Current SharePoint Landscape
Over the years Elanco has amassed over 1000 SharePoint sites, meaning that roughly 1 in 6 employees are an owner of an individual site. This includes a huge amount of data, and much of this remains untouched/abandoned. Many of these SharePoint sites have been designed and customised for business functions. In many cases, the person who created or customised the site has either moved roles, left the company, or it was an external party contracted for a short time, leaving the business unsupported and the site unmanaged. How many times have you tried to get access to a site but cannot find the relevant person, or have become owner of a site by default?
It can be frustrating when a site breaks, or needs maintenance as we do not have resources in Elanco to support SharePoint. People are left with broken sites and nowhere to go for help. We want to avoid this in future, providing a ‘clean’ Microsoft environment whilst maintaining all the data needed by our business.
What’s changing?
With this in mind there will be a shift in the way SharePoint is positioned.
- SharePoint will still be available as it is the backbone of the O365 suite. There will be simple sites available for those who need them, but these will be a requested through Service Now, and created from a template (with no option to customise).
- In terms of support, ETS will be positioning Sharepoint in the same way as other traditional MS tools. For example if you use Excel, you need to leverage online communities and work to your own level of skill. There will be no resources to support the creation or maintenance of SP sites, and custom code will not be supported.
- Soon InfoPath will no longer be provided by Microsoft, and again we are seeing the divestiture as a fantastic chance upgrade and adopt new technology where needed.
We understand that there are some SharePoint sites today, which were used for the specific functionality the tooling could provide. However, we believe that there are better tools and offerings which could provide the same capabilities.
This new approach will mean that SharePoint is not the ‘go to’ every time someone needs a large document library or visual site. Tools such as Microsoft Teams, PowerApps, OneDrive, Microsoft groups with document libraries and The Spot should be utilised as a replacement for the traditional SharePoint model.
Responsibilities
- ETS will ensure that all of the O365 tools are set up appropriately for use, and cover the capabilities required by our business. We will provide generic guidance explaining which tool should be used for which use case, and some basic getting started guides.
- As part of the divestiture we will ensure that all the necessary data will be migrated over to the new world. This includes data stored on SharePoint. We will work to understand what data needs to be taken and what can be left behind.
- It will then be the responsibility of functional IT teams to help the business determine which tooling would be best for their data long term
- ETS will not be able to provide support for individual sites but will be supporting the 365 platform as a whole in terms of governance, licensing, security and usability.
Next Steps
We are currently in the middle of the tenant migration POC which includes data/document migration test cases. Once we understand more about what data can be taken from SharePoint sites (documents, permissions, access, site layouts etc) then we will be sure to communicate more. If you are the owner of a SharePoint site and you have not yet been contacted about your site, we will be reaching out to you by email in the near future.
We are also working on knowledge articles for a selection of the O365 tools, with some guidance around how you may take data from SharePoint, into another tool.