Classic to Modern SharePoint Pages – Qualitem Modernizer

If you enable the modern experience for a classic site, Microsoft enables these components for you:

• List and library pages (most, not all)
• Site contents page
• Site usage page
• Recycle Bin pages

However, most classic sites are more than the standard system landing pages.  The core of what is important content for your business is likely to be:

• the customised site landing pages that bring together or roll-up your lists and content pages and;
• the actual content pages, which can be a mixture of web parts pages, publishing pages and wiki page content and usually contain multiple web parts.

In addition, you are more than likely to have nested sub-sites.

The topic of site modernization is quite a broad subject and covers the new modern site templates, Hub sites and groups.   However, the heavy lifting of site modernization can be done in stages and is not a requirement for modernizing pages.

In fact, we have found that many customers want to make use of the Modern look and feel for their pages and content, long before the larger site work is progressed.

Page Modernization

My assumption at this point is that you either want to “lift and shift” your classic content or have completed the move to SharePoint Online or 2019 and are ready to modernize your page content.

Unfortunately, moving classic content pages (publishing, wiki and web part pages) to a modern UI is not as straight forward as you think, and is a bigger change than just a simple “lift and shift”.   Many of the web parts in classic just do not have the equivalent in a modern page and most people choose to migrate this content manually or with the help of a SharePoint developer.

However, I think the move is a real positive one, especially for the end user experience and ongoing access to your content.   There are some excellent productivity enhancements with modern pages especially relating to list and library system pages.   There is some great content already published if you’d like to know more about the difference between classic and modern pages.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/What-is-Modern-SharePoint-and-Why-Should-I-care/ba-p/161941

Automating the Process with Modernizer

We have been on the modernization journey for some time with our Live Publish for Word product, having supported this for almost two years.   Building on the back of the amazing success we have seen with this product, we developed Modernizer, specifically to automate the page modernization process.  Modernizer is available for trial from the SPFxHub site (https://spfxhub.com).

Supporting content page modernization is a natural progression for the Live Publish product suite, as we are leveraging the technology we have had for many years.The alternative is the SharePoint PnP Modernization framework, which is a Microsoft open-source initiative to help customers transform classic page content to modern SharePoint pages.  However, it currently only works for wiki and web part pages.  Publishing pages are not supported and not all web parts are remediated either, largely due to the fact modern SharePoint, does not have an exact mapping between classic and modern web parts.

This was one of the reasons we developed Modernizer using our own technology was so we could support all classic page content including publishing pages with embedded web parts, as well as layout options where the source page is multi-column.   We encourage you to look at the PnP framework for site modernization but if you’re looking for a supported user tool to modernize page content, our Modernizer tool will hit the mark.

If you would like more information on our Page Modernizer, please refer to our web site at https://www.qualitem.com/modernizer or email us at info @ qualitem.com.

You can also find out more about our Live Publish for Word product here (https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA104379407)

Good luck with your page modernization efforts.  We’d love to know how you go.