for-lists-and-document-libraries-30e1aab0-a5cc-4363-b7f2-09e2ae07d4dc?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Feature Gaps and Constraints

Provisioning

CON Provisioning

While Modern sites can be created programmatically as part of a provisioning process (including all the content types and metadata fields that are required), you have no way to make the homepage of the new site look how it needs to without human interaction. Currently, you must add a new app to a newly provisioned Modern site manually, unless you create some sort of hacky UI-based execution, which has significant risk attached to it if Microsoft make updates.

Branding

CON Brandingjpg

Options for branding Modern sites are extremely limited, though further options akin to Master Pages and custom CSS are being rolled out as I write, and should hit General Availability (GA) in the next few months. The key takeaway here is that Modern Sites/pages will not look like the rest of your SharePoint environment if you have customised it in any way, and it is currently impossible to make them fit in look and feel-wise.

Update Sep 2017: The SharePoint Framework Extensions (the things that give you the ability to add custom Global Nav and brand a Modern Site) are now out of preview and available on first release tenants.

Custom Pages

CON Pages

The types of Modern Page that can be created are relatively limited, though the pages themselves are much easier to use for both end users and editors. It is also worth noting that Modern Web Parts are Microsoft’s clear strategic direction, and should become the de facto way in which custom web parts are developed in your organisation. If you’re not adopting the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) wherever possible for custom web part development, you are creating a bigger and bigger backlog of legacy stuff that will eventually need to be refactored.

Update, Sept 2017: All Modern Pages (across both Group Sites/Team Sites and Communication Sites) can now change their layout to various choices. This is actually really nicely implemented, and a lot more flexible than the old page layouts and web part zones on classic pages.

Site Management

CON Site Mgt

Modern Sites are currently only designed for collaboration (team/project site) scenarios, not web content management.

There are also issues with sub-sites created beneath Modern Sites, in that the homepage of the Sub-Site will be Classic, not Modern. This is a biggie for me, as it creates terrible inconsistency and is very confusing for site owners. Again, this is something that could possibly be addressed with a bit of a hack, but that’s not an ideal solution, or indeed a supported one.

Site Discovery

CON Discovery

Modern Sites/pages can be rolled up and presented in much the same way as Classic sites/pages, though some tweaking of the current configuration of your Content by Search web parts may be required. Also worth noting here is that it is not possible to capture metadata for a site in the property bag of Modern Sites. Some custom applications will have previously utilised the site property bag (rather than tags on pages or hiding properties away in some sort of site configuration list) in order to classify a site for rollup/discovery purposes when surfacing it through search. This is no longer an option, and if you’ve done this, you might have some serious remediation work on your hands.

They can also be attached/created as part of a new Group/Team to provide a more seamless interface with these other services in the Office 365 suite.

List Views

CON List Views

Some core list functionality does not work in the Modern UI, including Gantt and Calendar views which are widely used on collaboration spaces (at least in my experience). This means there will be a fragmented user experience if the site is Modern, but the list remains in classic mode. Something you must accept in the Modern UI is that there will – for the time being at least – be a degree of jumping around between Classic and Modern layouts as you move between lists. This has knock-on effects for training guidance and collateral, which must be kept in mind when you’re assessing the impact of the Modern UI (more to come on this in the next post).

Additionally, there are several field types that don’t work in Modern lists, though these are unlikely to affect the majority of sites.

List Customisations

CON List Cust

Lists with customisations generally do not work in the Modern Experience. However, Microsoft are rolling out the ability to add more customisations to the Modern Lists experience as we speak.

Microsoft’s Roadmap

Stuff That’s on the Roadmap

So this is a summary of the things that are on Microsoft’s current public roadmap, or at least alluded to as part of the collateral supporting related roadmap items.

Roadmap

Update, Sept 2017: As noted above, the ‘Injecting Content’ item is now out of preview and available to first release tenants.

Stuff That’s Missing from the Roadmap

This is a summary of constraints that aren’t on the roadmap to be addressed by Microsoft:

Gaps

Wrapping it Up

So that’s it for Part One of this two-part series. It’s been slightly one-sided so far, but in the next post, I’ll cover off the benefits of the Modern UI, and options/recommendations for how and when to adopt it in your organisation.

Thanks for reading.

Next post in this series >

Tinfoil Hat Predictions for SharePoint and Office365 in 2021

So another year has slipped by, and the SharePoint blogosphere is alive with predictions about 2016 and what the future might hold. I thought I’d take this a step further: Time to don my trusty tinfoil hat, and make some predictions about what might be happening in the world of SharePoint in 5 years’ time! Now, it’s worth noting that most of these predictions are based on some basic research, reading, and my opinion about the way trends are heading in the broader tech landscape: I might prove to be right on some counts, I may very well be totally wrong. It will be interesting to revisit this post in 2021!

So without further ado, here are my Top 5 predictions for SharePoint in 2021:

1. SharePoint as a concept/brand will cease to exist

Microsoft barely refer to SharePoint in their marketing. This was particularly true during 2014 and the early part of 2015, when there were hardly any articles specifically about SharePoint on their Office Blogs site, one of the main channels through which Microsoft updates users about forthcoming features and changes within its enterprise technology stack. However, towards the end of last year, somebody sensible at Microsoft seemed to realise that the SharePoint brand still carries significant cachet, particularly with on-premises customers. There was more direct referral to SharePoint by Microsoft in late 2015, particularly with SharePoint Server 2016 coming out shortly.

With that said, I still think Microsoft’s preferred direction of travel is towards distinct, delineated experiences within a shared platform. SharePoint as a concept is just too big and hard to explain (as I wrote about in this article), so even though the brand name still carries some weight, I predict that Microsoft will distance themselves from it and focus on marketing ‘Groups’, ‘Delve’, ‘OneDrive’, and other individual apps within the broader platform.

 

2. Around 20% of content on SharePoint intranets will be created by automated writing tools

Automated composition engines are already capable of turning data and analytics into natural language writing. In my opinion, it’s a matter of when – not if – this technology makes its way onto corporate intranets and collaboration platforms. Things like market reports, shareholder reports, legal documents, and the latest quarterly financial results could all be written by machines, reviewed by a human, and then published on a SharePoint intranet as news articles.

 

3. Modern intranets will no longer have a homepage

This is something I’ve actually been longing to try on a project for the last couple of years, but have never found quite the right situation or client to do it with. Homepages take up a massively disproportionate amount of effort and cost on a project, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of an intranet project’s total development budget. Homepages also take up an exorbitant proportion of analysis/design time too, since stakeholders are always so wedded to the idea of having a nice-looking homepage that everybody wants to have their two pence and get it as ‘perfect’ as possible.

In my opinion, the homepage of an intranet should be nothing more than a jumping off point into distinct portals (or ‘experiences’ as Microsoft calls them) where users can get the content they need or perform the task they must do. You could already make the argument that the app launcher in O365 fulfils this purpose (particularly if it’s customised to include things like links to your News Centre, Project Sites Hub etc. etc.), so I’d be tempted to go full-Google and just have a search box and nothing more on the homepage. I still need to find a client I can sell on that concept :-).

So my bold prediction is that by 2021, modern intranets won’t really have homepages in the traditional sense, or at the very least, they will no longer be pouring disproportionate amounts of time, effort and money into one single page.

 

4. Team Sites will no longer exist

I’m a big fan of team sites, so this is a prediction I make with a slightly heavy heart. There are two main reasons I think this one is very likely to come into fruition: Firstly, Microsoft have created a minimum viable product in O365 called ‘Groups’ which is attempting to bridge the gap between shared mailboxes in Outlook, team sites in SharePoint, and discussion groups on Yammer. It’s a bit of a ‘worst of all worlds’ solution at the moment and I’m not aware of anywhere it’s been widely adopted, but it shows the route Microsoft are trying to go down on the collaboration side of things.

The second reason I think this prediction has a high probability of being right is that Microsoft wants to move away from power user customisation. In my experience, 90% of an organisation’s user base will only use their team sites for the basics: store some documents, maybe a team calendar, capture some contacts if you’re lucky. But the other 10% go to town, and create all sorts of power user customisations and small-scale business apps that help them get work done more efficiently and effectively. Microsoft has been burnt in the past by allowing heavy customisation of SharePoint platforms (hence the app/add-in model) since it makes things harder to support and upgrade. For SharePoint 2013, they took away the WYSIWYG visual interface from the SharePoint Designer tool to make it less non-dev friendly. And for SharePoint 2016, well… There is no more SharePoint Designer! This leaves a bit of a hole in my opinion, in terms of small-scale business applications (it remains to be seen if PowerApps can fill it effectively), but I think it’s another nail in the coffin of Team Sites in the traditional sense.

I think that by 2021, Groups will be the de facto collaboration area, and PowerApps will provide the ability for power users to customise SharePoint and create business applications.

 

5. ‘Intranet in a Box’ products will cease to exist

There’s been a massive trend in the last few years towards implementing pre-packaged intranet products. The market is saturated with products built on top of SharePoint Server/SharePoint Online, and there is relative parity in features and capabilities of all these platforms. I think that it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft builds something into O365/SharePoint that fills most of an organisation’s intranet requirements out of the box. Indeed, they’ve already started down this route with the forthcoming Microsites and Knowledge Management Portal features in O365. Companies that have their own intranet in a box products will have to react quickly to new functionality Microsoft provides, or they will go out of business.

 

Conclusion

So those are my predictions for the SharePoint/O365 landscape in 5 years’ time. Some slightly out there, some bold but based on solid evidence, some that it’s safe to say probably will happen at some point. It will be amusing to revisit these in a few years time and see if I’m some sort of Nostradamus, or a complete fool. Thanks for reading.

SharePoint Operating Model

SharePoint Operating Model: Part 1 – Introduction

Introduction

Most SharePoint projects focus on building the solution. This covers the information architecture, user experience, interface design, apps/add-ins, and system integrations that come together to form an effective SharePoint implementation. Fewer still define an effective strategy and business change approach for the project. But – in my experience at least – hardly any projects give much heed to how to run SharePoint once it goes live in the organisation. Having a well-defined Operating Model is crucial to ensuring the on-going success of the platform and can help to ease the difficult transition from project into service.

What is an “Operating Model”?

“An Operating Model is the organisational design that makes it possible to deliver the business strategy”. – Ashridge Business School

My interpretation of an Operating Model is that it’s a set of guidelines for how SharePoint aligns with people, processes and other technology to deliver the business strategy. The Operating Model defines the necessary level of process integration and standardisation to allow your SharePoint service to thrive and grow. It provides a general vision of how your organisation will enable the long-term business benefits of the platform. It drives the foundation for executing the SharePoint strategy.

I’ve also heard it described as “governance on steroids” in that it provides some definition to roles, responsibilities, processes and procedures. However, governance typically focuses on information management, application management, and IT ops. This is necessary work that all organisations looking to use SharePoint should be doing, yet SharePoint often requires something more holistic to get the most out of it long-term. This is where the Operating Model comes in.

There are two overriding dimensions that drive an operating model. These are:

  1. Standardisation; and
  2. Integration.

Standardisation is about defining how a process will be executed so that it runs smoothly no matter who is enacting it. This delivers efficiency and predictability around who is doing what, and helps align the platform across different divisions in the company, as well as third party suppliers.

Integration is about linking efforts through shared data, capability and knowledge. It ensures that new capabilities or initiatives delivered in SharePoint can be smoothly integrated with the pre-existing functionality.

A Sample Operating Model

The diagram below shows a sample high-level Operating Model:

Operating Model
A sample Operating Model for SharePoint.

The thinking behind this model is to divide SharePoint into five operational pillars: Content, Adoption, Enhancements, Support, and Operations. An overarching strategy supplements these pillars, and governance policies and processes underpin them.

 Strat3 Strategy defines the direction for the platform. It ensures everyone involved in operating the system is singing from the same hymn sheet and pushing for the same outcomes. It provides direction and impetus for action and helps to guide future investments in the platform.
 Cont2 Content encompasses all information stored on the platform. It covers the configuration possible without formal change control or lifecycle management.
 Adopt2 Adoption covers the on-going training, communications and business change aspects of running SharePoint. It ensures employees engage with and use the platform.
 Enhance2 Enhancements is how to deal with change in the system. This could range from adding small features to much bigger, strategic programmes of work.
 Support2 Support is all about how incidents, problems and service requests get raised against the system. It also covers who deals with them, and how to categorise and prioritise them.
 Ops2 Operations covers on-going maintenance tasks. These activities ensure the smooth running and optimisation of the system over time. You will typically find that on-premises implementations will be much heavier from an ops perspective. This is because you have little control over much of the IT operational tasks in SharePoint Online, as Microsoft looks after these for you.
 Gov2 Governance underpins the core operational pillars. It fleshes out the policies and procedures that must be followed to run SharePoint.

Together, these elements form a holistic Operating Model that can deliver standardisation and integration across the different pillars, and ensure that SharePoint can thrive within an organisation.

This series

I’m going to write a series of blog posts focusing on defining an operating model for SharePoint. I’ll do one post for each of the 5 operational pillars, plus one each for strategy and governance. I’ll also do an extra post on organisation design, and how to put together the right teams, roles and responsibilities to run SharePoint. I hope this blog series will provide some useful reference material for organisations who want to maximise their return on investment with SharePoint.

Thanks for reading.

—————————————————————

Part 1 – Introducing the SharePoint Operating Model

Part 2 – Strategy

Part 3 – Content

Migration

Migration Projects – Things You Should Know

Introduction

Recently, I’ve seen a few questions flying about on the various SharePoint community Yammer networks, forums and LinkedIn groups about migration. I thought I’d weigh in with my usual approach to migrating content into SharePoint, which will hopefully help you to facilitate a smooth, successful, on-time, on-budget migration project.

Analysis of source data

Before you can think about what tooling to use, how you’re going to communicate the migration, or any other activities, you need to know what it is that must be moved. Your analysis of the source data should include the following information to help you make sensible, informed decisions later in the migration process:

  • What is the total size of data?
  • How many files must be moved?
  • How frequently read is the info?
  • How frequently updated is the info?
  • When was the last time the info was read?
  • When was the last time the info was updated?
  • What types of files exist?
  • What is the average size of file?
  • Are there any specific permissions applied?
  • How is the data apportioned into different ‘buckets’ within the source system?
  • Who is the owner of this information?
  • Are there any unique IDs that need to be migrated?
  • Do old versions need to be migrated?
  • Are all users of the old system in SharePoint (user mapping)?

This analysis piece will likely take the form of some analytics stats, perhaps presented in a graph to help make sense of it, plus an extract in .xlsx or .csv format that captures the granular detail about individual files.

If your source system is SharePoint…

If your source data is stored in SharePoint, there is some additional analysis you will need to do in order to prepare for a migration:

  • Are there any full-trust code solutions on the system?
  • What is the database count?
  • What is the site collection count?
  • Are there any unghosted files?
  • Are there any custom site definitions?
  • Are there any lists with a large (>100k) number of items?

A good tool to use to gather this information is AvePoint’s Discovery Tool.

Prioritisation of source data

Using your analysis, you need to make some high-level decisions about what is going to be migrated. Key things to keep in mind are that if you are migrating to a comms publishing portal (intranet), then you probably don’t want to take working documents over – you only need published content. Based on usage stats, you can also start to formulate a plan in terms of which are the big ticket items that must be moved, which are the quick wins, which areas can wait a while, and which content is not worth migrating at all. This is also the time to start involving the business in some of the decision making. I find a workshop where the analysis is presented and discussed works well, and it sets the wheels in motion ready for the ‘Housekeeping’ activities (see below).

If you’re migrating from SharePoint, this is also the time you need to start worrying about full-trust code (server side code). If you’re migrating to O365, you will have no option but to rebuild these solutions as provider-hosted apps. Even if you’re migrating to an on-premises SharePoint environment, you should still consider following best practice and rebuilding any full-trust solutions as apps.

Housekeeping

The big thing to avoid with migration projects is moving rubbish from one bucket into a newer, shinier bucket. A migration is your chance to clean up some of your content and ensure your new system is better used and more organised. You need to engage the business and empower the content owners of each logical area to remove, change or add any information they feel they should. Buy in from senior stakeholders within the business is essential for this process, because people are never very motivated to do any housekeeping unless their boss is breathing down their neck making them do it.

Target system information architecture

If you’re moving content to a ‘greenfield’ SharePoint environment (i.e. one that is brand new and isn’t currently being used), you have the luxury of being able to design your information architecture from scratch. In SharePoint terms, information architecture is how your site collections, sites, libraries, lists, and folders are structured; how to classify information (metadata and content types); how to secure information (permissions); how navigation works; and how search works. If you’re starting with a blank slate, you can design your IA with the migrated data in mind, in order to make the migration process as easy as possible. A few things to keep in mind when designing your IA are:

  • Content size boundaries (such as the 200Gb content database size limit for SP2013 on-prem);
  • The list view threshold (5000 items);
  • The lookup threshold (8 columns); and
  • Avoiding item-level permissions.

If you’re migrating into a ‘brownfield’ SharePoint environment (a pre-existing, already-used system with live content and users), things tend to become a lot more difficult. You might have to refactor some of your original IA in order to accommodate your new content while still ensuring the system is scalable and does not exceed any defined size boundaries.

Something to avoid – particularly when migrating from file shares – is simply replicating the source system folder structure. Though folders aren’t necessarily an evil thing in SharePoint (as some consultants might lead you to believe), you are still likely to face issues around usability and maximum URL characters (256) caused by deeply nested folder structures. A flatter, metadata-driven structure is often a better alternative, though it takes more work to plan out.

Mapping and categorisation

You will need some way of knowing where content from the source system should land in the new system, and how it should be profiled with metadata. It’s important to do a mapping exercise to define this. You can define mapping for buckets of content, specifying the location they should be moved to in your new system, and you can do some categorisation on an item by item basis to provide any metadata that will be required for the migration. If you’re building some sort of custom tool or script to move your content, this step is especially important: You need to be prescriptive about precisely where each item needs to be moved when you are scripting the process.

Select the right tool for the job

There are several third party migration tools available from the likes of AvePoint, Metalogix and ShareGate. Personally, I have used Metalogix and AvePoint tools and found them to be more than adequate. I’ve not used ShareGate yet myself, but everyone I’ve spoken to about it has sung its praises. Therefore it probably comes down to your project’s budget and your organisation/implementer’s existing partnerships which tool you select. I suggest you assess all three of these tools. If you’re moving from SharePoint to SharePoint, a third party tool is almost always the way to go, at least in my experience.

An alternative to using a third party product is to build your own tool, or write a custom script. This is often a cheaper alternative to buying a product, and can often be the best option if you’re doing a relatively low complexity migration, for example from a file share into SharePoint. The thing to keep in mind is that your mapping logic will need to be sound, and you will probably need a complete extract of all the source data.

The final option is to get users to migrate content manually. I find this is a good choice if you have lots of rubbish in your source system that needs serious housekeeping: if your business people are migrating content themselves, they are inherently more motivated to do some proper housekeeping by virtue of the fact they will be reducing their own workload when they come to actually move the files. It is also a solid option for web pages if you have defined some nice new layouts in your target system, but still need to take across page content (particularly true of content stored in Content Editor Web Parts on SP2010 and MOSS 2007).

Trial run

Before migrating into your production environment, it’s worth doing a trial run into your pre-PROD or User Acceptance Testing environment (you’ve got a UAT environment, right?). You can test your mapping logic, tooling, and – perhaps most importantly – get a good idea for how long the process will take. This information will allow you to plan downtime, change freezes etc. more accurately, and ensure you can set the expectations of your stakeholders correctly.

Testing

You need a plan for verifying a) that the content has all been moved, and b) it’s in the right place with the right metadata in your target system. Another key thing to test for is broken links, which will almost certainly be a problem if you’re migrating any pages. Users and content authors don’t tend to understand the concept of relative URLs, so it’s likely any links between pages on your old system will be broken post-migration.

The actual migration

You need a solid plan in place for the actual migration into live, and you may need to communicate/enforce a change freeze in the source environment. An alternative to a change freeze is to migrate, get your users on the new system and then go back and ‘mop up’ the delta between your first migration and the go-live on the new system. A good time to do migrations is usually over a weekend, since they often cause disruption (either through change freezes or ‘locks’/performance problems when extracting or importing data).

Change Management

From the outset of the migration project, you will need a solid communication plan in place. You need to tell your stakeholders what will be expected of them and when, plus informing any users of the source system what is going on. You need to explain to users why the migration is happening, when it is happening, and anything they need to do (or not do).

You will also need to train your users with the new system: content authors will need to know how to create/edit/publish pages; users will need to know how to upload documents, categorise information and navigate the system; and site admins will need to know how to add new libraries, folders etc. The type of system you are migrating from should also impact how much training you need to do (for example, migrating from MOSS 2007 to SP2013 won’t be a massive step-change, but going from an ancient file share to an all-singing, all-dancing SharePoint system will be a major shock to the system for your users).

Governance

One final thing: if you don’t want your new system to descend into chaos, you will need a well-defined, enforced governance plan in place. Governance is a big topic, so I won’t open that particular can of worms here, but it’s something you need to ensure you have in place in order to realise many of the benefits of migrating to SharePoint in the first place.

Bringing It All Together

So that concludes my whistle-stop tour of how to approach a migration project with SharePoint. The complexity of migration should not be underestimated, and it is rarely a case of a seamless “lift and shift”. Even for simple migrations, there is a lot of analysis, stakeholder engagement and planning that you need to do in order to ensure success.

Thanks for reading.