The project ended. The invoice was paid. The consultant moved on to the next client. And now your SharePoint environment runs on autopilot. Which sounds fine until something breaks. A workflow fails silently on a Friday night. Permissions drift after someone changes a group membership. Storage creeps toward the limit because nobody monitors it. Search degrades because the index hasn't been optimized since launch day. Your internal IT team is stretched across a hundred priorities, and SharePoint expertise isn't one of them. You don't need another project. You need a person who already understands your environment, watches it continuously, and fixes things before they become outages. That's what this is.
A healthcare company launched their SharePoint intranet in January. Beautiful build. Great adoption. The consultant wrapped up in March. Everyone was happy.
By June, the news page hadn't been updated in six weeks because the content approval workflow had silently broken after a Microsoft update changed an API behavior. Nobody noticed because nobody was monitoring flow run histories.
By August, three department sites had been created outside the governance framework. Permissions were granted directly to individuals instead of through security groups. External sharing links were active for documents that should have been internal only. Nobody noticed because nobody was running governance audits.
By October, storage usage hit 90% of the tenant limit. Performance degraded. Search results became sluggish. Users started complaining. IT investigated, discovered the problem, and realized the fix required a content cleanup project that would take four weeks. Four weeks of degraded performance because nobody was tracking storage trends.
In November, they called me. Not for a new project. For a rescue. The remediation cost three times what ongoing support would have cost for the entire year.
None of these announce themselves with an alert. They build gradually, invisibly, until the day they become a visible problem for users, leadership, or auditors. By then, the fix is always harder and more expensive.
Power Automate flows stop running because of a token expiration, a connector update, or a changed API. The failure is logged in the run history, but nobody checks run histories unless something visibly breaks. Meanwhile, approvals aren't routing, notifications aren't sending, and data isn't syncing. The downstream effects compound silently for days or weeks.
Every document uploaded, every version saved, every recycle bin item retained contributes to storage consumption. Without monitoring, you'll discover you're at 95% capacity when someone tries to upload a file and gets an error. The fix at that point requires an emergency cleanup project, not a calm optimization.
Someone grants a user direct access instead of adding them to the correct security group. Another person creates a sharing link that bypasses the governance model. Over months, the clean permission structure you started with becomes a patchwork of exceptions. Each exception is a potential security gap that nobody tracks until audit time.
New content gets added without proper metadata. Abandoned sites pollute search results. Promoted results become outdated. The search experience that was excellent at launch slowly becomes "search returns everything except what I need." Users stop trusting search. They go back to asking colleagues. Productivity drops invisibly.
Microsoft pushes updates to SharePoint Online, Teams, and Power Platform on a continuous cycle. Most updates are seamless. Occasionally, one changes an API, deprecates a feature, or modifies a behavior that your custom SPFx web parts or Power Automate flows depend on. Without someone monitoring release notes and testing proactively, these breaks surface as user complaints, not as planned maintenance.
The HR policy page references the old leave system. The IT support contact list has a phone number that was disconnected six months ago. The project archive site still appears in global navigation despite being irrelevant. Content owners change roles. Nobody inherits ownership. The intranet slowly becomes unreliable, and once users stop trusting it, adoption collapses.
Without active governance enforcement, new Teams channels and SharePoint sites get created without naming conventions, without owners, without expiration dates. Six months later, your tenant has 200 sites with no clear purpose, no designated owner, and no lifecycle policy. Cleaning this up retroactively is an expensive, frustrating project that proactive governance would have prevented entirely.
They compound quietly until the day they become urgent, expensive, and disruptive. Ongoing support prevents that day from ever arriving.
You don't build a building and then fire the maintenance team. The HVAC needs regular servicing. The fire suppression system needs testing. The elevator needs inspections. The roof needs checking before monsoon season. If you skip maintenance, nothing happens. For a while. Then the HVAC fails during summer. The elevator gets stuck. The roof leaks. And every one of those repairs costs five to ten times what the scheduled maintenance would have cost.
Your SharePoint environment is a digital building that hundreds of employees use every day. It has moving parts (workflows), structural elements (information architecture), security systems (permissions and policies), and utilities (search, storage, integrations). Without regular maintenance, each one degrades predictably.
The question isn't "can we afford ongoing support?" It's "can we afford the emergency that happens when we don't have it?"
This isn't break-fix support where you call when something explodes. This is proactive maintenance combined with expert advisory, so problems are caught before they affect users and optimizations are implemented continuously.
Regular health checks on workflows, storage, permissions, and site activity. Issues identified and resolved before they become user-facing problems.
When something does break, you message me directly. No ticket queue. No call center. No explaining your environment to a stranger. Same-day response for critical issues.
Quarterly governance reviews that catch permission drift, sharing policy violations, stale external links, and lifecycle issues before they become audit findings.
Continuous improvement of search, page load speed, workflow performance, and user experience. Your SharePoint environment gets better over time, not worse.
Microsoft releases updates continuously. I review relevant changes, assess impact on your environment, and proactively address anything that affects your customizations or configurations.
Ongoing guidance on how to expand your M365 usage, which new tools to adopt, how to prepare for Copilot, and where to invest next. Think of it as having a fractional M365 architect on call.
Every plan includes direct access to me. Not a support desk. Not a junior consultant. The same person who understands your environment, your business, and your priorities.
The most expensive SharePoint support is the kind you don't have. Here's why the "we'll deal with it when something breaks" approach always costs more in the long run.
| Dimension | Break-fix (no retainer) | Retainer with Darshana |
|---|---|---|
| Response time | Days to weeks (find a consultant, explain context, negotiate scope) | Same-day for critical, 24 hours for standard |
| Context | Consultant starts from zero. Ramp-up takes days. You explain everything again. | I already know your environment, history, and business context |
| Cost per incident | $2,000-$5,000+ per engagement (project rates, discovery, scoping) | Included in retainer. No per-incident billing. |
| Prevention | Zero. You only call when something already broke. | Proactive monitoring catches issues before users notice |
| Improvements | None. You maintain status quo between incidents. | Continuous optimization, new features, performance gains |
| Annual cost comparison | 3-4 incidents/year at $3K avg = $9-12K (reactive only, no prevention) | $18K/year for proactive monitoring + prevention + optimization + advisory |
The break-fix option looks cheaper on paper. But it doesn't prevent problems, doesn't improve performance, doesn't include advisory, and every incident starts from scratch with a consultant who doesn't know your environment. The retainer costs more per month but delivers dramatically more value per dollar.
"We'd been struggling with our SharePoint migration for months before Darshana stepped in. She diagnosed the core issue within a week. What three different vendors failed to deliver in six months, she completed in five weeks. Our team finally has a system they trust."
It's 9 AM on a Monday. An employee reports that search isn't returning results from one of the department sites. You send a quick Teams message to Darshana. By 10:30 AM, the issue is diagnosed (a crawled property mapping was overwritten during a recent Microsoft update), fixed, and confirmed working. No ticket. No scoping call. No "can you explain your environment to me?" conversation. Just a fix, from someone who already holds the full context of your setup.
It's the end of the quarter. You receive a proactive report: governance audit results (two permissions exceptions corrected), storage trend analysis (comfortably within limits for the next 12 months), search quality metrics (click-through rate up 15% after bookmark updates), and a recommendation to enable a new Microsoft feature that would benefit your operations team. You didn't ask for any of this. It's just part of the service.
It's budget season. Leadership asks whether the M365 investment is delivering value. You have adoption metrics, usage trends, and optimization highlights ready to present. Not because you compiled them. Because your retainer includes a quarterly executive summary that does it for you.
This is what ongoing support actually looks like. Not a safety net you hope you never need. A continuous improvement engine that makes your M365 environment better every month.
Workflows are executing. Permissions are being granted. Content is being shared. Storage is growing. Microsoft is pushing updates. All of this happens continuously, whether someone is monitoring it or not. The only question is whether you find out about problems before your users do, or after. A 30-minute conversation is enough to understand your environment's needs and design a support plan that fits. No commitment required. Just a conversation between you and someone who's spent 11 years keeping M365 environments healthy.