Change is here – What’s your plan for SharePoint End-of-Life?

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The evolution of cloud marks a new era in how and where we work, and it’s ushering in the next big wave of legacy technology extinction. As of April 2023, Microsoft will no longer provide extended support for SharePoint 2013, and extended support for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 will end in July 2026. It’s critical to update your technologies as soon as possible or face the risks that come with using end of support products.

It’s time to migrate to SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server Subscription Edition on-premises.

Risks of using SharePoint 2013 – and soon also SharePoint 2016 and 2019 – without support:

Here are just a few of the significant risks you could face by remaining on existing environment after SharePoint end-of-life:

No more technical support

Kind of obvious, isn’t it? But we just have to reiterate it. You will cease to get technical support for SharePoint 2013 after April 2023 without incurring quite expensive additional charges for post-life support. What’s more, platform utility too will be impacted as data integration will get severely affected as users will no longer be able to make periodic updates or receive direct support.

Reduced security

Till the time a product is under support, security update patches are deployed on a regular basis to deal with the constantly evolving strategies used by cybercriminals.  End of support automatically means the end of those patches that protect you from threats. Your organization will be vulnerable to security breaches without up-to-date patching support from Microsoft.

Integrating new features could become a problem

If you are considering adding new features to your system, you could run into some unpredictable challenges as the obsolete version of SharePoint is sure to have compatibility issues.

Business disruption

The solutions that are critical to business users may become increasingly unreliable and prone to failure over time. If and when there is a failure, you will experience an extended downtime with an unsupported fix (if a fix is possible at all), without any support from Microsoft. Once the support from Microsoft has ended, the protracted and often frantic efforts to reach out for post-life support or chalking up plans internally to deal with the downtime will increase the duration of the downtime, while your system gets affected.

Most SharePoint migrations will take weeks and months to complete. Large environments with a large amount of customized features take even 12 to 18 months to complete. Planning ahead can help you avoid disruption across your entire organization.

It is essential to start planning months before your SharePoint environtment will reach end-of-life and get out of support. But – Migration should be more than a step up to the new version of SharePoint. It’s also a chance to elevate your employee experience. With bitwork as your trusted partner, you can see SharePoint end-of-life and the need to migrate as an opportunity to innovate and drive value for your business.

Let’s bring our experts and your teams together for a 3-hour workshop to co-create breakthrough ideas we can test, plan for and then make real.

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