During the Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft announced that “SharePoint Online now has over 100 million active users”. One of the reasons behind the overwhelming popularity of SharePoint Online (as a part of Office 365) has been its potential to be expanded upon, enhancing the functionalities of the platform significantly. Moreover, SharePoint Online offers enterprises access to thousands of customizations, extensions, and applications created by Microsoft partners around the globe which improves SharePoint as a platform and empowers users. Such user interface enhancements range from essential web parts to workflows and many things in between. Logically then most enterprises have either migrated or preparing themselves for the cloud.
SharePoint applications and customizations have existed as long as the SharePoint itself. However, most of the existing ones were built to support the on-premise versions. To continue benefiting from the existing applications and customizations organizations need to migrate them to the cloud. But the task is not as simple as that and there are many challenges in the process.
Hurdles in the Migrating Applications
Post-migration most organizations focus their attention on content migrations. However, the migration of applications and customizations needs to be given careful consideration as well. Without careful consideration, the on-premise applications and customizations aren’t going to function in the way they should in the new environment. This can be a big area of concern for the employees who have so long relied upon these for their day-to-day work.
Office 365 (and SharePoint Online within it) is managed centrally by Microsoft, so organizations do not get as much control over the code as they do with SharePoint on-premises. This means most pre-existing SharePoint customizations cannot be migrated to the cloud as they are. For enterprises, this means only one thing – wasted investment.
What’s more, your employees who are already skeptical about this change (from on-premises to online) will now have one more reason to complain. The applications and customizations that helped them get complex jobs done quickly are now not supported in the new environment. This will frustrate them and add to the adoption challenges.
Which customizations will cease to work?
Since SharePoint Online is centrally governed and continuously improved by Microsoft themselves so most of your on-premise customizations and applications would not work on the cloud. The functionalities of the few that make it might be affected when new updates are rolled out. However, some of the customizations would most definitely not work on the new environment. These include:
- Full trust farm Solutions: Such customizations make important changes to the underlying code in SharePoint. Microsoft cannot allow enterprises to make code changes in SharePoint Online that would affect the overall experience of the platform and all the businesses using it.
- Sandboxed Solutions: As mentioned by Microsoft, sandboxed solutions migrated to the cloud would continue to work for a limited period only; however, it is recommended to replace them with alternative functionality. It should also be mentioned in this respect that sandboxed solutions with code artifacts containing web parts, event receivers, etc. will not work upon migration.
Overcome Your Challenges with QuickApps for Office 365
For enterprises that have invested significant sums of money and time to build customizations that the employees depend upon, it can be frustrating to leave them behind. Does this mean there is no way to salvage the situation? Let us introduce you to AgreeYa’s QuickApps for Office 365 which allows cloud users to customize SharePoint and build applications without coding. This innovative product offers the following benefits:
- Faster recreation of favorite apps: With its point-and-click configuration approach, you can slash your application development time by 80%.
- Slash development costs: Mitigates the need for hiring costly SharePoint resources to recreate applications. Users with some knowledge of SharePoint can build applications quickly.
- Future-proofing applications: Built specifically for the cloud, functionalities of applications built with QuickApps for Office 365 would remain intact when there are upgrades to Office 365.
Want to know more? Contact us for a free demo of QuickApps for Office 365.