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SharePoint Analytics-Driven Migration and Transformation : Preparing for End of Support for SharePoint 2016 & 2019 On-Premises in 2026

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On July 14, 2026, after almost 25 years Microsoft, is officially ending its support for SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019-on premises.  But we reckon that more than 50% of law firms have still not crossed the chasm. And are still racing to modernize their digital workplace in time.

If you’re in that camp, we imagine …

  • You’ve audited your current SharePoint environment:
  • You’ve audited your current SharePoint environment:
  • You’ve Engaged your key Stakeholders
  • Involved compliance, IT, and Partners and other business leaders
  • You’ve chosen your Migration Path:
  • Based on security and compliance needs-choose the path: on-premises SE, cloud, or hybrid
  • You’re leveraging expert support
  • You’ve chosen migration tools and specialised partners to help design and build your new environment.

But you’re still on the journey – and working hard to leverage assets and learn lessons from the current environment. And SharePoint Analytics has an important role to play.

The critical role of Analytics in your Migration and Transformation

You want your new SharePoint-based intranet to be a secure, digital hub for connecting people, knowledge, and operations.

You want it designed and managed with an unrelenting focus on continuous, measurable improvement, so it becomes the center of gravity of a modern digital workplace that defines culture, drives engagement and improves personal and collective productivity right across the firm.

Which is why this is not just about moving content. It’s as much about retiring it. And it definitely isn’t just about transferring your legacy look, feel and functionality onto a new platform.

And it’s why Analytics is an important part of the solution. For example…

Learning from your SharePoint Server environment – Four Analytics Essentials

Use your analytics platform to tackle these four tasks in your current SharePoint Server environment….

1. Site and Library Priorities

Prioritize the most Active Sites. Defer or dump Sites with little to zero activity so your new SharePoint Online environment stays clean and relevant. Similarly, use contribution metrics (creation/modification of content) to identify where the most document updates are happening. Prioritize the libraries that are evidently essential for collaboration.

2. Engagement Maps
Identify black holes of engagement (Interactions x Adoption) with your current intranet by organization segment.  Prioritize content development for these segments (e.g. Practice Group, Office Location…) in the new environment.
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3. Page Loading Speeds

Note current performance across all Office Locations of your current environment to inform KPIs and benchmarks for the new environment. Be proactive. Don’t wait for negative, anecdotal feedback after go-live. Same logic applies to all your priority KPIs for the new environment. For example…

4. Search Performance

Track current No Click Search % and Average Click Positions across all Search Terms. Use these to set improvement goals for the new environment. If nothing else, ensure improvements are in place for high frequency Search Terms performing badly by these measures.  

Preparing for Measurable Success – Four Analytics Essentials

Here are four things to focus on during the design, development and launch phases of your transformation.
1. Deploy your Analytics Platform in your Staging/Test environment
You’ve done your research. You know you need a serious analytics tool. Because you want to be measurably successful. So you have the budget. But the bandwidth to procure and deploy isn’t. Because everyone’s maxed with migration and transformation work. And the launch date is fixed. So something’s got to give. And deploying analytics gets put back until ‘things have quietened down’. You launch on time with a sigh of relief – but next to zero telemetry. Which is not smart. Really it’s not.
Instead, how about getting your analytics platform deployed early in your staging/test environment? It’s essential to be in production before you go live. And the best way to avoid that happening is have it up and running here.
2. Develop your Segmentation Strategy
It may be that your happy reporting by the User Profile attributes provided by your Active Directory/Entra ID, such as Department and Job Title. But they often won’t tell you what you will really want to know.
For example, how Partners are interacting with Pages and key Web Parts. You could do it manually by crawling through every Job Title. Or (with a tool such as Power BI) try a filter like ‘Job Title includes Partner’. But it probably won’t be reliable. Much better to create and maintain a Custom Attribute of ‘Partners’ that all stakeholders can use to report by this definition.
Same applies if you have people who report into a single Practice Group – but are distributed in Active Directory across multiple Departments/sub Groups. And maybe you want a simple filter for tracking the behavior of all Fee Earners? Or to create a segment of New Hires – with a Custom Filter that delivers ‘Hire Date < 12 months ago’?
And don’t forget that your best user profile data for all of the above might be in, say, an HR system rather than Active Directory. It’s really not rocket science to pull it into your analytics environment.
The point is you will no doubt define your key target audiences for your new Intranet. And aim to build great content and functionality for each of them. But if you can’t easily report user behavior by these definitions you won’t know how well it’s been received. And you certainly can’t measurably improve.
3. Test In-Page Activity Tracking

Counting Page Views and Visitors is kind of interesting. But next to meaningless when related to what you’ve spent many months and a lot of money designing and building. Which includes modern intranet pages characterized by:

  • Multiple interactive Web Parts
  • Guided Search
  • Access to AI tools
  • Personalized content for readership by targeted user segments.
You really do need to get tracking of in-page user behavior in place on all these fronts. Otherwise, you’ll be ‘flying blind’.
4. Real-Time Hero Page Mapping

Even if you’re fully tooled up with a great analytics platform, it will take a few weeks to collect the critical mass data required to kick off ‘big picture’ trend and engagement analysis across the firm.

In the short term the focus should be on mapping your ‘hero pages’. Typically, that’s your Home Page and the primary pages dedicated to Offices and Practice Groups.
There are three types of Page Map. Each gives you a valuable but distinctive perspective of how well your content and designs are performing. And the opportunity to address any obvious issues immediately – before they start undermining the credibility of the new environment. Note we’ve had to use our own technology for the screenshots. But other page mapping tools are available.
Heat Map:
A Heat Map conveys click intensity across the whole page. Meaning, for example, it includes clicks on navigation tabs and on images that are not hyperlinked. Use filters to generate daily Heat Maps for each of your target audiences

Click Map:

A Click Map provides detailed, real-time page-level reporting on user interactions with whichever Web Parts, Buttons and Links you have specifically chosen to track.
Scroll Map :
The Scroll Map is not about users’ clicks. It’s about their eyeballs. It captures where user scroll to – and how long they linger in different sections of your page. A basic analytics tool should tell you how long users spend on your page. But if you don’t know that, for example, all that time spent by one of your target audiences was ‘above the fold’, then you simply won’t be aware that content below the fold was not seen or read. Only a Scroll Map can tell you this.
Of course, this is just the start. A serious enterprise-class SharePoint Analytics tool will empower you to continuously improve the performance of your intranet at every level. Please do get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
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FAQs

1. What does End of Support for SharePoint 2016 and 2019 On Premises mean for my organization?

Microsoft will end support for SharePoint 2016 and 2019 On-premises July 14, 2026. This means, after this date, you will no longer get security updates, technical updates, or any bug fixes. This may impact your compliance and security posture as well. To remain secure and up to date, it’s important that your organization plan for the migration or upgrade.

You have several options for migration. You can move to SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365 to take advantage of cloud features and better scalability. If you prefer to remain on premises, you can upgrade to SharePoint Server Subscription Edition. Alternatively, you can choose to combine cloud and on-premises and choose a hybrid setup.

Begin by reviewing your current version, including workflows, custom solutions, and dependencies. Engage key teams early- such as compliance, IT, and business leaders. Choose the path that best aligns your security and compliance requirements and create a timeline, and leverage expert help or migration tools.

Analytics play a crucial role in migration- you can leverage analytics to see which sites, pages, and document libraries are accessed the most.Leveraging analytics ensures your new environment is clutter-free, simple, and useful.

SharePoint Intranet analytics provide insights into how people use your intranet, revealing user behavior, engagement, and adoption trends. The insights help improve navigation, search, and overall user experience post migration.

NGAGE Intelligence provides reports that help you plan migration, track progress, and measure adoption. Their reports include active site metrics, top viewed pages, document activity, site path analysis, and search insights. These help guide decisions during and after migration.

Analytics reveal user interaction with content and sites, helping you identify compliance risk, unused content, or any adoption issues before they escalate into bigger challenges.