SharePoint on-premise: End of Life Is Coming — What should your firm do now?
- Anthony Olisa
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
For many professional services firms, SharePoint on-premise (on-prem) has been a core part of information management for years. It holds documents, supports intranets and collaboration and often sits at the heart of how people find and share knowledge … but that era is drawing to a close.
Microsoft has confirmed that extended support for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 ends on 14th July 2026. After that point, these versions will no longer receive security updates or fixes making continued reliance increasingly risky, particularly from compliance and cyber-security standpoints. Meanwhile, SharePoint’s evolution and Microsoft’s investment remain firmly in the cloud with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online.
If your firm is still running SharePoint on-prem, if you haven’t already addressed this project, now is the time to start planning your next move.
Practical actions your firm can take now
1. Understand your knowledge assets
Most on-prem environments have grown over many years. Getting good governance right is a massive challenge and most intranet managers would say, hand on heart, that this is something they would wish to improve. Often, content has been copied, duplicated and forgotten. Before thinking about platforms, get a sense of:
what content exists,
what’s actively used, and
what is obsolete or low value.
This preliminary inventory often dramatically reduces the scope of your future effort.
2. Be clear on why SharePoint matters to your firm
SharePoint often serves many roles at once: document store, intranet, workflow engine, communication tool, team workspace. Clarifying these use cases helps shape what you migrate, retain, archive or redesign.
3. Engage the right stakeholders early
IT, knowledge functions, compliance teams and business units will each have slightly different priorities. Early conversations help avoid last-minute surprises and align organisational needs with any future platform choice.
If you have already moved to SharePoint Online, but it feels unfinished
Many firms have completed a cloud move in haste or as part of a broader Microsoft 365 rollout. The result is often:
a lift-and-shift of existing structures and content,
replicated folder hierarchies,
minimal focus on governance, and
search and findability functionality that doesn’t feel intuitive to users.
For these firms, the focus should now be on:
improving information architecture and metadata,
clarifying content ownership,
refining governance to support users,
making search work better in practice,
considering where your SharePoint instance sits in your firm’s overall technology ecosystem and how you want it to work with newer technologies such as AI chatbots or agents going forward, and
aligning SharePoint with tools like Teams where appropriate.
When these foundations are addressed, SharePoint Online could starts to deliver real value rather than just a cloud-hosted repository.
How 3Kites can help
3Kites has a strong track record of supporting firms in delivering SharePoint initiatives. From this, we bring a deep understanding of the platform and how to make it work in practice, not just in theory. We have worked with firms big and small, on global SharePoint platform refreshes and smaller focused engagements advising on aspects of what needs to be done. Doing a full-on, all singing, all dancing SharePoint project can feel daunting (and time is short before the support deadline in July 2026 is upon us) but we can help you right-size your initiative to deliver your objectives.
So, whether you are still on-prem or already in the cloud, 3Kites can support your firm by:
Working with stakeholders within your firm to capture clear functional and non-functional requirements
Applying our experience of delivering SharePoint within the professional services space to help your firm shape realistic, scalable and future-proofed solutions
Bringing design ideas to life through mock-ups within the SharePoint Online environment, so they can be explored, challenged, and refined before any build or migration takes place
If you would like support in understanding your current position and shaping a future-ready SharePoint environment, please feel free to get in touch using the following details.
· Anthony Olisa, 07583 973196, Anthony.Olisa@3kites.com
