In case you’ve missed it. Microsoft have been upgrading SharePoint Online on the Office 365 platform since late 2012. That means that they are now finished upgrading all the SharePoint Farms. Or at least in the European Datacenters, where I am seated.

The announcement in the Message Center is that you have until April 1st to get your Site Collections upgraded to the 2013 experience. Otherwise they will do it for you. So what happens if you have customised your site collections heavily? Disaster. That is what happens! Luckily you have options.

Option one

Run a test upgrade, and fix the glitches yourself. Save your resource files and then set aside some downtime for your company to begin the full upgrade and fixing of the production site collection.

Option two

If you don’t have time or possess the skill set to upgrade, you can hire me to do all the dirty work for you. I have done this on numerous occasions for other clients. Contact me to get a non-binding Quote.

Option three

You run your SharePoint Online on 100% standard design. Then just go ahead and run the test upgrade. Most likely you will not see anything wrong with that. Then go ahead and run the full upgrade on your Site Collections

Upgrade SharePoint Online by following these instructions

Will this ever happen to me again, you might wonder? The answer is clearly “Yes”. It will happen for a number of reasons.

  1. Microsoft have a way of changing a lot of things on every upgrade
  2. Microsoft are getting better and better at compliance towards non-IE browsers, so they need to upgrade the front end code a lot
  3. The upgrade pains are way smaller that last time, when it went from 2007 to 2010
  4. SharePoint have a “Theme” functionality like, say WordPress but it’s not really any good so professionals tend to create their own theme, which then needs to be upgraded just like your WordPress theme on a major update


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