Sharepoint Maintenance: Best Practices & Costs

SharePoint is a valuable tool that helps teams collaborate and stay on top of tasks — provided it's well-maintained. It's also important for companies to customize SharePoint to meet their unique business needs.

That means that most businesses that use SharePoint need to have a SharePoint maintenance plan in place. This plan needs to include support for updates and routine maintenance that keeps your system up and running.

Due to the application's complex nature, it's usually necessary to employ an IT professional who can help maintain a healthy SharePoint environment.

SharePoint Maintenance Plan Best Practices

1. Maintain Communication Between IT and End Users

Those in charge of maintaining your SharePoint products can only do their job well if they know the issues your end users face with the program. Use built-in surveys or tools like user logs and reports to discuss concerns regularly and identify areas for improvement.

2. Archive Obsolete Content and Sites

You can make your SharePoint solution work more efficiently by archiving unused site collections and outdated site content. Before doing this, ensure that end users understand this is happening and encourage them to save any site content they don't want to lose, as restoring content can be difficult after it's archived.

3. Review Site Permissions

Login to your central administration panel on your SharePoint site to view site permissions. It's important to review these regularly, delete old users, and/or change permissions to ensure that only those intended can access your company data.

4. Plan and Test Backup Processes

Backing up your data is crucial to restoring content from your SharePoint site. Ensure your maintenance plans include scheduled backups and backup testing to protect your company's data.

SharePoint Maintenance Costs and What You Should Do Instead

With the right customizations and maintenance plans in place, SharePoint is a great collaboration. That said, it also has the potential to drain your budget.

Maintaining a good SharePoint environment requires you to invest in several costs on top of your basic SharePoint subscription fees, which range from $5 to $27 per user per month.

• IT experts: SharePoint is a complex environment that requires an expert to maintain properly. To adopt SharePoint for your business, you'll need to pay an external SharePoint consultant or hire in-house IT experts.
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• Employee training: Because SharePoint is complicated to use, it's important to adequately train your employees to ensure a high rate of user adoption. You can hire out training to consultants who offer in-person and online SharePoint training.
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• Customization: SharePoint is far from an out-of-the-box solution. It requires extensive customization to create an interface that's on-brand and user-friendly. It also requires customizations and tweaks to make the application work the way you need it to. These customizations require a SharePoint expert to implement and often need updates as Microsoft rolls out updates and security fixes.
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• Maintenance: Maintaining your SharePoint system as discussed earlier by undertaking tasks such as archiving obsolete content and removing outdated permissions can be complicated. You may need to find an IT consultant to handle these tasks or at the very least, pay an employee to take care of them.
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• Updates and repairs: Microsoft often releases updates, patches, and fixes for SharePoint. Every time this happens, installing and implementing them is crucial to ensure your data and operating systems are secure. While some updates are simple, others require an expert to implement. It's also possible that updates may affect the functionality of your customizations, so you may need to put more time and money into fixing them.
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• Employee time: SharePoint takes time to learn. Picking up new processes and navigating the platform may take your employees extra time to learn, so giving them the time they need to do so is essential. Prepare yourself to pay extra wages throughout the learning curve and any costs associated with mistakes they make during this time.

What You Should Do Instead

If you're already working with SharePoint, find an alternative program that integrates with the tech you already have so you can quickly transfer or access stored data.

On the other hand, if you're searching for a new solution, make sure to compare alternatives to SharePoint before making your decision. Instead of investing in a program that requires extensive customizations and investments, look for a ready-made solution that doesn't require a high level of technological prowess.

Choosing CentricMinds Intranet Platform

Choose a SharePoint alternative that offers an all-in-one solution to collaboration, document management, workflow automation, and communication. CentricMinds intranet platform is the ultimate out-of-the-box tool that does everything your business needs and more. And best of all, it does it without the help of IT experts or complex customizations.

With CentricMinds intranet platform, you get

• Uncomplicated document management: One search tool, one centralized location for every document, photo, and file your team saves. Use CentricMinds to store and search through every file with an intuitive search engine that lets you search by file name, revision date or file owner.
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• Easy integrations: CentricMinds can integrate with many standard business tools. Connect it to your Google Drive, Dropbox, or Office 365 to centralize your files without taking time to replicate or transfer them.
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• Simple, no-code workflow automation: Put more time back into your day with automated workflows. Teach CentricMinds to approve documents, complete forms, reply to communications and handle other menial tasks that detract from your focus throughout the day.
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• Collaboration tools: Enable your team to share documents, work simultaneously and collaborate more effectively on projects so they can get the job done, even when working in two different places. 
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• Effortless communications: With company-wide broadcasts and social-media-style employee chat and profiles, your team can work together and have fun doing it.
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• Secured cloud storage: Keep your data safe using your cloud-based storage solution that ensures nobody can access it unless you've authorized them.