i3solutions

05/28/2026

Migration plans usually look correct. Until they hit the business calendar.

Cutover schedules are built around technical capacity.

How many batches can move, how long validation takes, when tools are available.

All valid. None of it accounts for when the business actually needs that content.

Finance close. Legal deadlines. Audit windows. Sales cycles.

Migrate content during those periods and the disruption is unavoidable.

Getting that input takes a meeting. Not having it takes weeks of recovery.

05/27/2026

After years of leading IT delivery, I finally understood what separates reactive leaders from trusted ones.

It’s not just experience. It’s not just seniority. It’s the discipline to spot delivery risk before it becomes visible.

Discipline one: watch your decision velocity. When decisions stall, that’s not noise. It’s an early sign that delivery risk is forming.

Discipline two: inspect real artifacts. Backlogs. Test results. Release notes. Evidence, not opinion.

Discipline three: act early. Patterns repeat before projects drift. The leaders who spot them first are the ones who protect the outcome.

The leaders who surface problems early are not being alarmist. They are being accountable.

Before your next delivery review, look at where decisions are stalling, what artifacts prove progress, and which issues are repeating.
Those three checks usually reveal delivery risk before the status report does.

05/26/2026

Some SharePoint migrations go beyond what standard tools can handle.

It comes down to four things.

One, SharePoint Designer workflows.
They don’t run in SharePoint Online and have to be rebuilt in Power Automate.

Two, farm solutions.
No equivalent in SharePoint Online. Each one rebuilds as SPFx, Power Apps, or Azure. Or gets decommissioned.

Three, complex content types.
Standard tools move content, not governance. These require PnP templates or custom scripting.

Four, external data connections.
BCS is not supported in SharePoint Online. Each one needs a new integration pattern.

None of these are edge cases in mature environments. All four are custom engineering scope.

Identify them in discovery. Commit the timeline after.

Save this before your next discovery phase.

05/25/2026

Version conflicts during migration don't happen by accident.

They happen because no one defined where work should happen.

During coexistence, users default to what they know.

They keep working in the source. No one told them not to.

Migration batches capture content at a point in time. Every edit made after that point exists only in the source.

It will never reach the destination on its own.

When cutover happens, that gap becomes visible.

Edits are lost or stuck in manual reconciliation, and that work lands on your team.

There is a design decision that prevents this. It has to be made before the first batch moves.

05/25/2026

Excel is one of the most capable tools ever built for organizing, analyzing, and sharing business data, and for many organizations, it still earns its place. But there is a point where the tool stops serving the operation and starts straining it, and knowing when you have crossed that line is one of the more consequential calls an IT director can make. This framework is designed to help you assess exactly where you stand, so when you do decide to replace Excel, you do it with evidence behind you, not frustration. Why Excel Isn’t the Problem: Scale Is Excel

05/22/2026

Farm solutions have no SharePoint Online equivalent.

The full-trust farm solution model that ran on SharePoint on-premises does not exist in the destination platform. Every farm solution in the source environment requires an architectural decision before the migration timeline can be committed.
The inventory is straightforward. Central Administration's Farm Solutions page, or Get-SPSolution in PowerShell, returns the full list. The work starts after that.

For each solution, the assessment answers three questions:

What does it do
What SharePoint objects does it deploy
What business need does it serve

Then one of four decisions:

Rebuild as an SPFx web part or extension for UI customizations
Rebuild as a Power App for data entry forms or simple workflow interfaces
Rebuild as an Azure-hosted application for background processes or server-side ex*****on
Decommission, when native SharePoint Online capabilities now meet the need

Each decision adds engineering scope. Aggregated, those decisions are the timeline.

A migration scope that commits to a date before the farm solution assessment is finished is committing to a number that will change. And in complex environments, the number always changes upward.

Share this with your migration team before the next scoping conversation.

05/21/2026

When your team needs to build a new business application, the question of whether to use Power Apps or pursue custom .NET development comes up fast. The stakes are higher than most organizations realize. A wrong choice can mean months of rework, ballooning costs, and a solution that cannot grow with your business. What Are Power Apps and Custom .NET Development? Before weighing the tradeoffs, it helps to understand what each option actually is and where it fits inside the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Power Apps Power Apps is Microsoft’s low-code platform, part of the Power Platform suite, that allows

Discover how to choose between Power Apps and custom .NET development for your enterprise with a practical, unbiased framework from i3solutions.

05/21/2026

Lock down SharePoint provisioning and users route around IT with personal accounts and external file sharing.

Open it up and the environment is ungoverned within months.
The streamlined approval process feels like the fix. It is not.

The provisioning model that breaks this cycle does not sit between those two options. It replaces the tradeoff entirely.

05/21/2026

A migration that ignores automation dependencies will break them.

Not eventually.
Immediately.

Flows, apps, and integrations depend on content paths.

Change the content without updating them, and they fail.

Three required steps:

First: dependency inventory.
Every flow, app, and integration tied to the migration scope.

Second: update all references to destination paths before any content moves.

Third: validate everything in the new environment using real test scenarios.

Migration isn’t complete when files arrive.

It’s complete when everything that depends on them works.

05/20/2026

"We have 600 consultants."
Sounds impressive. Here's what it actually tells you.

Three things truly determine whether your project succeeds and firm size speaks to none of them.

✅Who shows up. The senior leader in the room during the pitch? Often not the person running your day-to-day. Know exactly who owns your work.

✅How they run delivery. A 900-person practice can have wildly inconsistent quality across teams. Scale doesn't standardize discipline.

✅Whether they stay. Large firms rotate talent. Your lead gets pulled to a bigger deal. Their replacement starts learning your environment from scratch.

The number on their website is not a promise. The people assigned to you are.