What Goes Up Doesn’t Always Come Down

What Goes Up Doesn't Always Come Down

…And it Could Cost You

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Office 365 with SharePoint Online, I really do.  In fact, in my last two blogs, I’ve been singing the praises of benefits of how seamless and painless these environments can be.  But (I’m sure you could hear a “but” coming) a few experiences this last week have given me cause to curb my enthusiasm and pay very careful attention to the subtle differences between putting something on the cloud versus building something on the cloud.

We were recently contacted by a client who had decided for various reasons that they were interested in migrating a reasonably modest site collection out of Office 365\SharePoint Online and getting it back into an On Premise environment.  Well, we did a fair amount of research, tried some different strategies and even worked with leading companies and products to see just what was possible.

The Good News

We learned a lot.  For one thing, we learned that almost no one (statistically speaking) is trying to do this.  The bad news is, when you’re doing something that no one else wants to do you’re not going to find very many solutions to help you do it.

Without getting too technical, even when moving from a cloud version of SharePoint 2013 to an on premise version of SharePoint 2013 we were haunted by the issue of “build numbers”. The build number for the Office 365 version of SharePoint was always newer (problematically so) than the On Premise build number of SharePoint 2013.

What this caused was a less than robust end result when migrating.

The good news is, that we were able to effectively migrate an entire site collection with every site correctly named and positioned and with every list and library nestled in the appropriate site with list items and documents intact. (Rather amazing accomplishment when you really think about it).

The Not So Good News

The lists still had the “all items” view but every list view that had been individually created was gone.  The same is true of any custom library views. More alarming (from an “hours invested” standpoint) is that we lost all of the independent Web Parts. By this I mean the Content Editor Web Parts, Image Viewer Web Parts and so forth.

To make this really clear, for the homepage of a typical department site, where you’d expect to see:

• an image (or images)
• a description of the department
• a calendar and summary view
• a key contacts list view
• a summary view of an announcements list
• a list view of some important hyperlinks

Yep, you guessed it… 

The page was pretty much blank except for the navigation and the top banner bar. The site, calendar, lists and libraries all remained, but the body area of all of the pages were essentially blank and all of the carefully crafted Web Parts that we had applied were gone.

I guess the moral of the story is that the road to the cloud isn’t exactly a two-way street…  it’s more like an “express lane” going up but a “sidewalk” coming back, so invest your time appropriately.