Modernizing SharePoint in Energy Environments with Heavy Customization
For most organizations, migrating from SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online is a significant undertaking. For energy companies, it is a different category of project entirely.
The depth of customization typical in energy environments, built up over years of operational necessity, means that a migration is rarely just a lift-and-shift. Permit-to-work systems, outage tracking workflows, safety management integrations, and connections to SCADA or EMS platforms all leave a footprint inside SharePoint that has to be accounted for before a single file moves to the cloud.
Understanding that complexity upfront is what separates a successful migration from one that stalls out halfway through or breaks critical operations on day one.
Why SharePoint Migrations in Energy Environments Are More Complex
Energy organizations have typically pushed SharePoint further than most industries. Compliance requirements around NERC CIP, OSHA, and EPA reporting drove teams to build custom solutions inside SharePoint long before modern low-code tooling existed. The result is often a SharePoint environment carrying significant technical debt: farm solutions that require full server trust, InfoPath forms tied to compliance workflows, legacy SharePoint Designer automations, and custom web parts built with outdated frameworks.
Add to that the integrations. Many energy companies have SharePoint workflows that pass data to operational technology systems, ERP platforms, or field service tools. Those connections are fragile during migration and need to be mapped and tested explicitly.
Start with a Customization Audit
Before any migration planning can happen in earnest, the environment needs to be assessed. If you run SharePoint Server 2010/2013/2016 the SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT) has been traditionly used for this, but Microsoft has sunsetted it, with end of support arriving October 1, 2026. If your organization has already run SMAT reports, those findings are still useful. If you have not or you are migrating from SharePoint Server 2019, Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), in versions 4.0 and higher, have the scan and assessment capabilities of SMAT.
Regardless of the tooling, the goal is the same: a complete picture of which site collections carry farm solutions, where InfoPath forms are in use, which lists rely on classic workflows, and where customizations have been applied. In energy environments, these findings often run long.
That inventory is not a migration plan on its own, but it is the foundation of one. It tells your team where the real work is so you can scope the project accurately and avoid mid-migration discoveries that delay timelines or put compliance-sensitive workflows at risk.
Re-Architecting Legacy Code: What That Actually Means
The harder truth behind most SharePoint migrations in energy environments is that some of what was built cannot simply be migrated. It has to be rebuilt. Modern SharePoint Online does not support farm solutions or full-trust code, classic workflows have been deprecated, and InfoPath is no longer developed and has no future in Microsoft 365.
Here is what re-architecting typically looks like in practice:
- Farm solutions and custom web parts need to be rebuilt as SharePoint Framework (SPFx) client-side web parts. For an energy company, this might mean rebuilding a custom permit-to-work dashboard, a field inspection summary view, or an asset status display that was originally built as a server-side solution.
- InfoPath forms used for safety incident reporting, change management approvals, or regulatory submissions should be rebuilt in Power Apps. Power Apps handles the same use cases with better mobile support, which matters for field workers who are not always at a desk.
- SharePoint Designer workflows that drive approval chains, notification triggers, or compliance record creation can be rebuilt in Power Automate. In many cases, Power Automate handles these processes more reliably and comes with better visibility into run history and failure logging.
- Custom search and filtering tools should be evaluated for replacement with modern search web parts or purpose-built SPFx extensions that use the Microsoft Search API.
None of this is trivial. But rebuilding in these modern frameworks also means you end up with solutions that are maintainable, supported, and capable of growing alongside your organization rather than accumulating more debt.
Why the Free SPMT Tool Is Often Not Enough
The SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) is Microsoft’s free utility for moving content from SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online. For straightforward document libraries and standard site content, it works well. For SharePoint migrations in energy environments with significant customization, it hits its limits quickly.
SPMT does not migrate farm solutions or custom code. Complex permission structures, deeply nested site hierarchies, and large-scale metadata requirements can introduce errors that require hands-on remediation. SPMT also lacks the project management visibility and error reporting that larger, more complex migrations demand.
Organizations in this situation typically benefit from pairing SPMT with third-party migration tooling or working with a partner who has experience managing high-complexity SharePoint migrations and can support the customization rebuild alongside the content move.
The Migration Is Also a Modernization
For energy companies that have been running heavily customized SharePoint environments for a decade or more, the migration to Microsoft 365 is not just an infrastructure change. It is an opportunity to replace systems that were built as workarounds with solutions that are designed for how work actually happens today, including on mobile devices and for workers in the field.
Getting there requires honest assessment upfront, a realistic scope for re-architecting what cannot be migrated, and the right expertise to execute. The organizations that treat this as a modernization effort, rather than a migration project, come out with better tools and less technical debt on the other side.
Ready to understand what your migration will actually take?
Compass365’s Migration Assessment and Roadmap engagement gives your team a structured evaluation of your current environment, a clear inventory of customizations that need to be addressed, and a practical migration plan built around your operational requirements. It is the right starting point for any energy organization with a complex SharePoint footprint.
