SharePoint Solutions & Consulting in Edmonton

A service crew near Grande Prairie finishes a job. The signed ticket gets scanned into a job folder on the file server at the shop. Three weeks later, accounting in Edmonton needs it to invoice, and nobody knows which of six folders it went into.

Meanwhile, the SharePoint 2016 farm holding your safety manuals stopped getting security updates in July. And the approval workflow someone built years ago has gone quiet.

We fix this as scoped projects. Each one covers a migration, document control, permissions or approvals, and ends with something your own people can run.

The 2026 deadlines behind most Edmonton SharePoint projects

Three Microsoft changes this year sit behind most of these problems.

Some InfoPath forms still submit today, which makes it easy to assume Microsoft extended support. It didn’t. There’s no extension and no published removal date, so a working form is not a supported form.

If you’re on SharePoint Server 2016 or 2019, the supported destinations are SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server Subscription Edition. Old workflows and forms get rebuilt in Power Automate and Power Apps.

Moving a file server or old farm to SharePoint Online

The content usually lives on a Windows file server at head office, a server in a field office, or a SharePoint 2010 to 2019 farm. Microsoft’s free SharePoint Migration Tool handles file shares and SharePoint 2010 to 2019. ShareGate and Migration Manager cover the larger or messier jobs.

Five steps keep a migration on schedule:

1. Design the destination first. Agree on sites by business unit or region, libraries, content types and a permission model before a single file moves.
2. Scan every path. SharePoint Online allows 400 characters counted from the site name down, and 255 per file or folder name. Characters like " * : < > ? | \ / and leading or trailing spaces are blocked.
3. Plan waves around throttling. Microsoft slows migration traffic on weekday daytime, and a support ticket won’t lift it. Evenings and weekends move faster. On file servers, the real bottleneck is often reading the source disk.
4. Reconcile each batch against the source before anyone signs it off.
5. Run a final delta pass. Migration Manager supports delta sync for file shares, so cutover only copies what changed since the last wave.

Before anything moves, find your deepest job folder and count the characters from the site name down. Customer, year, location, job number, tickets, revisions: those trees get close to 400 fast.

Microsoft’s own estimate is roughly 1 TB a day for Office files and about 250 GB a day for small files or heavy metadata. That’s the best case, and it sets your wave plan.

Copying NTFS permissions across one-for-one tends to carry the mess with it. For a cleaner approach, read the permissions guide. For scope, tools and timelines, see our migration service.

Document control that works for crews and head office

Folders make you choose one home for each document. The field thinks in jobs and locations, accounting in customers and AFEs, and safety in document types and revisions.

With metadata, one document can answer all three. Tag it with what people actually search by:

• Job or ticket number
• Well, LSD or site location
• Customer and AFE
• Document type, such as JSA, FLHA, procedure or inspection
• Revision and approval status

Retention then follows the document type, so old revisions are archived on schedule without anyone having to remember. When an operator, auditor or regulator asks for the procedure that was current on a given date, you can find it.

For the detail, read the DMS guide.

Permissions nobody can explain anymore

Contractors come and go and rotations change. Somebody shares a folder with a personal email to get a job done. A few years on, nobody can say who can open the rate sheets or the HR folder.

A clean-up covers four things:

1. We list who has access to what, including links shared outside the company.
2. We set up SharePoint groups per site with named owners.
3. We restore inheritance where it broke.
4. We write rules for creating new sites and Teams, with owners confirming access on a fixed schedule.

Approvals when the approver is on rotation

Power Automate is a good fit for field ticket sign-off, purchase requests, timesheet approval and document review. Two limits shape the design:

• A single cloud flow run lasts at most 30 days, including time spent waiting on an approval. An approver on a long rotation can run out that clock.
• Flows with no trigger activity for 90 days may be turned off unless the owner has a premium or Process licence. A seasonal flow, like one that only fires after spring breakup, can go dormant.

The fix is to store the approval on the list item, handle the response in its own flow, and re-send expired requests on a schedule. Read the approval pattern. Retired SharePoint 2013 workflows and InfoPath forms get rebuilt here too.

When the paper form needs to become an app

Sometimes a paper field ticket or safety form is the real problem, and the answer is an app.

Bonanza Drilling, an Alberta drilling contractor, runs field tickets, HSE checklists and payroll export on Dataverse and Canvas Apps. 25+ paper forms were retired, and pulling up a record went from about 30 minutes to instant. More than 20 separate checklist forms were replaced by one reusable checklist whose questions live in Dataverse. Read the Bonanza case study.

Migrations we’ve delivered

• E.S. Fox, an Ontario industrial fabricator and contractor, moved about 4 TB of legacy DocuShare content to SharePoint Online with its metadata and permissions. We set the information architecture first, wrote custom migration code for what off-the-shelf tools couldn’t handle, and reconciled every batch before sign-off. Phased cutovers kept production running. Read the DocuShare case study.
• TD Wealth in Toronto: a two-year engagement moving 1+ TB of SharePoint 2013 content to SharePoint Online with ShareGate, in phased waves with validation checkpoints.

Working with us from Edmonton

Edmonton is our headquarters. You get a written reply within one business day. If the scope isn’t clear yet, start with a 45-minute call with a senior consultant about the file share, farm or approval that’s causing trouble.

Once scope is signed, the work runs in three stages:

1. Discovery and workshops happen on-site.
2. The build runs remotely.
3. Demos and rollout come back on-site.

We work on-site across Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Fort Saskatchewan, Spruce Grove and Stony Plain. Drayton Valley, Whitecourt and Grande Prairie are covered remotely, with site visits when the work needs them. See how we work in Edmonton.

Questions Edmonton teams ask

Should we move to SharePoint Online or Subscription Edition? Both are supported. Subscription Edition suits you if something has to stay on-premises. For most mid-sized firms whose crews work from phones and tablets, SharePoint Online is the simpler place to land.

How long does a migration take? Three things set the timeline: how much content there is, how many paths need shortening or renaming before they can move, and how much you can push through in the evening and weekend windows when throttling eases. We size the waves once the source has been scanned. See our migration service.

Our InfoPath forms still work. Do we need to act? Yes. Support ended on 14 July 2026 and you can no longer publish changes. There’s no published removal date, so you can plan the rebuild on your own schedule before Microsoft sets one. See our Power Platform work.

What do we get at handover? Documented sites, named owners, a permission model and governance rules your IT team can run. Later work, such as the next migration wave or a new approval, is scoped as its own project.

If a file server, an old farm or a stalled approval is slowing your crews down, we’ll scope the fix with you.