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Escaping the On-Prem DMS Tax

Why legacy document management systems are holding you back

October 21, 2025

I'm accustomed to cloud everything, but document management is an interesting world. Key aspect: the number of organizations that still use an on prem DMS.

These on prem solutions often come with crazy high licensing costs and a side effect of calcified systems that are very, very difficult to innovate within. This is a huge tax as AI comes online at scale.

This of course comes up because people talk to me about migrating from legacy on prem DMS to a SharePoint Embedded powered solution. People are often shocked about the different economics of SPE vs legacy.

The playbook: Use the migration API or a migration partner to move the data to SPE, use AI coding assistants to create the UI, decommission on prem, accelerate the rest of your innovation agenda.

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