The challenge
A municipally-owned electricity distributor ran its document estate on a SharePoint farm carrying everything that makes an upgrade hard: Collabware CLM for records management, Nintex for workflow, two further add-ins, and the one that mattered, more than 200 SQL Server Reporting Services reports, 75 of them on live subscriptions. Under provincial regulation the records layer is the compliance posture.
The reporting problem was structural and known from the first week. The old farm ran SSRS in SharePoint Integrated Mode, deprecated after SQL Server 2016, so the target platform could not receive those reports as they stood. They had to move to Native Mode on a separate server: a re-platforming wearing a migration’s clothes.
The solution
All four third-party products were scoped in, not deferred. By June 2025 a full round across every service application and content database was complete.
The report inventory was built around actual use. The first pass listed the 75 subscription-bearing reports, and the client found it incomplete: it excluded reports nobody subscribed to but people still ran. A full inventory followed with a last-run date for every report.
Then the reporting layer stalled the project. Report definitions migrated; their connection strings did not, and the data sources reached across SQL Server instances and an Oracle RAC cluster. Behind that sat Kerberos: rendering inside SharePoint needs service principal names, constrained delegation and a Claims-to-Windows-Token-Service account all agreeing.
In late November 2025 a delegation change made with an existing service account took the production intranet down. It was resolved the same day by issuing a dedicated account, but the outage was ours. Then the escalation route closed: a Microsoft support ticket was refused outright, because support does not assist with SharePoint Server, Subscription Edition included.
Two decisions ended the stall. Stop waiting on the vendor that had declined, and add a specialist. Then abandon the assumption underneath the problem: reports do not have to render inside SharePoint. Surfacing them by link removed the Kerberos chain from the critical path.
The results
Records and workflow arrived still attached to the content they govern, so the compliance position after cutover matched the one before. In May 2026 the client wrote unprompted:
[The utility] would like to thank Clouds Connected for the excellent work delivered on our SharePoint upgrade project. Your team demonstrated strong expertise, professionalism, and a clear, structured approach that made the entire process smooth and efficient.
We truly appreciate the effort and quality your team brought to this work and would not hesitate to work with Clouds Connected again on future initiatives.
They then bought more. A July 2026 patch decision surfaced that no support contract was in place. By August, two purchase orders followed two days apart: a twelve-month engagement to maintain the farm, retire the on-premises Nintex dependency and stand up an on-premises data gateway across both data centres. The Nintex work had been cut from scope in July, and the engagement grew anyway.