This article was originally written by Avanade alum Tom Hoglund.

Microsoft stopped mainstream support for SharePoint 2010 (SP 2010) in 2015 and the final date for extended support is April 13, 2021. After then, no more updates and no more security patches. Many organizations are still using SharePoint 2010 as the platform for their intranet, sharing knowledge, collaborating and other critical business functions. Companies that rely on SP 2010 after it goes off support are at severe risk for interruption of those critical business functions and security breaches.

While 2020 may seem far into the future, organizations should be actively starting their migrations to supported versions of SharePoint now. Most companies are seeing timelines to migrate that are well over 12 months, as they need to accomplish several key tasks during that period:

• Inventory what content they have that needs to be migrated.
• Assess what features they’ve used in SP 2010 that are not available in later versions of SharePoint or are implemented in a different way.
• Catalog what customizations they’ve made in SP 2010, determine if there are features in the newer versions that will accomplish the same things and develop a plan to convert that functionality or re-create it in the newer version.
• Migrate what in a large company may be terabytes worth of content and potentially tens of thousands of applications which may have issues like functionality that is broken, links that no longer work, missing content owners, out of date content, multiple versions of the same content, etc.
• Determine how they will execute records management and eDiscovery after migration and move the appropriate metadata to the new version to continue to manage records.
• Do all of this with minimal disruption to their users.

Organizations have been getting value from SharePoint since its inception, but they have also suffered some frustration with its limitations over the years. As Microsoft has embraced the cloud, they have breathed new life into SharePoint as the content management substrate under Office 365, Teams and OneDrive. As SP 2010 reaches its end of life and organizations consider the options for their collaboration and intranet platforms, they should absolutely consider Office365 and SharePoint Online as their future. The growing set of Office 365 tools are easier than ever to learn and the new capabilities that Microsoft has added provide a great new look and feel, while requiring much less customization than prior versions. This can lead to happy users and a much lower cost of ownership.

Making the jump from SP 2010 directly to SharePoint Online will also once and for all get the IT department out of the “my version of SharePoint is expiring” fire drill and minimize the effort to move to the cloud. Of course, there are scenarios where clients have a limited subset of data which is highly confidential, and they don’t yet feel comfortable putting it all in the cloud. We often recommend a mixed environment for that scenario or where there are large volumes of inactive data that they want to archive for records management purposes to minimize the migration effort.

For many of our clients, SP 2010 end of life is also providing an impetus to update their entire intranet to provide a more personalized, engaging and mobile-enabled experience for their employee. New tools beg for a redesign of the user experience and a move from very static, publishing oriented intranets to more engaging, mobile enabled and personalized “digital hubs” where employees go to get real work accomplished. Creating a more consumer-grade experience for your employees is an important factor in attracting new employees and retaining them.

We recommend our clients use the SP 2010 migration to rationalize their content and applications, seeing which things done in SharePoint today are better served in different types of applications like Dynamics, SAP, Teams, etc. For example, companies that are doing much of their team collaboration in SP 2010 today are impressed by the extended capabilities and better user interface they can get with Microsoft Teams, which also provides a rich environment to rapidly assemble experiences that look like websites or applications without having to do programming.

Organizations can look at SP 2010 end of life from two different perspectives. Those that consider it as a nuisance requiring them to expend a lot of effort for low value and just move things to a different platform will get exactly that out of it. Those that look at it as an opportunity to take their workplace experience to the next level will see significant increases in employee engagement and put in place a platform they can leverage for driving higher employee productivity and effectiveness.

Find out how Avanade can help you transform your Workplace Experience with SharePoint.