1. Introduction
2. Benefits of going green with SharePoint
3. Knowledge Management – Going green
4. Go Green – Green Benefits of Content Management

Introduction
Organizations are constantly looking for ways to cut costs, but don’t realize that those cost cutting measures may also have positive environmental effects that can increase goodwill and shareholder value.

Microsoft SharePoint solutions provide tremendous return on investment, but also make your organization more environmentally conscious or “green” by cutting the consumption of paper. Many organizations around the world are utilizing IT solutions to realize their green initiatives. One such technology is Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007

For example: There are government-sponsored green initiatives currently underway. In 2003, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe enacted a strategy to form a “Roadmap for Paperless Trade”.
(http://www.unece.org/cefact/publica/ece_trd_371e.pdf)

The commission discovered that by moving from paper document processes to electronic technologies, they increased security and transparency in supply chains (Trading industry) and provided both the business sector with higher revenues and costs savings.

Benefits of going green with SharePoint
Information and Communications Technologies are transforming our world on a daily basis. SharePoint enables organizations to control the creation, routing, approval, and publishing of documents. Many organizations use documents in paper format such as invoices, patient records, insurance forms, and corporate policies. These documents are typically copied and dispersed to wherever they are needed—often too many disparate locations. By converting these paper based documents and processes to electronic procedures, a single copy can be accessed electronically from any location without it being printed, shipped and then later archived or discarded.

Here is how you can calculate how much of environmental impact you have contributed and thereby saving how many trees?
By using SharePoint Content management solution, the savings realized by the company can be translated into positive effects on the environment.

How do you calculate?
1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets
1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree

http://www.conservatree.com/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml

For the a Company which uses 2,000,000 pages, the number of trees saved are calculated as below:
Calculating Paper Saving’s
Total Pages 2,000,000
Reams of Paper (500 sheets/ream) 4,000
Number of Trees Saved (17 reams/tree) 235

Other benefits Using SharePoint

Real Estate
Not storing paper has two benefits regarding real estate – paper storage space and office space. This is space that would require energy consumption for heating, lighting, and humidity control. Beyond that there is also the impact on the environment of using the physical space as a warehouse as opposed to, say, a reserve forest or wetland.

Another example of the real estate impact of storing physical documents is the fact that a paper document is only available at a single location. By storing documents electronically, they can be access in multiple locations, even simultaneously.

Lifestyle Benefits
Putting documents online reduces the number of employees who are commuting to an office. This has tremendous impact on the environment, but also on employee lifestyle. Some organizations are beginning to assign lifestyle scores to projects. While analyzing return on investment and other facets of a project, organizations can assess the impact on employee lifestyle. Raising lifestyle benefits makes a company a more attractive employer and helps organizations with recruiting.

Technology Benefits
Organizations which use SharePoint solutions are also well-positioned to meet their business challenges as they now have a scalable and manageable technology platform which is hot-pluggable and that it can be integrated with other standards-based applications and tools. Since .Net Framework is compatible with SharePoint, SharePoint also gives you an opportunity to customize application which will help the user community to accept the cultural change.

Knowledge Management – Going green
“Going green” has become a topic of increased attention, but it’s nothing new to knowledge management. By its nature, knowledge management promotes efficiency and optimal use of resources, which often reduces the amount of energy required to achieve a given goal.

Knowledge Management (KM) awareness is creating new interest in KM solutions that can improve business performance while reducing environmental effects. Knowledge management using SharePoint plays an important role improving their energy management to optimize the use of office equipment and energy in buildings. SharePoint knowledge management solutions, including records management (RM) and enterprise content management (ECM), reduce the use of paper. In addition, online collaboration and online meeting solutions can greatly cut down on the need for travel to meetings.

In the past, larger companies were well positioned to make use of knowledge management solutions that transformed paper-based information into digital information because they could justify and afford the investment. Now, the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market has more choices, with the lower entry costs for software as a service (SaaS) products. SharePoint provides an option for SharePoint online hosting KM solutions.

Go Green – Green Benefits of Content Management
SharePoint offers so many opportunities to go Green, Top six ways to go Green with SharePoint:
1. Save money on paper – and reduce your environmental footprint at the same time.

2. Increase the effectiveness of core processes.
Think about the benefits of SharePoint technologies in just a single core process – finance. Driving paper from financial processes allows an accounts payable group to pay invoices faster, taking advantage of discounts for early payment. It allows an accounts receivable group to improve cash flows and reduce the number of days that sales are outstanding. The cost of processing an invoice can typically be cut by a factor of 10, creating savings that drop directly to the bottom line. These kinds of savings can usually be replicated in other paper intensive processes, yielding BOTH bottom line AND Green benefits.

3. Truly integrate your field operations.
The application of distributed capture technologies – using a scanner in a field office to process locally created paper and electronically store it in a central location within SharePoint. These scanned documents can be accessed from any location over the internet for immediate review. Distributed capture solutions often pay for themselves just through savings in courier and shipping costs. But taking courier and overnight services off the road also translates into significant direct environmental benefits.

4. By using SharePoint we can reduce real estate costs. Less paper means fewer filing cabinets means less real estate – which reduces cost, but also significantly reduces your environmental footprint.

5. SharePoint helps in improving employee productivity.
As a content management tool, SharePoint proves to be the best in the industry for the following:

Collaboration
Portal
Enterprise Search
Enterprise Content Management
Forms Driven Business Process
Business Intelligence

6. Reduce off-site storage costs. Off-site storage of paper is expensive, often requiring rental and maintenance fees as well as significant transportation costs to the facility. SharePoint provides a SaaS option for hosting the portlet.

As a CFO and senior business executive would life be better if all your commercial information, everything from files and documents to LOB systems, were all accountable and controllable from one platform or portal?

Imagine definitive decision support, comprehensive implementable governance, anything and everything at your finger tips via a dashboard and ‘best bet’ query.

In recent times, and with its ubiquitous commercial acceptance showing no sign of abating, SharePoint has been moving to take this kind of ‘center stage’ in the information management universe.

But in many cases SharePoint is filling this role by default, due to its momentum within IT and other business areas, without a comprehensive assessment as to its suitability for this pivotal role.

Could SharePoint be a black hole for your business, drawing in information and content without providing an adequate foundation for information management?

Let’s look at the typical benefits SharePoint delivers then consider some of the strategic implications these benefits portend.

Typical SharePoint Benefits
There is no doubt that SharePoint delivers extensive business benefit in the information worker and general office productivity area:

• Document Libraries – Business content such as documents, spreadsheets, graphics, presentations, media files, even emails and their attachments, can be housed and ‘managed’ in SharePoint libraries easily accessible by anyone, anywhere, anytime, via intranet, Extranet or Internet

• Roles & Controls – Library controls, and permissions across SharePoint, enforce author, editor, publisher roles and structured responsibilities along with fail-safe versioning, garbage, archival repository and other content controls

• Search & Surfacing – Search promises that nothing will ever be ‘lost’ again. Anything in your Enterprise in SharePoint, and beyond, can be found or ’surfaced’

• Security – Security is leveraged from your existing Active Directory investment or other authentication system integrating seamlessly with content roles and controls. Single sign-on can make any LOB system, such as financials, ERP or CRM, directly accessible or integrated with your portal

• Information Management – Metadata can be tailored to your business and assigned to assist with search, categorization, and information processing

• Customisation -SharePoint is extensible with features and functionality that can be exposed and customized, or created for example as Web Parts and seamlessly integrated

Implications
But what are the implications behind these SharePoint benefits and how do they impact your business?

Let’s consider three basic SharePoint issues that span the business technology ’sophistication’ spectrum from: the basics of content library storage; to custom development; to business intelligence

SharePoint’s Storage Paradigm Shift
While the concept of computer storage might be considered somewhat boring and ’something for the Techs’, it is important to note that SharePoint involves a massive paradigm shift in this area.

In the past, Fileshares have been the most common method of general storage. But their time has passed and it is now almost universally considered a good idea to have all your content in record management systems, document libraries and workspaces.

But where does all that content actually live once it is in SharePoint in a document library?

Fileshares in Windows, and folders in SharePoint, while functionally similar are very different entities from a storage perspective

Doesn’t SharePoint store content in its own folders and ‘fileshares’, the way it appears on screen?

No. SharePoint stores all its content in a Microsoft SQL Server database.

SQL Server is not a new technology and your business likely already has SQL Server running, but consider the implications of this change:

• Licensing Cost – SQL Server involves its own licensing costs both for the purchase of the software and CALS (client access licenses). This is in addition to the SharePoint costs. By contrast storing and sharing files in folders is essentially ‘free’

• Infrastructure & Performance – SQL Server is a sophisticated platform that necessitates specialised infrastructure including servers, storage devices, and staff, in addition to SharePoint. The cost for the use of this infrastructure may be spread over other applications that are already using SQL, but if your business is looking at putting all its content into SharePoint+SQL then this infrastructure will have to scale both in terms of its size and mission critical support.

• If you require the SharePoint content to be available on an operational basis special attention will need to be given to SQL I/O performance along with addressing problematic performance issues with SharePoint itself, such as the performance penalty when returning more than 2,000 records in a list. Performance limitations might make certain types of enterprise-wide solutions untenable. Capacity planning is essential. Here is a useful link on SharePoint capacity planning.

• Migration – While there are tools that allow the migration of content into SharePoint from earlier versions of SharePoint and other information sources such as Lotus Notes, this is typically not an easy or ‘lossless’ exercise. Looking to the future, will there be tools to migrate your content out of SharePoint+SQL if needed? What about all the feature rich content attributes you might build into your SharePoint information management solution – will you be able to take them with you?

Custom Development Dilemma
SharePoint is a great OOTB, ‘out of the box’, productivity tool. But OOTB functionality is never enough! Customization is always demanded to support specific business processes and applications.

However, while SharePoint has a wealth of inbuilt functionality waiting to be tapped, commensurate with the richness of features there is a high degree of complexity that is largely underrated. Development in SharePoint brings its own challenges:

• Business Coverage- SharePoint covers many different business areas including content management, business intelligence, document and records management, workflow, portals, etc. Ideal SharePoint solutions should leverage as much of the existing platform functionality as possible without reinventing the wheel.

• For best results a developer should have a holistic functional understanding of SharePoint across all its business applications

• Complex Technology – SharePoint is a complex technology in its own right that spans from web front ends to SQL Server database processes. The right approach, expertise and understanding are required to fully leverage it. Good .Net developers are not automatically good SharePoint developers. Experience, lots of experience, is needed to bring about holistic development understanding. Experience also assists in coping with SharePoint’s many ‘undocumented features’.

• Because many SharePoint options can be configured without development, and initial development appears easy, overconfidence is often engendered in in-house developers, and overly ambitious development projects can be undertaken with disastrous results

• Duplicitous Paths -With Microsoft technologies there are often several development paths to achieve a solution and SharePoint is no exception. But despite the seeming logical and extensible nature of a path, a satisfactory result may not be achieved. As this stage of SharePoint’s maturity, many likely development paths often come to a dead-end through no fault of the logic of the developer or their approach, but because of a SharePoint bug, anomaly or undocumented feature.

• SharePoint is only early into SPK release lifecycle and the many CUs (cumulative updates) are a must

• Development Environment – a suitable development environment is required which ideally should replicate Production conditions which may involve topologies of web farms, index servers and SQL clusters, Active Directory and Exchange servers. Few environments provide that level of development platform support, although virtualization is closing the gap. This means that SharePoint development projects do not always travel well to the Production environment, even with Solutions and Packages, delivering unforeseen results

SharePoint Production environment topologies can be complex, and are not often replicated in development, with the result that SharePoint solutions do not always travel well when deployed

Metadata Intelligence
The leveraging of metadata is one of the most underrated areas in SharePoint yet it is invaluable to your business and information management strategy.

For example the implementation of an information management system, incorporating governance and compliance built on SharePoint’s metadata and workflows functionalality, is a logical application for the platform.

Metadata support allows you to attach keywords that can be used to provide meaning about the content that is loaded, assisting in categorization, search and aggregation. It is also a key to ensuring the alignment of content and business processes to your governance, compliance and information management plans, by being linked back to your associated business goals and objectives.

SharePoint OOTB can leverage the Properties page in all Office documents where metadata for author, title, subject, status, keywords, etc., can be entered. In addition SharePoint has a whole metadata infrastructure that allows you to create, customize and manage your own metadata infrastructure.

This SharePoint metadata, called content types, have particular value in that they can also be used to trigger actions and workflows. For example when a document is loaded into a library, special processes can be triggered based on its metadata.

Let’s consider some of the implications of even a basic implementation of SharePoint’s metadata on a large scale. (For ease of discussion I will use the term metadata rather than content type.)

Note the message ‘You MUST fill out any required properties’

• Mandated Metadata – It seems like a good idea to allocate metadata to all your SharePoint content because of the associated benefits. So the next obvious step is to mandate metadata i.e. ensure every piece of content that is loaded into SharePoint must be assigned relevant metadata.

• To add metadata to a single document may only take a minute but scale that out across your business to every staff member and to every piece of content, and a sizeable amount of time will be taken up assigning metadata that will erode overall business productivity

• Dirty Metadata – One way to overcome this ‘mandated metadata productivity hit’ is to make the metadata faster and more intuitive to allocate. This can be done by providing metadata in the form of dynamic lists, as opposed to free text fields.

• But even when presented with an easy or ’smart’ pick list, staff may not know what metadata value to assign, or be confronted with too many choices. For example combinations of departments, business units, and projects could produce an overwhelming list of options.

• ‘Time poor’ information workers don’t want to stop their task to find out what metadata should be allocated or go through the process to create a new category. This can lead to erroneous values being assigned just to expedite content loading.

• In some cases there may be purposeful erroneous metadata provided, to obscure business activities such as fraud

• Legacy Metadata – Most discussions of SharePoint benefits focus on ‘greenfields’ SharePoint implementations but all businesses have legacy fileshares, content and systems that can be essential to migrate into SharePoint.

• While it is possible to programmatically assign metadata during migration, in reality it is not worthwhile to do so on any scale unless a metadata or similar policy has previously been in place.

• Consider trying to allocate even simple metadata such as author, document title and version if these are not already associated with the content: fileshare locations by nature provide multi-author storage so authors are not differentiated from PAs, etc.; duplicates and drafts with the same or entirely different titles are common confounding categorization and titling; latest date may not reflect a file master version. These are just some of the issues.

This much used image helps demonstrate the typical nature of the information and content in most businesses fileshares. Determining, on any scale, the author, title, keywords of this information is in reality an impossible task.Thus much legacy information comes into SharePoint sans the metadata that could be vital to an understanding of the material, and assist with the information management of the business

• Metadata Meaning -Metadata seeks to give meaning to content beyond that given by a file name.

• How many metadata properties might be needed to adequately indicate the meaning of a document that spans many diverse areas and topics? Free text metadata would allow more comprehensive explanation but we are back to the ‘productivity hit’ issue of the time taken to enter all the metadata.

• Meaning may also differ from different perspectives. How would the allocation of ‘definitive meaning’ to files and content be achieved? How would different perspectives and synonyms be handled where different metadata words and terms are used for similar concepts?

• Consider the issue of trying to assign comprehensive metadata to all the images, video, audio and VoIP content in your business. How much resource would be required? Would the metadata be accurate and definitive using any current methods?

• In terms of scale, how would the process of allocating metadata relating to every email be handled?

• What about metadata relationships between content, such as between documents and documents, images, emails, projects, departments, people, roles? Would this type of meaning and understanding gained provide any useful insight into your business and be of value?

These are issues that may currently seem most poignant to the legal profession and e-Discovery but are increasing in import for all businesses.

Metadata that provides meaning as described above, including that for unstructured content, can provide valuable insight into business operations providing a basis for real business intelligence, way beyond that of the traditional BI with just numbers and charts in a spreadsheet.

Conclusion
SharePoint is a good information management and general office productivity platform. However it has its issues that are best to be aware of and managed, rather than just ‘let loose’ in your business, preventing it from becoming a ‘black hole’.

In the context of the issues discussed above:

The Good is that SharePoint will, in line with the Pareto principle, OOTB meet roughly 80% of your general information management needs and in the process provide a stable scalable platform.

Good also is that assistance with SharePoint development, both in terms of available tools and developer experience, is increasing at a rapid rate. At the time of writing this article, a quick search of www.CodePlex.com returned nearly 700 ‘open source’ projects providing explanation and assistance on SharePoint development. Countless blog articles by SharePoint gurus likewise provide commentary on numerous SharePoint solutions.

The Bad is that if you want SharePoint, then SQL Server and its associated overheads are unavoidable.

Bad also is that with regard to going beyond the metadata basics, there is no solution available within SharePoint that address the issues discussed. However this is not so bad as it seems as there is no solution available within any of the current generation of similar platforms.

How to get more meaning from business information and unstructured content is the next major conundrum facing business managers today. However I believe this type of metadata support and analysis is one of the most exciting challenges, and will be the basis for the next level of real business intelligence and competitive business advantage.

Next generation tools, providing definitive meaning to structured and unstructured information and a full understanding of information relationships, are just starting to enter the mainstream and gain more attention. These tools can work with SharePoint as well as hundreds of other information sources and hold the promise of providing an incredibly comprehensive understanding and powerful information management tool for your business.

I will be looking at this next-generation solution in more detail shortly.

1. These are not in any particular order.
2. These are “Five Important Tests” not “The Five Most Important Tests”.

I have put them together for two main reasons:

1. To compliment the existing test regime that I’m sure you already have in place.
2. As a reminder (sure you never forget!) because these are the main reasons I see SharePoint solutions fail.

This is not a “How-To” article, but I have tried to include examples of “real world” experiences I’ve encountered along the way. Now, without further delay, lets take a stroll through Five Important Tests you should perform before “Go Live” with your SharePoint solution.

1. Fill ‘Er Up!

Add lots of data to your solution. SharePoint, fundamentally, is a data driven application. By that I mean, the application changes and adapts based on the data it is filled with. Most of the SharePoint solutions you build will be driven less by HTML and code, and more by data, including navigation, document libraries, lists, web parts and the list goes on. The result of this is that your solution will inevitably behave differently when it has lots of data in it, and at the risk of stating the obvious, it will rarely perform better!

SharePoint compounds this problem by having some serious limitations on the amount of data that it promises to perform well with. These are outlined in the “Planning for Software Boundaries” documentation (that every SharePoint developer should know by heart).

Of course, our development environments never have much data in them, which means that “everything works fine on my machine”. Unfortunately, problems related to data volumes often fail to show up until months after the solution has been deployed, and by that time, it can be very difficult to go back and “Fix it”.

One final note, back in my RRE (Rapid Response Engineer) days, the #1 reason for a CritSit (critical situation/server down) were custom Site Navigation controls. This was usually a web part that built out a tree control using a recursive loop of all sites. When you have hundreds of sites, combined with the need to dispose (which almost no one did), you have an application pool recycle problem on your hands!

Resources:
Working with large lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007 (must read)
SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool
Plan for software boundaries (Office SharePoint Server)
Plan for software boundaries (Windows SharePoint Services)
SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool

Bottom Line:
Load up with data until you know when you’re creaking.

2. You entered what?!?

Sometimes it feels like the people using the solutions I build have completely different keyboards to the one I have. They are always entering the weirdest characters, in the weirdest places, leaving me with the most infuriating bugs. Infuriating because they are so easy to fix, and I know, deep down, that I really, really should have picked it up. This of course is vastly more complicated in an international environment.

Resources:
21 Apps Blog – Andrew Woodward has some great resources on Unit Testing and SharePoint
TypeMock for SharePoint

Bottom line:
Have some testing resources (automated or otherwise) dedicated to entering the strangest characters you can imagine, into the strangest places you can imagine.

3. Are you allowed to do that?

I couldn’t imagine a solution built on SharePoint that has only a single permission level. SharePoint is a collaboration platform, so by its nature, it brings people together, safely, by ensuring everyone can do only what they should be able to do. The custom solutions we build are no different.

With that said, developers are typically running with every permissions available (rightly or wrongly!). The problem of course is that running with all these permissions makes it very difficult to use the system exactly as an end user would. This problem is amplified by the SharePoint Object Model which, thankfully, will always respect a users permissions and in whose context much of our code will later run. The classic symptom of code that works when logged on as an administrator, but not as a “normal” user, is an authentication box when trying to access a site they otherwise have permission to access.

Another aspect of this is giving deep thought to exactly what rights a user should really have as an “Administrator”. For example, initially, our blogging solution made the person who owned the blog a Site Collection administrator. We very quickly realised that this was a bad idea. Why would the owner of a blog need to activate new features? Modify the navigation? This just ended up confusing people, so now, a blog owner gets a reduced set of permissions tuned specifically to the solution we have built for them, simplifying things, which after all, is our job as solution designers.

Resources:
Best Practices for Elevated Privilege in SharePoint and Elevated Privilege with SPSite by Daniel Larson
Elegant SPSite Elevation by Keith Dahlby

Bottom Line:
Make sure you are testing the system using the roles you have defined, and make sure you are giving people only the permissions they really need.

4. Two Servers are better than one

SharePoint, through its Solution Framework, does a great job of making it easy to install solutions across a farm. That is of course if you have one, many customers don’t need need either the scale or the availability to warrant one. However, in my mind, this doesn’t excuse developers from worrying about whether our solutions will work in a farm environment. You never know what the future holds.

So, what can go wrong? Well, let me tell you a little story. Many years ago, in the SPS2003 days, I was part of a team that put together a solution that stored navigation information for SharePoint sites in an XML file (that’s another story). The solution worked great “on the developers machine”, but on our medium server farm we had a problem, when someone updated the navigation on one front-end, that change was not reflected on the other front end. Obvious when you think about it, but you will be amazed how often you don’t.

The solution of course was also obvious, move the XML file onto shared storage, somewhere both machines could access it. We tested away, and again, on our development environment it worked. We went ahead and made the change, only to find that in production, nothing worked. The problem of course, was that we were hitting that classic of all issues, the NTLM Double Hop problem (to date I have lost around 6.3 days of my life to that this issue).

Now, that had a relatively simple solution too, impersonation, but the important bit is not how simple the solution is, but what it ended up doing to our timelines, and how embarrassed I felt! <grin>

Anyway, double hop, resource storage, state management (potentially) and Web.Config modifications are just a few of the issues you can encounter once you move to a farm environment.

Resources:
How To: Modify the web.config file in SharePoint using SPWebConfigModification by Mark Wagner

Bottom Line:
Test on a multi-server environment sooner rather than later.

5. Baseline it!

Your application works, job well done. You have completed all the testing you possibly can, everyone has signed everything off. You are ready to go into production.

Wait, before you do, there is one more thing!

Create a baseline. That is, an accurate representation of exactly how your application performs under a controlled set of parameters. Its critical to ensuring that the future upgrades you make are safe.

This is actually simpler than it sounds (which is not to say its simple), for example it could be:

1. A virtual machine that includes your application, fully configured, and with a complete set of sample data. Ensure that it is representative of what you will find when it does go into production.
2. Visual Studio Test Edition suite, or basically any load testing tool (see resources).

Then, pick your metrics, rinse, record and repeat. You need to get to a point where you have a pretty good grasp of how the system you are testing behaves while operational.

With this in hand, and before your next release, before going live, upgrade the environment and repeat exactly the same steps. The important thing then is to look for variation. If you suddenly find an unexpected increase of 50% in memory consumption, then you know something isn’t right. In this case, its the performance relative to the baseline that’s important, not the actual numbers.

Resources:
MOSS2007 – Visual Studio 2008 Testing (Load Test) by Liam Cleary
MS Web Application Stress Tool

Bottom Line:
Baseline the performance of your solution so that you can compare it to future releases.

Conclusion

As I said in my opening, there are many, many other important tests that should be performed. So lets start a discussion, what test do you perform before “Go Live”, and what do you think are the most important?

Records created, managed and stored in SharePoint constitute electronic communications that fall under the same compliance rules requiring the retention and availability of communications records organizations must apply to email.  There is not only limited space for storing such unstructured content but there’s also more than a little confusion about exactly what should be stored and for how long. To make matters even more confusing, those same SharePoint records cannot simply be dumped onto backup tapes and sent to a storage facility down the road where they remain untouched to gather dust. Specific records must also be accessible at a moment’s notice in the event of a lawsuit or regulatory investigation.

SharePoint presents IT administrators with the same management and storage issues as email, as well as some new ones.  SharePoint versioning is a useful tool, but it stores a completely new item for each new version created.  So if you create a PowerPoint presentation and a colleague makes just one change to one slide, SharePoint saves that change as an entirely new slide deck.  You can imagine how quickly SharePoint can consume expensive primary storage space.

The number of SharePoint sites within an organization can grow very quickly as sites are often created for even short-term projects.   These sites are usually temporary and are active only for the life of the specific project.

Benefits of Archiving

Implementing an archiving system for SharePoint records enables IT to optimize its storage resources by moving older records off the SharePoint server and expensive primary storage facilities to less expensive options after a project reaches completion or when a document is no longer being modified on a regular basis  SharePoint documents can be archived to preserve storage space, utilizing features such as compression and single-instance-store (SIS) to further reduce costs.   Moving from primary to secondary storage also has the benefit of accelerating SharePoint maintenance such as scanning the database for viruses or backups.

Single instance store eliminates the cost of storing multiple copies of the same document.  For example, if the same document exists in multiple SharePoint document libraries, just one copy will be stored in the archive.  If that same document also exists in the File System archive or email only one copy will be stored.

When an item is archived, it is first compressed and then metadata is added to it.  As a general rule, the item is compressed to half its original size, and the metadata comprises approximately five KB.  When an item is shared, only the metadata is added.  To estimate  the storage savings compression creates, halve the total size of items to be archived, divide by the average number of sharers or collaborators (if any) and add five KB multiplied by the total number of items. The compression ratio may vary considerably, and you must factor in the growth in the number and size of documents.  A more conservative method of estimating storage is to assume that space used by archiving equals the space used by SharePoint in storing items.

Additionally, the SharePoint administrator can set policies to further reduce the number of files stored within SharePoint, such as establishing a rule to automatically delete mp3 or video files from a SharePoint site collection..  Documents can also can be automatically deleted as they become outdated by creating a rule at the site or subsite level to archive and remove documents from SharePoint based on the last modified date (while maintaining an archived copy).

As previously mentioned, SharePoint versioning is a useful tool to preserver every modification to a given document however each change is stored as a separate document.  Archiving solutions can ease this storage burden by providing a way to archive the older versions to cheaper storage while maintaining the current version in SharePoint for easy modification.  Versions can still be accessed by the user via shortcuts or stubs but the actual file will reside within the archive not within SharePoint freeing up valuable space.

End-user Access to Archived items

Shortcuts or “Stubs” are essential in maintaining the end-user experience once items have been archived and removed from SharePoint.  A shortcut or stub links to the original document in the archive and provides seamless access for the end user.  A good archiving solution will also maintain the original icon or a variation of the original icon to minimize the change to the user experience.

End-user search is also essential to provide an easy way to find items in the archive (especially if shortcuts are not in use).  End-users must be able to search on both the metadata and content within the document and should be able to restore items back to SharePoint if they wish to edit the document.

Improving Search and Recovery

An archiving system’s search and retrieval functionalities make finding and recovering specific records for business or discovery purposes much faster, more accurate and far less costly than manually searching through piles of backup tapes.  Backup tapes were not designed to do what archives do. Backups offer safeguards against unexpected data loss and application errors, while archiving is the process of systematically saving copies of unstructured files to reduce primary storage, better management retention and enable the discovery of information on a per item basis.  Backups will always be an important part of an organization’s data protection and disaster recovery strategy, but they are less than efficient when used for archiving purposes. Nevertheless, if tapes are the only source of SharePoint, email, IM and other electronic communications backups, then they are fair game should a lawsuit demand their discovery. And simply saying they’re inaccessible will not hold up in court.

A proactive archiving system reduces the costs associated with the search and collection of electronic data by creating a centralized and indexed archive that can be searched on demand.  With archiving in place, organizations can save on discovery costs by eliminating the fire drills and time required to respond to requests, decreasing the resources needed to carry out legal holds and significantly reducing the cost of manual collection, de-duplication, imaging, password cracking and tape restores.

To summarize, there are multiple benefits to expanding your existing email archive to incorporate SharePoint records, including:

• automating the archiving of older business-critical data on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server to more cost-effective online stores
• moving documents from SharePoint workspaces to provide maximum storage benefit, including entire workspaces when a project ends
• maximizing online knowledge store and increases information sharing
• enabling SharePoint to remain a constant size and does not suffer from storage “bloat” to facilitate rapid disaster recovery and optimal backup processing
• all data can be stored in one location

Implementing a software-based archiving solution is one way to keep storage costs from spiraling upwards without limiting how employees use SharePoint.  Newer, more frequently accessed content is retained within SharePoint with older, less frequently accessed content being moved to the archive while still remaining available to the end user. This keeps storage growth focused, enables SharePoint Portal Server scalability and keeps backup/restore windows under control without impacting the end user.

The second part of this three-part series will focus on archiving for SharePoint to ensure compliance with laws and regulations requiring the retention and availability of electronic communications records and to facilitate the e-discovery process.  Part three will examine how extending your archiving system to include SharePoint will significantly improve the end-user’s experience with SharePoint.

In today’s business climate, competitive pressures are greater than ever. Organizations must leverage any competitive advantage to gain or maintain an edge. Or, in the midst of a shrinking economy, there is always a need to do more with less. Recently, many organizations have turned to knowledge management (KM) systems like SharePoint to create new knowledge. Some experts consider knowledge to be perhaps the only sustainable competitive advantage. With knowledge come better decisions, more efficient teams, and a commitment to learning. However, the high risk of failure is well documented which compels us to study why and then define critical success factors that are found within successful implementations.

Working in the researcher’s favor is the overwhelming consistency found when researching these critical success factors (CSF). Furthermore, in a study of thirty-one KM projects¹ across twenty-four companies, researchers found that successful projects “had virtually the same indicators.” Additionally, the study concluded that “the unsuccessful or not yet successful projects had few or none of the characteristics.” These findings give us a high degree of confidence in the factors that are provided here. These factors have been selected based on the frequency found in journal articles, various case studies and experience in deploying SharePoint solutions.

Not Just Information Technology

When asking most business or technical people what Information Technology (IT) means, very likely one will get an answer that only involves technology. Somehow, the information element gets lost or subjugated. While technology is an important element, and arguably a CSF outright, the CSF more emphasized in research is recognizing that there is more to the solution than a technology component. Some of the first KM efforts have learned this lesson the hard way, and it is now widely published that a KM implementation must involve people and processes. The KM system is a multidisciplinary effort that depends on organizational learning, sharing habits, and changes to culture; in other words, it is not just IT. As quoted by a KM consultancy firm in New York City, “The biggest misconception that IT leaders make is that knowledge management is about technology”²

Culture

In some sources it is reported that having a healthy corporate culture that is conducive to knowledge sharing is perhaps the most important success factor. Unfortunately, changing culture is also one of the single-most difficult things to do. This dangerous mix helps explain why most KM efforts fail. There are many barriers to why staff are reluctant to share. These include lack of trust, lack of perceived value, or simple knowledge hoarding. Even without these barriers, there is the inertia of instituting any type of change. Companies must have individuals, teams and the organization as a whole believing that sharing knowledge is a healthy and normal way to do business. Having a compatible culture is not optional: either this KM initiative fits “into their organizational culture, or else they should be prepared to change it.”³ If the culture is not KM friendly, “no amount of technology, knowledge content or good project management will make the effort successful”¹. Having the right culture can also work in your favor. If employees really believe that sharing knowledge is essential to the organization, they will use every available process or technology to share and learn.

Building a Foundation

In addition to culture, there are other important ingredients that go into the foundation, or infrastructure, for KM. This foundation consists of the establishment of roles and teams that will help build a learning environment. Management should develop effective policies, procedures and guidelines for the organization. This structure, commonly called governance, cannot be understated in importance. Without this, the garden of knowledge can become starved, turn into a jungle, or become overrun with weeds. Some organizations even form a new executive-level role in that of a Chief Knowledge Officer, or CKO, to formalize this in the organization.

Motivating Staff

While motivational incentives alone do not guarantee success, they are still critical to becoming a learning organization. Rewarding employees helps reinforce positive behavior and is one element in changing an organization’s sharing culture. Recommendations include moving away from individual performance incentives and towards group- or team-based compensation. The goal is to create a sense of shared work and purpose which stimulates collaboration and fosters teamwork. These should be tied into job or project performance reviews as well as annual evaluations. The approach should, in general, be long term and be visible across the organization. Keep in mind that not all incentives need to be—or should be—financial in nature. Recognition, expectation, as well as peer pressure can all act as motivational carrots.

Training

Training is also a critical success factor in the deployment of a KM system. In fact, in one study employee training had the strongest correlation with a successful KM implementation⁴. Training ensures employees understand a new software system and the processes associated with it. While not itemized as a single CSF in this paper, it is clear that user adoption is essential for success, and training is the primary way to prevent refusal or apathy by the staff. This component is not just having everyone sit in a class; often times, it is just getting the word out to the organization. The message can be through seminars, bulletins, announcements or just evangelism to get employees and managers familiar with what KM is.

Making Resources Available

While the goal of KM is to make organizations smarter and more efficient, this will not happen overnight. KM is an investment in the future of the organization, and it takes time, money and effort to get there. Time is needed for training, process re-engineering, occupying new KM roles, and performing knowledge-sharing activities. Money may be needed to purchase new hardware, software and services for a new KM system. Effort is needed in changing culture and convincing staff of the merits of sharing knowledge. Human resource availability is already a common problem with staff already feeling over burdened with tasks. Nothing positive comes from a KM effort that is just dropped into the organization with the belief that staff will either make or find the time. As a result, planning the scope and iterations of a KM effort with realistic timelines and outputs is essential for success.

Executive Support

While there is always the hope that a grass-roots effort will instill KM within an organization, executive support is still necessary. If knowledge is of such strategic importance to the organization, executive and board support is crucial. Beyond a passive leadership role, executives must be KM champions in both actions and words. They establish a clear vision for KM and also ensure alignment between KM strategy and corporate strategy exists. They amplify the importance of knowledge and clarify which types of knowledge are most important. They help ensure the culture changes take effect as well as play a pivotal role in the creation of a solid foundation. Executive sponsors make resources and other funding available to the KM cause. In short, they make it clear that the organization is focused on KM and steer the organization in that direction.

Conclusion

The effective implementation of KM is controlled by certain factors. Understanding up front what these factors are enable proactive management and mitigates a project’s largest risk areas. Keep in mind each organization is different, and while these factors apply to some degree to most all types of companies, the ranking of each will vary. In some organizations, there will certainly be other factors not spelled out. Hopefully with careful analysis of these areas specific to your organization, building a successful KM implementation is well within reach and will also yield a strong return on investment.

References

1 Davenport, T., De Long, D., & Beers, M. (1998, Winter98). Successful knowledge management projects. Sloan Management Review, 39(2), 43-57.

2 Kulkarni, U. Ravindran, S., & Freeze, R. (2006, Winter2006/2007). A knowledge management success model: Theoretical development and empirical validation. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23(3), 309-347.

3 Wong, K. (2005, May). Critical success factors for implementing knowledge management in small and medium enterprises. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 105(3), 261-279.

4 Hung, Y., Huang, S., Lin, Q., & Mei-Ling-Tsai, M. (2005, March). Critical factors in adopting a knowledge management system for the pharmaceutical industry. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 105(2), 164-183.

How you measure the success of any SharePoint project is open to much debate. Your typical tangible metrics around how a particular project has performed in terms of Time, Money and Quality, are still the main areas are what most organisations focus on upon to gauge their ultimate success. This is irrespective of whether or not the true ‘measures of success’’ from a SharePoint deployment aren’t actually felt by the business until longer after the project team has been moved on to other things.

But with the introduction and importantly adoption of SharePoint into many organisations growing exponentially over since the release of MOSS 2007 last year, it brings with it a number of challenges to say the least. The delivery of Microsoft’s premier collaborative platform, SharePoint, will put under pressure one or more of these metrics during the project life cycle, as any novice or experienced SharePoint, traditional infrastructure or software project managers whom take on the management and delivery of these projects, will tell you.

Having spent the last 7 or so years leading successful bid teams to win and then go on to manage the deployments of SharePoint into large and small businesses, spread across several industry sectors, (and in some cases to help organisations ‘recover’ failed projects), this article looks at the reasons why SharePoint projects can and do go awry. And in an effort to educate readers through the sharing of knowledge and experience here in this article, it will highlight some areas for you to be aware of and plan for accordingly so that you increase your chances of a successful SharePoint project.

Why are SharePoint projects difficult to deliver?

There are many reasons why SharePoint related projects run into difficulty and like any other IT project, they fall under the following headlines well documented by others:

• Poor Scope Definition
• No inherent Project Culture within the business
• Poor Stakeholder Management
• Poor Project Governance
• Poor Project Management skills
• Weak Planning (for the project and beyond once it has been deployed)
• Lack of proper change and risk identification and management.

However, there are other reasons that organisations need to be aware of.

Reasons Specific to SharePoint Projects

Here are some of the main additional reasons why SharePoint projects fail to live up to expectations and in particular areas your organisation needs to be aware of and plan for accordingly to increase the likelihood of success of your SharePoint deployments:

Underestimating the Scope of the Project Deliverables

In particular for the medium to large organisations, they often fail to plan and budget properly for the enormity of the Project deliverables that feature in SharePoint deployments.

These are often in areas such as:

• Strategic and Operational impact business practices
• SharePoint Governance
• Project Team Resources and skills
• Planning and Design (in particular around those that demand re-branding of SharePoint interface)
• Infrastructure (to support both internal and collaborative working externally)
• Application Delivery, Build and Test (In particular for deployment with bespoke elements)
• Migration of content or documents from file shares, existing intranet(s) and other line of business applications, (databases, etc)
• Release & Change Management
• Launch Activity and User Adoption going forward
• IT Helpdesk and User support following Go-Live.

Business ‘Quick Wins’ to demonstrate value

More often than not, SharePoint is first introduced as a replacement Intranet. Fine, it will do that very well. But often businesses forgot to include in their planning, enhancements to the intranet that could give it the ‘wow’ factor when the business first starts to use it.

Such ‘Quick Wins’ can be relatively minor in effort, but tremendously valuable when try to gain momentum and secure support from the wider business that the adoption of SharePoint within the business is more than just an intranet replacement solution. They are more aligned to a different way of working for the business which should be one of the strategic objectives is much more than this and are key to business adoption.

Such ‘quick wins’ should be identified earlier on and planned into a release program following the launch of the initial project to ensure the deployment of SharePoint is a success not just at the beginning, but continues to be so as it is further utilised and deployed within the business.

Short term planning, long term pain

Forget to include long term planning and management of your SharePoint project at your peril!

Businesses often forget to include the long term planning within the initial phase at the beginning, especially around the underlying architecture to support potential changes in the future. Thus potentially needing to re-invest in significant infrastructure costs later on when for example you wish to introduce an extranet facility or include another business units’ content following a business buyout.

It is critical you consider those changes planned for the future now within the SharePoint underlying architecture & infrastructure. This will I guarantee save you money and pain later on!

Lack of SharePoint experience in your Project team

Do you use a one of your team members whom has never worked with SharePoint before? Or hire a SharePoint Developer or SharePoint Consultant on your project team, or perhaps both…?What about SharePoint Architect, Business Analysts, Web Designer or even an experienced SharePoint Project Manager?

For many larger projects ALL of these resources are needed and getting this wrong in terms of the mix of roles and experience of resources is one of the major reasons why projects will fail, as project planning around resourcing is badly managed and underestimated by the team at the beginning.

The product feature set is vast and all too often project teams are poorly equipped in terms of the relevant team members experience of the product core features, including the underlying infrastructure to support the larger implementations. It is critical you understand the challenges here and ensure you get the right resources on board and consider carefully whether or not to use a single developer/consultant resource hoping they will cover it all. The chances are they won’t, will struggle to meet deadlines, cause project overruns  and in the end it will cost you a lot more to make it right or worse you abandon a sound valuable strategic platform because of a poor initial experiences.

Lack of SharePoint Project Management Delivery experience

Often overlooked, but good solid experience of managing SharePoint related projects is worth its wait in gold. Often, IT departments and outside consultancy’s will assume its like every other Microsoft infrastructure related project, which it is not! Nor is it like any other traditional software related project either.

It is more like something in between, which is why it proves challenging for IT management and existing Project Managers in either camp to get their heads around the issues and challenges. This is both at the beginning in terms of planning, in the middle in terms of day to day management and towards the end when you are ready to go live and you have underestimated all the activities that need to happen to make it visible and importantly adopted by your users both from launch day and beyond.

Wrong Infrastructure and Poor Architecture

An area often overlooked, but be warned a little forethought here can save you a lot of money/effort. As the SharePoint product spans across both intranet, extranets and now public facing web sites, the right infrastructure supporting SharePoint users is crucial for successful delivery and operation.

The end to end design of a SharePoint technical architecture  will often need to touch on other technologies such as networks, firewalls, Proxy Servers, ISA servers, anti-virus software and database clustering to name but a few. In addition, capacity planning for your hardware is also important as quite often you will need to potentially plan for every 1MB of user storage, over 3mb (yes 3!) of storage space for your whole environment!!

Together with a relatively complicated, and costly licensing model from Microsoft, do your homework on this area before your commit your budgets and commence your project.

Customisation or Configuration?

I will describe ‘customisation’ is essentially an activity whereby a SharePoint developer deploys bespoke handwritten code within a SharePoint environment, whereas ‘configuration’ is the manipulation of existing “out of the box – (OOB)” features to meet your needs.

More often than not, many organisations will opt for the former as they don’t know the latter well enough and assume they have no choice, but this should be counselled against doing so without proper consideration of the impact and risks.

MOSS/WSS are very pervasive technologies and being able to support the environments both from launch to decommissioning/migration is key.  The MOSS/WSS feature set is huge, hence understanding what you can do out of the box with the product is difficult, if not impossible for one individual resource to know. But that doesn’t mean you should turn to custom development, more you need seek and if need be to bring in the right skills and experience of those that do understand how to get the most out of the platforms array of features, before you commit to development resourcing on the project.

Custom development definitely has its place however, but do not underestimate the effort it takes for even your best developers to come up to speed with the inner workings of SharePoint. Particular areas for your Training/R & D efforts are that of SharePoint branding, workflows and how you deploy your solutions, as the three main areas which crop up as being the more challenging than you perhaps expected or planned for.

Hence, having the experience to know when to use custom development is important because remember, you pay for your custom changes several times, not just the few days of developer time for a minor enhancement that doesn’t seem to be there out of the box. Namely you pay for the:

1. Initial bespoke code

2. Testing when service packs or ‘hot fixes’ come along that may break your bespoke code (could be several times in the life of the platform)

3. Finally, when you migrate to next version of SharePoint or new product, and the migration tools don’t like your bespoke work as its not supported.

So, do you really customise SharePoint or configure…? Will the customisation you are about to embark upon be really worth it to your business needs? Really think this through before you open up your SharePoint deployment with Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer. Quite often its easier and hence cheaper to modify the business process or to leave out the functionality altogether. On this latter point I have witnessed all too often a bespoke ‘function’ not available out of the box, be custom built at great expense, only for it to be rarely if at all used by the end user.

Poor Planning for User Adoption

There is little point in designing and deploying the ‘best’, most detailed SharePoint solution if from launch date, very few users can access it, those that can can’t seem to find information or use it very well and those that can’t access it that eventually do, don’t go on to then use it and nor reap the benefits of collaborative working.

Planning for ‘Launch and User Adoption’ and the results of this are key to the ‘perceived’ success of the project more so than just the usual time/quality/money metrics. It revolves around planning, stakeholder management and user awareness, be that in form of training or briefing them of the new ways in which to enhance and improve how they work and make their jobs easier.

Businesses should have a longer engagement plan of objectives, deliverables,budgets and milestones for enhancements to the solution following the initial launch. Such long term planning is often missed.

Conclusion

This article has highlighted many issues organisations deploying or are about to will come across and indeed, many organisations will face difficulties in some or all of the above, as a consequence of lack of experience, poor decision making or expectation management with the business sponsors.

So what do organisations do to avoid many of the issues raised in this article. Quite simple, if you can start small (don’t run before you can walk so to speak) do so and get to know the vast array of features and functions available out of the box with the platform. Do not let loose your developers on a project until you have fully explored the rich feature set provided out of the box and established that the end result is really worth it to the business when all costs (short and long term) associated with custom development are weighed up.

If you’re planning a large deployment however, plan, plan and plan some more, review your approach carefully and seek the knowledge and wisdom of others whom have done it before, know the pitfalls and have learnt the lessons before you commit your resources.

Finally, it’s worth considering getting specialist advice from the outset from those that have been there before and can help your organisation through this period of change and allow your users to reap the full benefits of using Microsoft’s SharePoint collaborative platform whilst allowing your to get on with doing what you do best. If you do go external for such resources, then ensure appropriate levels of knowledge transfer take place to your staff during ALL phases of the project and not just at the handover!

Andrew Walmsley

Director – WorkShares Limited © 2008

This the third post of a six part series on Leveraging the SharePoint Platform. In the last post I explained some of the great things that can be implemented. In this post I will introduce the Governance, the People and the Approach that needs to surround SharePoint.

I hope from reading the first two parts you are under no illusions on the scale of the SharePoint Platform. With this post I hope to point to some great resources out there both from Microsoft and the awesome SharePoint Community.

The Governance

Microsoft defines Governance as “the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that you establish in an enterprise to guide, direct, and control how the organization uses technologies to accomplish business goals.”.

You’ll notice from a lot of the references I use in the post are all 2008, the reason I point this out is because the latest version of SharePoint has been out since November 2006 and it has taken this long for Microoft to raise their game and provide assistance in this area. SharePoint could quite easily become the next SAP behemoth platform that people talk about and never witness being rolled out nto Production (apologies for any SAP lovers out there – I’m sure you say the same thing about SharePoint).

There seem to be a collection of sites dotted among the Microsoft network regarding SharePoint Governance:

• Code Plex
• SharePoint GearUp
• TechNet
• Office.Microsoft.Net
• and more from the entire Internet at diigo.com/user/jthake/

Microsoft have published a great SharePoint Governance Checklist Guide that offers a lot of information around the Platform. They also have provided a template Governance Plan that can be used at the initiation of the project.

There’s plenty of information in the links I’ve listed above and rather than me regurgitate it all here I’ll let you read these at your leisure.

The People

This is an area that is covered by the Plans and Checklists that Microsoft provide, but I don’t believe they are realistic. The problem I have had with most engagements I have been involved with or witnessed around me is that SharePoint is treated in isolation to the rest of the Technologies around it. To emphasise this point further, most environments I have been in even have a separate SQL Server instance just for SharePoint Databases rather than leveraging existing server infrastructure due to the uneasy nature of DBAs not knowing what SharePoint does because Microsoft state that you shouldn’t touch the Database Schema in ANY way.

With this isolation also becomes resource islands and the common pattern is that the person/role who installs SharePoint, also becomes the person who supports it and keeps it operational. Now in a perfect World, and in Microsoft Plans and Checklists, this would be divided up into separate resources and transitions would occur at various phases to make up a ‘Tactical Team’.

As I highlighted in my first part in this series, SharePoint spans multiple Tiers, so immediately, you can see there’s a lot of specialists skills required that span multiple Microsoft Technologies which alone have their own sophisticated exams and certifications. Various bloggers out there have tried to define this:

• Sharee English
• Becky Isserman
• Eric Harlan

(Please add more in the comments of this post)

All of these approaches are valid and some take it from the Roles and Responsibilities approach and others take it from the Technical Background. Sharee’s approach in my mind gives the breakdown I have seen naturally evolve in various SharePoint roll outs I’ve witnessed.

The biggest problem I’ve seen with the isolation and break down of personnel is that SharePoint always takes the blame, because although it is in isolation, there are some shared resources because it shares resources such as the underlying network, Exchange, ISA, Backup and Active Directory. Also, it just isn’t a full time role for each isolated tier such as SQL, ForeFront, SMTP and Windows Server.

What do I mean by “taking the blame”…so a User submits a support call to say the Company Intranet is running slowly  (typically they even know it’s SharePoint and say it’s SharePoint running slowly), this immediately points the blame at SharePoint. Looking at the tiers in the diagram you can see that potentially it might be the underlying architecture that is the issue. This will involve various experts getting involved and working as a team to resolve the issue. So many times I’ve had experts in particular areas going “everything is fine” to later find out that their area was the reason, because other experts have invested hours of time proving to the nth degree it isn’t their technology.

This ‘Tactical Team’ would also include Developers who as Microsoft put it:

“Technically talented people both willing and able to customize, personalize, and use SharePoint in a manner that fulfils the business opportunities as identified by the strategy team. This team is a loosely-knit community of developers with varying degrees of proficiency in software development. Members can range from highly skilled programmers to technically savvy end users in charge of personalizing departmental team sites. Skilled developers will handle large change requests, new features, and program management while ensuring adherence to standards.”

This did make me laugh and also made me feel very self important. I’m going to cut and paste this into my Profile for future reference! In all seriousness, I don’t believe that having ‘Developers’ is breaking this role up enough. As mentioned in my personal blog there is more than one way to skin a cat in SharePoint. Most of the approaches set SharePoint Developers apart from each other, these are (and not limited to):

• Web User Interface Developers – everything is done within the User Interface using OOTB Web Parts, JavaScript and done directly into production environment.
• Site Template Developers – slightly more advanced than above, involving packaging up Site Templates that can be reused.
• SharePoint Designer Developers – everything is done from with SharePoint Designer and migrated using Content Deployment API or similar tools.
• Visual Studio Developers – everything is a Solution with Features and Powershell automated build scripts

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on the best approach to actually ’skinning the cat’ and Chris O’Brien has put some great points forward on the table.

I also believe that with these customisations there is some relevance to what was discussed in the last two posts around the SharePoint Capabilities. Most of the SharePoint MVPs have a specialist area within the Platform and may understand the other areas principles but never implemented them. With this in mind I think it is wise to understand the risks of putting a fresh SharePoint Developer onto their first Business Data Catalogue or Enterprise Search project. The current SharePoint certifications really don’t go deep enough into each capability and I’d like to see more specialisation in each of these with a core WSS Development exam.

Project Managers and Development Team Leaders should be aware of the strengths of their SharePoint Developers and try and identify the gaps in their team based on the requirements of the Organisation. This is further confused by the lack of resources in general in the SharePoint market and the push from recruitment firms and misleading CVs with unexperienced Developers. Joel Oleson makes some valid points about this issue which also has a HUGE discussion thread. Microsoft are also trying to combat this problem by encouraging existing ASP.NET developers to get onboard, this site is a great resource for people ramping up on SharePoint.

Basically, if you have one thing to take away from this section, please be aware of the multitudes of Developers out there and what type is going to suit your sized rollout whether bringing them in-house or outsourcing.

The Approach

Joel Oleson is one of the greatest SharePoint Community Members out there in my opinion and has some great posts around this whole area. Way back in October 2007 he announced the MOSS Deployment Plan sample.  Before you open it, bear in mind that this has the kitchen sink of tasks in there, but also keep your eyes open as this project plan has a total of 6452 hours split between 10 different resources. Again this break down doesn’t seem to align with the other Microsoft Plans and Checklists which isn’t going to make this very easy to use without some work.

Again, with all the references I’ve linked to, I just want to highlight two main core approaches to rolling out SharePoint into the Organisation. You have the traditional Waterfall model and the Agile model. The  Agile model attracts a more iterative approach, which works well with SharePoint due to the features you get out of the box and the speed in which you can get things up and running compared to a more traditional project where you are building everything from the ground up (I will discuss this more in the next part in this series).

As with any Requirements Gathering exercise, Business Users think they KNOW what they want from a system, but often need pushing to be able to explain EXACTLY what they WANT and also sometimes need to be RECOMMENDED what they NEED. Erik Swenson does a great job of highlighting some possible decisions that need to be made simply on the User Interface, before you even start getting into functionality requirements of a particular sub system.  My fellow Perth blogger Paul Culmsee also offers some advice with a great sense of humour and bitterness on this.

By following an iterative process, where you deliver in small chunks what a Business User asks for produces more responsive and early feedback. This allows the system to evolve as the Business User sees the interface working for them with their data. These prototypes can then be taken away to give them stability and shelf life to go into production.

This iterative approach does not lend itself well to the Waterfall method where there is a more formalised process up front of: gather requirements; documenting these into a Functional Design Document; then handing this to someone to produce a Detailed Design of how it will be implemented by the SharePoint Platform.
Traditionally Business Users don’t actually get to see or interact with anything until well after the Detailed Design is complete and the Implementation is in full swing. From here, it is likely that requirements change and scope creep occurs and then Functional and Detailed Design documents are immediately out of date.
A lot of SharePoint projects are very poorly documented due to the ease of which it is implemented and changed and this is something to highlight early on to the entire team…that Documentation is required! It is important to treat Releases as strict as you would a ASP.NET project for various reasons:

• Developers can look in source control and see what’s in Test/Production at any given time;
• A sense of achieving a goal if you have specific release dates;
• Formalised testing done as part of release process;
• If things are packaged and automated properly, SharePoint Admins can be handed the package to run in Test and then once approved run in Production…rather than Developers getting involved;
• Producing an As Built Document of the release, so that if a new team comes in to support it, they don’t have to go digging through code, environments and e-mails to work out what it is doing;
• All of which encourages a formal transition to support for the release.

I would recommend treating the installation of SharePoint as a completely separate project to any Solution you wish to deliver to the Organisation. The main reason for this is that it often involves very different resources than those involved with creating the Solutions on top of this Platform.

The Waterfall methodology does work well when it comes to the Infrastructure and Setup of the Environments. Many Integrators out there repeatedly do this for new customers who have purchased SharePoint licenses and have formalised approaches for this. I would strongly agree using an Integrator, rather than doing this internally as a self learning exercise, due to the complexities of the setup. It may look like a simple Wizard you run, but there are plenty of minor details that can cause all sorts of havoc later down the track. As mentioned before about the isolation, this is mainly due to the complexities of the platform which runs a risk of having more applications servers running on the environment leading to too many permutations when it comes to fixing a problem.

Scenario

At this point I’d like to raise a scenario which I’m sure most SharePoint Integrators reading this will nod their head repeatedly at.

So Microsoft have finally managed to persuade you to purchase the MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise license and the IT Manager has the media in his hands. The various technical whitepapers have been read and hardware has been purchased for a Database server and a Application server.

The Server Admin is sent off to install Windows Server on the two servers. The database server is then handed off to the DBA to install SQL. The thumbs up occurs and the SharePoint Admin installs MOSS on the Application server. The SharePoint Admin gives the thumbs up and they all get together to ensure that everything is being backed up.

A quick company logo is added to the header of the OOTB Blue SharePoint Theme and team sites are created for company divisions: Public Relations, Human Resources, IT and Finance. Division Managers are given full control of their Division Team Site and all members of the Division governed by Active Directory are given Contribute access.

Over the course of 3 months, various ad-hoc projects occur:

• Custom Web Parts have been added to particular Divisions;
• modifications are made to the look and feel using SharePoint Designer;
• InfoPath forms are suddenly replacing Word Documents for Time Sheets and Annual Leave forms with custom SharePoint Designer workflow;
• Columns have been added to certain Division Document Libraries;
• And the list of Business  Users with Power goes on…

6 months later, Users start complaining:

• Users can’t find documents in the search; and
• inconsistencies in how Document Libraries are set up make it hard for Users to know what to do;
• Users don’t know the most appropriate Document Library to use because the person who set them all up has left the organisation;
• Users want extra functionality out of the Web Parts/InfoPath Forms that have been installed, but the person who installed them has left;
• Also, Patches are released for SharePoint that need to be put on and fears around customisations that have been created being lost occur.

So a SharePoint Development Team is brought in-house or outsourced to follow up on these requirements. Immediately the team require a Development environment and the Project Manager wants a Test Environment for testing the updates and deployments before they go into Production. Issues are raised on the best ways to get Deployments from Development to Test to Production and also how to get Content from Production down to Test down to Development to give some realistic working data to test on (more on this coming on my blog).

18 months later, the CIO starts to raise concerns about how all this is being controlled and wants to start rationalising what people can and can’t do (from the list above) without going through a formalised process. This in my opinion is too little too late.

What I am trying to illustrate here is that if you put SharePoint into an Organisation you have to start Governing it straight away and take Roles and Responsibilities seriously. To the point where it is defined in Job Roles throughout the organisation and part of the Handover process when personnel move or leave the Organisation. The OOTB permissions that are giving to an “Owner” of the Division is far too much and should be giving to Owners at the IT Departments discretion.

In Conclusion

At this point, it is also worth mentioned that there is a programme that Microsoft have put together called the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services program. Basically Microsoft will pay its Partners to deliver a qualifying SharePoint deployment plan to their customers through on-site consulting sessions. The clients must have Software Assurance and the length of the session (one, three, five, ten or fifteen) depends on the agreement. So if you have Software Assurance please speak to your Microsoft representative and make the most of this opportunity.

Microsoft have also released this PDF on Risk and Health Assessment for MOSS Server by Microsoft as part of their Premium Support package. This again is probably to combat those environments that just aren’t set up correctly, for example hitting 100% CPU with 5 users or Maxing out on RAM.

The recent success of the Best Practices Conference in the US last month also pays testament on the awareness being raised within the Community. I have also noticed that plenty of training companies out there are also offering specific SharePoint Planning and Governance courses such as Ted Pattison , Set Focus, Mark Schneider (please add more in comments below).

The next part in the series will talk more in detail about the tools out there and how to leverage them.

Until next time,

Jeremy Thake

http://wss.made4the.net/ | http://www.readify.net/

This the second post of a six part series on Leveraging the SharePoint Platform. In the first post I introduced at a high level the Capabilities, the Editions, the Infrastructure and the API of the SharePoint Platform. In this post I will give my own opinion on what capabilities to start with and what ones to use Open Source/Partner Solutions with or to wait for SharePoint 2009.

I’d like to point out up front that this is my own opinions on what capabilities to start with. All organizations may start with a particular Solution in mind which has got them the budget to go ahead and implement what they require using the SharePoint Platform. These recommendations demonstrate the maturity of the Capabilities of the Platform and it’s complexity/immaturity in others.

In terms of leveraging Open Source and Partner Solutions on top of SharePoint Platform, I’d also like to point out that this series is by no means going to be a full listing of available options. When I stated ‘best of breed’ solutions in my previous post, I wasn’t intending to include all of them. The Solutions that I listed are the ones in my mind that are getting exposure in the 300+ blog feeds that I read every week as well as in case studies and the local Australian marketplace.

OK, so now that I’ve covered my bases on those points, lets get started I guess. As I discussed in the previous post Microsoft try and make SharePoint out to be everything to everyone. Reading through their six Capability areas it pretty much covers off most things you’d want to implement in your business. What Microsoft don’t really tell you is what is there “out of the box” with a little configuration, and what takes a degree of effort, to fulfil your needs. This extra effort can involve considerable planning utilizing the OOTB technology or having to expand on top of what is there with custom development involving specialists resources.

As I have quoted in many user group presentations and client meetings…SharePoint is not best of breed in a lot of the areas it markets itself in and only really ‘ticks the box’ in terms of functionality in some, the big advantage is that it is a unified Platform. The unified Platform argument doesn’t really stand up for itself as well as it used to though when you think of Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter, Blogger and other consumer platforms that happily coexist and also with the large Enterprise push on Service Orientated Architecture.

I will try and elaborate and provide sources of information by breaking up the capabilities and their sub areas with reference to various case studies and articles. As with most organizations that invest in a technology they wish to see results and fast…so as well as highlighting the strengths of the platform I will also highlight the ‘Quick Wins’ of each capability area to further point your rollouts towards a high ‘SharePoint Adoption’ with visible Return on Investment.

I’ve also added some star ratings in the Quick Wins to show what I would say are the easiest things for an Organization to plan and configure based on no experience in SharePoint with someone who can follow instructions. 1 star is easy and 5 stars is most complex and really needs someone with SharePoint experience. In later parts in this series I will elaborate more on this, it basically gives you a more realistic view of what is something Business Users can do over what requires “SharePoint Ninjas”.

Collaboration and Social Computing

Quick Wins

Project Site

There’s no story more compelling than “eating you’re own dog food” so why not use SharePoint to plan and manage your SharePoint rollout? Obviously this does entail some prior planning to get the hardware and installing it somewhere. It doesn’t stop you having a small WSS 3.0 instance on a Windows Server 2003 machine with it’s own Db to start with and migrating it later. There are lots of advantages to this, the one that comes to mind the most for me is that it gets you and the team rolling out SharePoint as consumers to the platform rather than understanding the technology and never actually using it day to day. For instance, one thing that I realized very quickly is that OOTB SharePoint Calendar’s don’t aggregate in the web interface, but Outlook 2007 has a way to load up multiple calendars and overlay them.

Incoming E-mail

E-mail integration is a very powerful way of collecting information and can automate a lot of processes where a Admin Assistant would be taking received email and saving the attached files to a file share/document library. Once you have incoming email configured on your server at installation and set up delegation in Active Directory it’s once configuration step away from any list in SharePoint acting as a drop box for email.

• Incoming Emails

Surveys

As well as running the SharePoint rollout project within SharePoint, there are other technologies you can leverage early on to gain feedback. SharePoint Surveys for Quick Polls are extremely easy to setup and report on. I will point out here though that the rendering of these surveys are very very limited and please don’t think this will replace tools such as Survey Monkey with branched questions etc.

• A useful article on customizing views on Surveys

Famous 40 Templates

If someone can point me to a SharePoint blog anywhere that doesn’t have a post about the Famous 40 Templates I’ll buy them a beer! It’s pretty much where all “dabblers” start off. These templates are not only a good way to kick start a particular themed solution, but for developers are a great way to look under the hood and see how it’s all hooked together.

• Microsoft SharePoint Templates

Medium Term

People and Groups

The ability to have Groups within SharePoint containing Users (AD Users or AD Groups) and allowing End Users to manage them is a large jump. Management of Active Directory is a beast of it’s own and this is typically controlled by Operations…so why would this be any less scary? Unless you can have extremely clear guidelines on this it will turn ugly and will lead to a phenomena not far from Facebook “Friends”. How many of you just permanency add Facebook Users you see but never actually go back and look at their profiles etc. These people can see your entire profile, imagine that concept internally to an Owner of a Site that has Information there and has control of who can and can’t see it by adding Users and Groups at their disposal. I would recommend keeping Operations control over security and permissions of SharePoint based on AD groups and roles until the Information Architecture matures and stabilizes.

• Security Planning

Long Term

Presence

Presence is something that if you’re a early adopter of Unified Communications, this is a great Quick win, but more likely this will be something to further leverage the SharePoint Platform when your organization finally gets approval to roll out UC.

What to wait to mature

Wikis

The Wiki technology in SharePoint is one of the biggest features I would claim is a “tick in the box”. In comparison to most other Wiki platforms out there this is extremely week. The HTML editing and ability to insert pictures/objects into pages pushes people away to using other platforms or Microsoft tools such as OneNote. I would recommend either waiting for this to improve or looking at 3rd Party Products.

• Wiki

Blogs

This is another “tick in the box” for me, yes you can have multiple blogs and yes they’ll support RSS feeds like all SharePoint lists, but OOTB you cannot get RSS feeds for categorised posts and you can’t have more than one category per post.

• CodePlex CKS:Enhanced Blog Edition

Tagging + Rating

Pushing further on blog posts and multiple categories is the whole social space around tagging items. Take digg, diigo, de.li.cious as good examples of this technology at work. OOTB SharePoint doesn’t cater for this but fortunately the Open Source community at CodePlex have started to offer solutions.

• Tags
• CodePlex Rating

What to avoid early on

Wikis + Blogs

Not just from a limited functionality perspective, but also from a paradigm…these technologies are not something that will be easily adopted in an organisation. My suggestion would be to get people comfortable from the move away from File Shares and E-mails for storing Information before suggesting anything as “high-tech” as wikis and blogs.

Portals

Quick Wins

Intranet – Phase 1

It is important to set very tight scopes of work when creating your Intranet and not to try and produce the masterpiece in your first attempt. I would recommend starting with the usual: HR site as a like Employee Self Service Information pages; Corporate Affairs posting Organization news; and then a very basic site template with a homepage for each individual Business Unit where they can upload Static Documents, that have been approved externally to SharePoint, that may be used by the Organization e.g. Finance for Expense Claim forms etc.

Mobile workforce

This is a great quick win for any Organization with a mobile workforce. All the SharePoint interfaces will work on a mobile operating system, and especially so on Windows Mobile Platform (no surprise there). Admitted it isn’t the best interface in the world, but at least the information is out there for these devices to consume.

Document Aggregation Web Parts

Not for one minute am I saying that Document Aggregation Web Parts are the answer to your Document Management issues, but in the sense that you can use them to show views of multiple areas within the Intranet in one location will make findability that much easier.

3rd Party Web Parts

Most Organization will have a bucket full of systems and most major systems now have some sort of integration with SharePoint and they don’t currently, are racing away in the developer dungeons to get some. This again, is a great way of presenting information in a unified place without too much effort required.

Medium Term

Intranet – Phase 2

After the initial phase is ticking over nicely and you have Business Stakeholders in place for your specific areas (dependent on the taxonomy you go for), you can now start to increase the functionality available to them. I would start by allowing them to make requests for particular systems to be migrated underneath their areas such as Image Libraries, specific Custom Lists to store information usually stored statically in Excel spreadsheets etc.

MySites Phase 1

I think the general consensus is that most people out there now are comfortable with Facebook and the concepts behind having a profile. MySites give Users their own profile within SharePoint. I would start by giving all individuals in the Organization a MySite and limiting their Site Allowance to an agreed Mb allocation. They can then go in and utilize the area to update their profile information, groups and colleagues from here. Providing a simple Document Library will also give them an area to start to get comfortable with the process of working on documents within the SharePoint platform rather than within their specific area site visible by everyone.

• MySite Architecture
• Customising Look and Feel

Long Term

MySites Phase 2

Once Users are comfortable with editing their profile you can start opening up the functionality available to them to creating their own sub sites/workspaces and ability to create multiple pages. These sites can then be opened up and Users given control of who can see their sub sites/workspaces to allow them to collaboratively work together and take ownership of the areas.

Role Specific Sites

As with the Famous 40 Templates, there are some example Roles based templates available. These give you a great indication of the power of having Roles based views of Information. The reason I say these are long term solutions is that it takes a large understanding of your User base and Organization to come up with segments and views of Information that will be valuable and worth investing time to develop.

• Roles-Based Templates for SharePoint My Sites – Under the Hood

Extranet Portals

Not for the feint hearted because of all the dependencies on Firewalls, HTTPs, Certificates etc., but can be extremely beneficial to expose Information that is stored internally to the Organization to external parties. There is serious consideration needed here on how this is implemented as there are so many scenarios.

What to wait to mature

“Colleagues and Membership”

This to me is another “tick in the box” area of SharePoint where they wanted to get something similar to LinkedIn and Facebook but just didn’t quite get anywhere near it. I would definitely hold off for SharePoint vNext because I’m sure this will be pushed harder with stronger functionality about the connections with colleagues and also how groups communicate with each other in Team Sites. For now, it gives the ability to add yourself to a group and link to colleagues for everyone else to see.

What to avoid early on

“Biting off more than you can chew”

Global domination within SharePoint is only recommended to the fully trained SharePoint Ninja’s of the World. My only advice here is to start small and tackle one problem at a time rather than pitching SharePoint as the answer to every problem in your organisation. Small goals will lead to small rewards that are tangible and occur quickly, large goals may take years and with little visibility of results until they are fully implemented.

Enterprise Search

Quick Wins

People Search Phase I

By far the easiest win out there is the People Search when you already have Active Directory in place. This can replace your Company Phone list. It is great for finding people by location, department, role or title. One warning though is that it will highlight issues with AD information that may not have surfaced before to End Users!

• Customise People Search Results

Federated Search

SharePoint’s ability to crawl content sources and provide a federated search across all of them is another powerful way of bringing all the Organizations Information together. This information can be web sites (existing Intranets/Internets, custom systems, public Internet sites) and file stores.

Medium Term

Search Results

SharePoint search can also allow you to customize how the search is rendered. This is great if you want to display more properties in your results without the Users having to click into the actual found item to see information on it.

Tailored Searches

Start to provide some tailored Advanced Searches as custom Web Part forms to users that can find those Minutes for a Sales Meeting last month where “Fred” attended. There is a lot of power in presenting different ways of discovering Information in SharePoint.

Long Term

BDC Search

Expose information from external sources via the linked in search capabilities of BDC. It allows Users to be able to get at information that would normally mean logging into another system with another set of credentials. It also means that the  Organization doesn’t have to roll out the thick-click application to all Users machines if there is enough Information exposed via the SharePoint web interface.

What to wait to mature

Faceted Searches

This is an area that crept in during the SP1 upgrade and started life as a sub project on CodePlex and wrapped up into the update. I would suggest not pitching this as the killer app within SharePoint just yet, it’s got some great features that will no doubt continue to mature with the passion behind who’s developing it in future releases.

What to avoid early on

Information Overload

One thing that I’ve noticed on various implementations so far is that often people Index too much information. You may be saying “there’s no such thing”…but there is. Users will use very open ended searches, like they do in Google, and find too much Information. As an Organization you have to be responsible for training Users on finding Information via Advanced Searches and Scoped Searches. There is a lot of great syntax you can add to trim down your results without a advanced search screen. Try and work out some key scenarios of what Users will want to search for.

• Box Fox is in the middle of a great set of web casts on Findability which tries to tackle this.

Enterprise Content Management

Quick Wins

Document Management Phase 1

With a simple Site created you get a Document Library that you can upload Documents to. To familiarize your Users I would recommend starting off with something this simple without complicating the issue with too much with asking for MetaData. Get the Users comfortable with uploading and editing Documents in a web interface rather than a File Share. Organisations often assume that Users will pick all this up quickly but this is not always the case.

WCMS Phase 1

The ability to create an Intranet/Portal and provision various inter-related sub sites comes hand in hand with managing the Content on the pages of these sites. The Web Content Management System functionality migrated from MCMS 2003 have taken full advantage of the Master Page/Page Layout architecture of ASP.NET 2.0 as discussed in Part 1. The ability for Users to use the Page Editing Toolbar to edit pages in designated Web Part Zones can let them go for Gold adding Content. The Users can be as creative as they like by using a Rich Text Editor Control in a Editable Content Area on a Page Layout or they can add a variety of other Web Parts from the Gallery. I would recommend training Users on the basic of Page Editing and showing them how to utilize the basic Web Parts and Editable Content Areas of Page Layouts. Unfortunately there is no easy way to control what Roles of Users can see what Web Parts in the Gallery, it’s all or nothing. I would also limit the Users in Page Creation here and hold this control at Operational level to let them make the decision of whether it’s a page, sub site or existing item etc.

One thing that people do take for granted is the fact that you can integrate WCMS functionality with DMS functionality which is rare in most other competing products such as Documentum and Opentext. This is a great advantage to end Users as the same system training can cover both applications. It almost fuse them as one which is a lot easier for Users because other systems seem frustrating to them with such clear separation where they want to link the two.

• SharePoint WCM
• Andrew Connell’s blog is the best place to start for WCM

Medium Term

WCMS Phase 2

Once the Users are comfortable with WCMS basic functionality you can start opening up the Page Layouts to give them more options. Developing customized Web Parts for displaying videos and flash can give Users a more interactive experience. You will find that giving the Users specific training in further Web Parts available to them will empower them to develop more complex Content Pages…these Web Parts have always been available to them but the majority of Users won’t be comfortable “playing” until they’re shown.

Document Management Phase 2

SharePoint has extremely powerful integration with the Microsoft Office 2007 product line. For instance, when opening a word document, the metadata stored for the Document in the SharePoint List is integrated in the same window, rather having a separate web or windows interface for filling it out. Checking in and checking out documents and other workflow tasks can also be done without reaching back to the web interface.  With this integration it can make moving towards storing Metadata for documents as well as introducing Workflows a slightly smaller step. Again, phasing metadata and workflow separately can also help the learning curve.

Long Term

Information Rights Management

This is definitely something you just don’t turn on. It needs some planning, ownership and control around it. This is something that really should only apply where the functionality is required and lends itself to Records Management which I discuss next.

What to wait to mature

Records Management

It is widely documented and I agree that Records Management was another “tick in the box” for SharePoint to get the Enterprise Content Management capability in play. With no OOTB functionality for Transmittals and Compound Documents you will find most Records Managers not wanting to touch SharePoint with a barge poll. There has been some work to get DoD certification, but this has not been publicly released.

• Records Management Guide for MOSS 2007

Document Imaging

OOTB SharePoint does not have any components that handle Document Imaging. There are plenty of Products out there on the market that can handle SharePoint Document Libraries being the repository for the scanned images and processing them. I think this is an area that Microsoft will want to get into though at some stage.

Multi-Lingual Web Sites

Multinational organizations wanting a full WCMS platform often require Multi-Lingual sites and SharePoint has not got a fully versed answer for this with its Variations functionality in my mind. This functionality will mature in time and come to be more competitive to other stronger WCM products out there.

What to avoid early on

Accessible Web Sites

There are plenty of public Internet web sites out there on the SharePoint Platform but a lot of them have accessibility problems and if they don’t are certainly not using the OOTB JavaScript, Web Parts, Master Pages and Page Layouts provided. There is considerable work involved in getting an accessible web site out of SharePoint currently.

• SharePoint Accessibility

High Load Web Sites

As stated above, there are plenty of public Internet web sites out there now and a lot of them have sub second response times. There is significant work involved in getting these rendering times down this low and mean not using a lot of the OOTB technology. There are various Caching approaches in the Platform that can aide here, but this will only take you so far.

Large File Document Repositories

I remember when the SharePoint 2007 was released and the Database Administrators (DBA’s) of the World were up in arms over the proposal of storing everything in a SQL Database. BLOBS have always been a contentious issue between Developers and DBA’s and this didn’t help the matter. There are plenty of White Papers out there on this, but it really needs considerable planning and effort to ensure that performance of 10Mb+ documents are close to User expectations. With the abilities of SharePoint Search, it is not necessary to store ALL your information in SharePoint and this is something definitely worth bearing this in mind.

• SharePoint and Large Files
• Is the file server dead?
• Configuring Large File Support

Business Process and Forms

Quick Wins

Data Capture with Simple Web Forms

InfoPath is a great tool for getting Developers to build Data Capture Forms quickly. Organization tend to start with simple forms such as: Annual Leave Forms, Time Sheets and Safety Reports. With InfoPath Forms Services it allows these forms to be hosted as a web page rather than being reliant on InfoPath Client. This stops the reliance of a roll out of InfoPath to occur. One thing to bear in mind is you don’t necessarily have to keep the submitted InfoPath form xml in a Form Library, instead you can push data directly into SharePoint List or external data system via web services etc. So the InfoPath Form is simply a dumb entry screen that submits the information collected in a validated way.

• InfoPath Development

Medium Term

Workflow based forms

Once you’re comfortable with capturing information using InfoPath forms you can take the next step into modeling your Business Processes using workflow using SharePoint Designer. This allows you to control the statuses of a form submission such as the Annual Leave form from the Employee to the Line Manager, then to Payroll. The trick here is to keep these processes simple and not to overcook them! Utilizing the creation of tasks in task lists can also prevent the reliance on workflow emails as the only way for people to track what responsibilities they have in the process.

• InfoPath Workflow

Long Term

Empowering Users to Create Forms

With InfoPath comfortably in the Organisation and Users aware of where it can be powerful you can start empowering Users to generating their own InfoPath Forms for their Business Areas.

Visual Studio Workflows

Visual Studio workflows are basically .NET 3.5 Workflow Foundation technology and are a little more involved than SharePoint Designer workflows, requiring .NET Development experience. This allows more controlled deployments of workflows and the ability to extend process steps to do such things as call off to web services or store things in databases that aren’t available with the out of the box SharePoint Designer Workflow Activities.

• SharePoint Workflow

What to wait to mature

Methodology for version management of forms

As mentioned above, .NET 3.5 Workflow Foundation technology is at the core of workflows and can be considerably scary when it comes to version management. For instance, imagine you have 50 annual leave forms submitted and the business decide to add another approval step…does this mean that all existing instances of the workflow need to have this step or just new ones? These kinds of decisions take some “tweaking” when you deploy the package and are things not often thought about until they occur. Some prior planning and waiting for some best practices to come out around this space will assist in the future.

SharePoint Designer Custom Workflows

A drawback with the power of allowing Users to create their own workflows in SharePoint Designer is that they’re not portable and are attached to an individual Form Library List for an individual Site Collection. So designing these workflows in one environment and deploying to another is not possible. This doesn’t fit very well with Enterprise rollouts where testing is required, especially when modifying workflows that are in Production!

• Porting a SharePoint Designer (SPD) Workflow to Visual Studio.Net – Part 1

What to avoid early on

Complex Processes & Large Forms

One thing to bear in mind is that there are limitations of what you can do in InfoPath, simple forms are easy to put together…but more complex forms aren’t! There is certain functionality that doesn’t work when hosted as web services. Also, large scale InfoPath forms can have rendering performance issues and you may want to consider breaking down the data capture over a number of forms rather than one large one. These kind of things take some experience and more than likely some bad experience.

• InfoPath Forms vs. ASPX Pages in SharePoint Designer

Transactional Processes

SharePoint does not have built in support for Transactional processing as a Platform. It is common for various Business Processes to require this especially in Commerce type Systems. It is recommended to leverage a Platform purposely built for this, such as Commerce Server 2007 and simply use SharePoint as a presentation layer which interfaces to trigger such external processes.

• Microsoft have published a White Paper on Configuring and Integrating MOSS 2007 and Commerce Server 2007

High load business Systems

As discussed in the first part of this series, SharePoint can scale out onto multiple servers to allow specific Roles to be isolated and to spread the load of web requests to Sites. Microsoft is building more and more information around this area, but it is recommended that you speak to a Microsoft Partner with experience in this area to ensure that you get the full potential out of your SharePoint Farm.

• Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices and Working with Large Lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Joel Oleson has some great articles around this space.

Business Intelligence

Quick Wins

Excel Services

Have you ever worked somewhere where Excel spreadsheets seem to store the most important Information? Have you ever found they get sent round in e-mails and multiple versions start cropping up and suddenly it’s in a mess? Excel services allows you to web-enable Excel using Excel services. This is an extremely powerful tool and can often simplify who actually needs the ability to change formulas etc in the spreadsheets and who is just a consumer to them. Simple Web Parts can be added to Pages that point to spreadsheets hosted in Document Libraries.  This is a very quick and easy way of getting those Dashboards that all Sales people are talking about these days. Excel services is new in 2007, so expect a host of new features in vNext and therefore expect limitations in how far you can push current functionality.

Filter Web Parts

Filters can be placed on Pages where the Excel services Web Parts are and this will allow End Users to dynamically add filters to the Information be reported on within the spreadsheets hosted in SharePoint.

Medium Term

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Just because the SharePoint Platform can handle generating lots of KPI dashboards, doesn’t mean you should start throwing them together. This needs a true expert in the area of Business Intelligence to ensure that the data is accurate and doesn’t mislead people with incorrect wording. The last thing you want is for your CEO to start quoting how wonderful sales are going, to find out later that the dashboards were taking into account various variables because implementing this was too complicated.

Long Term

BDC Data Web Parts

The Business Data Catalogue not only has hooks into the Search capabilities of SharePoint, but also has functionality for CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) type operations with external mapped sources such as ODBC databases. It allows you to display views of data and empowers the User to be able to operate on this data within the SharePoint interface. This means that rather than developing a ASP.NET/Win Forms custom interface with Business Layer and Data Layer type approach, you can leverage the BDC repeatedly for each data source.

• Sahil Malik has a great introduction to BDC

What to wait to mature

Business Data Catalogue

The concept behind BDC is great, unfortunately it is a lot of “heavy lifting” to get the XML up and going for this. Fortunately there are some 3rd Party products out there to help you in this space. I’m sure that Microsoft are busy working in the background to make this easier to work with.

• BDC Metaman has some great articles as well as a strong Product in this space.

What to avoid early on

BDC – Large/Multiple Repositories

When looking at BDC to target multi large repositories of Information and aggregate this within the Search or connecting to it using the Data Web Parts you will have to be cautious. I would advice starting off with some smaller scoped repositories before trying to consume/manage Information from large back-end sources. It is worth bearing in mind that BDC was designed for “Knowledge workers” and not full developers and therefore is not designed to scale or handle complex situations.

• Further Information on a more complex and scalable alternative to BDC is blogged about here.

Platform Services

Quick Wins

Custom Lists

Custom Lists have a lot of functionality that can often enforce structured content for data capture. These features are available in all Editions of SharePoint and can act as a great quick win within an organization. Think of how many “lists” are currently stored in unstructured forms, Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. This can be replaced by SharePoint Lists with Content Types…for securer, versioned, permission based, workflow driven, single source of truth of Information.

Medium Term

Site Provisioning

Many a Developer has spent nights writing code that SharePoint does out of the box to build team sites. Large Enterprise Software houses have also tried to create these, but none are quite as extensible as SharePoint and also don’t leverage the powers of ASP.NET to the level that SharePoint does. This in itself can be a huge advantage to leveraging SharePoint for this type of functionality.

What to wait to mature

Security and Permissions

As discussed previously, the security model can easily get out of hand in SharePoint and one thing you’ll find happening quickly in your Service Desk is support calls raising issues about access to Sites etc. The OOTB tools for discovering permissions for a particular User based on their SharePoint Group Memberships and Permissions applied to these as well as Active Directory Groups is extremely limited. Fingers are crossed that this will be adjusted in vNext, but just be aware of the issues around this and try and keep to a very strict basic security model to save these pressures.

• There are some great tools to help in this space such as Barracuda Tools and Universal SharePoint Manager.

What to avoid early on

Heavy Customization of Master Pages / Page Layouts

There is plenty of Information out there on how to customize the SharePoint look and feel. I would recommend when you start not worrying too much about making it “not look like SharePoint” internally within the Organisation. The main reasons for this is that a lot of the End User training for SharePoint available on the Internet will be easily to relate if the interface is similar to the screen shots in the material they are reading.

• There is no better place to start than Heather Solomon’s blog on SharePoint Design

Until Next Time…

Ben Bradley’s post on ‘What is YOUR Firm’s SharePoint Balance?‘ touched on some great issues around what I would call ‘SharePoint Adoption’ and the balance of ‘SharePoint Power’ between the ‘End Users’ and ‘Administrators’ of the system that is running on top of the SharePoint Platform. In Part 3 I will be explaining in more detail the array of ‘SharePoint Roles’ and in Part 4, I will explain the different ‘SharePoint Powers’ that can be given to these Roles.

http://wss.made4the.net http://www.readify.net

No business is immune from this ‘SharePoint Paradox’. Understanding and avoiding it is an essential part of SharePoint success.

SharePoint Popularity

Did you know that SharePoint 2007 is Microsoft’s most popular product ever, having achieved the $1billion 100 million sales mark faster than any other product in Microsoft history? A position achieved with none of the marketing hype that accompanies the likes of Office or Windows!

The popularity of SharePoint is built on a number of characteristics, including:

• it has a wealth of easy-to-use, web-based collaboration tools and templates that are analogous to Outlook and so receive ready uptake, while providing much more functionality
• it is easily extensible and customizable to fit your business
• only limited IT involvement is needed
• it is a real 80-20 tool, almost 80% of common business tasks can be achieved OOTB (out of the box)
• it integrates seamlessly with Active Directory, and with a bit more effort to your LOB applications, providing immediate secure use enterprise-wide
• it can scale easily

SharePoint truly is a ‘wonder tool’ of the information age.

It can takes less than 30 minutes to install SharePoint, create a website for collaboration, and start enjoying the benefits of collaborative resources such as task lists, calendars, versioned document libraries,  workflows, CMS publishing.

Where’s The Problem?

So where’s the problem?

The paradox is that SharePoint ‘s inherent ease-of-use is its own worst enemy. Rapid, organic, unstructured SharePoint growth leads to business disaster.

This pic shows the APAC SharePoint conference with eight Microsoft team members on stage including Mike Fitzmaurice, Joel Oleson and Angus Logan. SharePoint while initially appearing easy and straight forward is a sophisticated and complex technology requiring a depth of expertise

Consider the following post-installation problem scenarios based of real life experience:

• § SharePoint websites can be setup by a non-IT user in 5 minutes without requiring any pre-qualification or adherence to business mission or information architecture. Hundreds of non-business-aligned, duplicate and redundant sites tend to proliferate. The overhead in rationalizing is substantial
• § Document libraries are created by default and are easy to populate. Nomenclature and meta data standards are not automatically applied, and bad habits associated with existing file shares are often transported into the document libraries. Document search and manageability, precisely the issues meant to be improved, become bigger
• § The SharePoint install is so easy that the subsequent expertise needed to effectively configure and govern SharePoint within the business is often dramatically underestimated until it is too late
• § Once installed, the ongoing management of SharePoint can escape the rigors of IT because of its ready take-up and hand-over to the business

What To Do?

Without effective and specialized governance, SharePoint will only replicate your business’ existing problems at a faster rate and on a larger scale than you thought possible!

You need a governance plan enacted in your business by an appropriately empowered steering committee.

This SharePoint Steering Committee should have enough seniority to ensure two-way business alignment, ie that SharePoint is aligned with the existing business governance plan and associated initiatives like the information architecture; and that the business plan can be updated to incorporate benefits derived from SharePoint.

The ubiquitous and innocuous File Share. To some it may seem strange that just loading hundreds or thousands of documents from their existing file-shares into a SharePoint document library doesn’t solve the problem of not being able to find things!

This sounds pretty straight forward. Just apply a SharePoint governance plan and all will be okay.

There are literally thousands of pages of information available on SharePoint governance. The Microsoft SharePoint Governance Plan and Check Listare a good place to start. An Internet search will return tomes of material on governance with some documents in the realm of 600+ pages in length!

Why Problems?

Why are problems still encountered?

The answer to this is two-fold.

First, with this seeming wealth of governance related material available, none is definitive, and most discusses what governance should do, not how to do it!

For example, we discussed above that SharePoint should be aligned to the business governance plan and information architecture. But how do you do that?

Similarly, the Microsoft Governance Plan identifies that up to 30 roles can be used to effectively govern SharePoint, but which business has the resource to cover all those roles or can encumber existing staff with that level of extra responsibility? Which roles are essential and what actions should they cover?

Second, for most Microsoft Partners, SharePoint is just one product in their already overloaded product set.  Consider the plight of the poor Microsoft Partner with SharePoint 2007, Office 2007, Windows 2008, SQL 2008 and VS2008 all released little more than 12 months apart. Which Partner let alone business has the ability to skill-up on that range of technology? ‘Heroes’ or not!

Fewer organizations have a history with SharePoint beyond the current version, and almost none can take a ‘holistic’ view i.e. discuss a SharePoint solution in the context of the entirety of its features set.

Governance plans talk a lot about ‘What To Do’ but not ‘How To Do It’. You need an extensive history with SharePoint, all its incarnations ie portal, DMS, CMS, BI, horizontal and vertical platform application, experience in its application to various business issues, strengths and weaknesses, to be able to best plan its use in the organization.SharePoint Practice Governance, based on an extensive experience of this kind of ‘best practice’ – a definitive body of knowledge- allows for the proactive rather than reactive planning of the use of SharePoint in your organization. If you don’t use deeply experienced SharePoint resources with access to this Practice Governance you are faced with trying to ‘learn on the job’ and with SharePoint’s tendency towards rapid organic growth, if you don’t get it right from the start problems will overwhelm the resources available to manage SharePoint..

It is only from experiencing SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses across its diverse range of functionality, from portal, to BI, to DMS, to CMS, forms, from generic horizontal platform to adapted vertical solution, and how it performs across diverse business applications, that you can begin to understand and identify SharePoint best practice and effective governance practices.

SharePoint Practice = Best Practice

In short, you need a lot of ‘SharePoint practice’ to be able to provide ‘SharePoint best practice’.

Most businesses can not afford to implement systems, let alone a widespread platform like SharePoint, on a trial and error basis trying to work out the best way to do things ‘on the job’ (though some Partners often try to get away with having their staff learn that way!)

So in conclusion as you work through your SharePoint implementation and ongoing management, if it isn’t producing the business advantage and results you expect, find a partner who has a SharePoint specialistion.

Draw on their rich best practice to source and develop your governance plan, stop the SharePoint paradox, and get the SharePoint results and business success you want.

In following articles I will explore Practice Governance and the best practice it is based upon in more detail.

Till next time – Julian

The Issue of Balance

Neff’s not talking about the need for SharePoint training; he’s talking about the need for SharePoint balance, specifically the balance between empowering small groups to act spontaneously and injecting some planning to create solutions with value beyond simple collaboration  This balance is always a prime consideration for group-oriented resources, but particularly acute with SharePoint since its potential reach across the enterprise is so vast and its potential integration is so deep.  Less obvious is how this issue of balance highlights larger issues of how the company deploys and manages technology for efficiency and competitive advantage.

Never have business users been more able to reorganize the basic building blocks of their work as meaningfully as they can with SharePoint. Never has IT been more solidly in an enabling role than they can by accelerating that discovery process, pointing out common pitfalls, and awakening users to advanced features.  User experimentation alone rarely produces robust, scalable solutions that can be put into production; centralized control alone frequently removes too much flexibility; reliable solutions require iterative loops of both perspectives.  SharePoint is hard-wired for exactly this meeting of minds.

Establishing (or re-establishing) productive balance is steadily rising on management’s priority list even now.   On one hand is the tremendous interest shown by IT and many work teams for ever broader and deeper workspaces, fueling SharePoint’s white-hot growth.   On the other hand are the leftover consequences that remain from SharePoint’s almost accidental arrival in many companies, complicating the way forward for both technologists and users, and affecting the speed with which enterprises can gain the full productivity enhancement SharePoint offers.

Because SharePoint entered many enterprises as a free component with Windows Server 2003 R2, many companies made SharePoint available to users as a toolset with minimal rules and recommendations for what it could do  and how to use it.  IT didn’t have to devote budget to its purchase, didn’t have to develop a business case to use it, didn’t require specially trained custodians, its future on the infrastructure roadmap was highly uncertain then, and, with SharePoint’s strong ties to Microsoft Office, the conservative approach was to make it available as a user tool for the power users who would explore it.

Discovery-ware No Longer

Fast-forward to today, where SharePoint is solidly on its way to being a cornerstone of the infrastructure roadmap, many more functions, features, and points of integration exist, and an entire cottage industry has grown up to provide the third-party tools, services, and web parts that extend the base functionality for specific business uses.  All of this experience using SharePoint based solutions to unlock unprecedented productivity is giving Microsoft a much clearer product roadmap of the way forward  And, it is giving IT departments new methods to empower users.

The most full-featured version to date is MOSS 2007, which, unlike the original version, does require budget, IT management, and planning to get the greatest value from its many licensing commitments.

In short, SharePoint has baggage.  Reintroducing users to the productivity value from the platform-that-the-free-toolset-has-evolved-into might best be organized as a mini-project in itself.   The place to begin is with those users who have some awareness of SharePoint.  In broad-brush terms, they tend to fall into three categories, each needing a slightly tailored view of the way forward.

1) “Oh No, Not SharePoint!”

Many users first came across SharePoint in the “collaboration tools” section of their intranet. The pages looked like a cross between MS Office and a basic web page, so many users experimented with a document library, or sharing a team calendar, or a threaded discussion.

“A lot of users assumed SharePoint was one of those Microsoft applications that would help you figure out how to use it,” observes James Beck, Co-Founder of Synergy Corporate Technologies (http://www.synergyonline.com), “but they quickly found that was not the case.”

There wasn’t much in the way of guidance, or recommended practices, or administrative rules, so many workspaces acquired confusing file hierarchies, required ever more manual manipulation to stay even marginally useful, ever more rigid rules, frequent re-creations to start over. Then there was the issue of sub-sites, many of which contained some of the same resources.  Result – frustration at the chaos, declining use, and an attitude of SharePoint being little more than a glorified file server.

“We encountered it,” says Neff, “we proposed a portal for the analytics team at a major client – when they learned we were proposing SharePoint, they nearly canceled the project.  SharePoint had simply been pushed out to them in the past, had seen some small use, and then became a dumping ground.  The business decision-maker considered it an organizational disaster because of the confusion that resulted.”

“In the early days, the user frustration that sometimes resulted from early-adopter departments experimenting with SharePoint was really the flip-side of the hunger for features and functions that were simply not available out-of-the-box.  The market for third-party web parts began there, with strong demand for parts to streamline a workflow, or simplify user process, observes Wes Bryan, Sr. Product Manager of Bamboo Solutions (www.bamboosolutions.com).   Bamboo provides a suite of Web Parts, Solution Accelerators and customized SharePoint products for project management, social networking, business intelligence, portal administration and content management.

The Way Forward – Re-engaging such departments is widely thought to be worth the effort, and not just for the department productivity improvements that are at stake.

“At some point, and not too far away, being adept at interacting with SharePoint workspaces will be as necessary to an individual user’s skill-set as knowing how to use MS Office,” claims  Ross Freedman of RightPoint Consulting (http://rightpointconsulting.com).  ”SharePoint is going to be the glue that holds so many other things together.”

Chief among tactics for getting through to hold-out departments are:

• Keep the technology and the business separate in the discussion – probe for chronic business problems the department confronts and demonstrate ways of overcoming them using SharePoint.
• Stress the procedural differences between using SharePoint now vs. using SharePoint originally – successful implementations don’t start with experimental tactics now, they start with business goals, and SharePoint now is robust enough to deliver.
• Take department management on an internal tour of successful team sites used elsewhere in the company and illustrate ease of administration. Highlight tools, guidelines, templates, web parts that IT has provided since initial rollout that specifically deliver user productivity improvements over current methods and previous attempts.
• Reassure that SharePoint now occupies a more central place in IT infrastructure management and planning than originally and outline IT’s ongoing role for scaling SharePoint and connecting it to corporate data and LOB applications.
• As illustration of that point, identify any common resources that IT provides for the company that were developed in SharePoint. Especially if the user interface doesn’t resemble out-of-the-box SharePoint.
• If nothing of the sort exists, consider converting some basic files from the shared server to SharePoint – e.g. staff directory in an Excel file; group calendar; group contacts; project FAQ’s; IT trouble tickets; HR info
• Find the early-adopter in the group and cultivate a liaison role
• Check in regularly if they try SharePoint again to seed productive habits and help them expand the functions well before frustration sets in again.
• Use Group Policy to set the internal home page to the home page of the company’s SharePoint site, making certain that HR/internal communications keeps the information updated regularly.

2) “We’ve Gone About As Far As We Can Go“

Some SharePoint user groups, frequently propelled by an early-adopter team member, explored the toolset deeply enough to become productive with it, but are now in a sort of enforced holding pattern. They are using some basic SharePoint features, are aware of other functions that could be provided, but require IT resources to enable them.

“We find that about 50% of our customers have had some experience with SharePoint, most of it is very rudimentary.  They built some basic workspaces, but they’re not full-featured enough to address the full business need,” comments Freedman, of RightPoint.  “A significant number of the calls we get is from companies just waking up to the fact that they need professional help to take things farther.”

“SharePoint right out of the box is missing some things that a lot of business users really need,” comments Beck. “Too many users assume that SharePoint is self-contained and it isn’t.  The SharePoint they first experience should be thought of as a 1.0 version.  Other parts and services are needed to turn it into a solution.”

“We used to get calls from IT groups who had hit a snag in production and needed help working around a shortcoming or finding a more robust way to bring legacy data into a SharePoint  project site,” notes Bamboo’s Bryan. “Now the bulk of the calls we get tend to occur higher in the process, where plans are being laid.  Some of these result in custom web parts, or solution accelerator bundles. It’s a much more disciplined process aiming at bigger goals.”

The Way Forward – Provided you can get to these work groups before frustration weakens the productive habits that SharePoint has helped form, these groups are in the ultimate “teachable moment” – they have had some direct experience, have accomplished at least some productive routines via SharePoint, and can see other benefits just out of reach.

Highest-value issues to tackle with such groups include:

• Meet with the work teams making these requests and identify the “next-stage” activities they were unable to complete, then walk them through these if their workspace currently supports it. If not, begin a priority list and rank each requested function as to whether it can be provided by: a) configuration; b) purchased web parts/modules/templates; c) broader/deeper integration; d) .NET development
• Push these groups to create a roadmap for how their SharePoint workspaces should evolve – what functions are most needed, what reporting of KPI’s, legacy system access that would improve productivity. This is functionally the same as a departmental vision for how work can best get done and can serve as a way of organizing the dialog between the business group and IT.
• Establish the boundary line between the department’s site admin and IT’s overall SharePoint admin
• Identify quantifiable metrics for reporting program and/or department ROI to highlight the value of SharePoint-managed workflows.
• Pay special attention to department resources such as Excel spreadsheets and Access databases and offer to convert those for use via SharePoint. These are some of the highest-productivity uses of SharePoint features and may help with corporate compliance initiatives.

3) “We’ve Got HOW MANY SharePoint Sites?!”

If a third distinct cluster of users actually exists in any numbers in an enterprise, the SharePoint phenomenon can be said to have come full-circle, because these are the users propelling the unbridled growth of SharePoint workspaces in many companies. IT management reports being shocked when they run tools to determine how many SharePoint sites exist, and they get back results that are orders of magnitude higher than they imagined…e.g. expecting 40/finding 1000; expecting 200/finding 4000; expecting a few hundred/finding 15,000.

“It can happen anywhere along the spectrum,” says Ross Freedman, “big companies and small ones, you never know when the buzz is going to take hold. We were at a client the other day who was certain they had one SharePoint workspace because they had just posted a demo site of the SharePoint tools.  A brief audit uncovered nine SharePoint workspaces and several more being worked on.  IT freaked at the speed at which users were putting up their own sites and how few basic controls there were for managing any of this.”

Bamboo’s Wes Bryan continues: “We quickly learned that some of the most valuable webparts we could provide were those that simplified administration and oversight, not just for the business users, but for the IT administrators who were facing a proliferation of SharePoint workspaces. ”

The temptation is to believe that these rogue islands of collaboration and information-sharing are thriving oases of tight, coordinated activity and high team value…user temperament finding just the right tool for operating across company silos.

James Beck isn’t buying it.

“I’ll bet money that companies who discover all these rogue SharePoint sites are finding mostly failed experiments,” he asserts. “Expectations tend to be all over the place, assumptions guiding activity more than understanding, resulting in waning activity over time as they keep having to branch out to accomplish some task that SharePoint doesn’t yet accommodate.”

Tucked away among the legions of such SharePoint sites, there are probably a handful of even worse outcomes, according to Neff, workspaces that users have come to depend on.

“We’ve seen some SharePoint sites go the way all user-enabled tech goes sometimes, which is straight from experiment to production.  Just look at Excel.  SharePoint is more susceptible to this than many other technologies because it has so many more pieces which appear to be so much more accessible.  Imagine what would happen if database tools were just as user-inviting and made openly available?  Luckily, you have to be pretty technical to set up a database whereas you don’t with SharePoint.”

The Way Forward – Those who work with SharePoint most see the current “SharePoint sprawl” as nothing less than the coastline of IT’s empowerment role AND its governance role as SharePoint matures.

“This is exactly why we don’t recommend that companies start with WSS, see if it resonates with users, then apply the lessons learned to a business case for MOSS,” offers Synergy’s James Beck. “The very thing most needed to ensure successful implementation is the very thing missing from such an approach – integration into the broader IT infrastructure – security, scalable capacity, dedicated support, Active Directory, backup, even database structure. If SharePoint really takes off, IT is in major reactive mode to gather all this up, develop a strategy and assign a budget.”

“Business goals have to guide the process,” asserts Bamboo’s Bryan. “Every technology has always stressed the importance of regular dialog between the business user and IT. But with SharePoint the absence of such a dialog is very obvious – it results in sprawl or users doing highly unsound things with sensitive data, or elaborate workarounds long after the third-party providers have solved the root problem with new web parts.”

“Unless the company has made a real conscious commitment to SharePoint at a strategic level, about all the governance we see is occasionally at the user department level,” adds Aquent’s Neff. “The life-of-its-own implementations that are really changing the ways departments work invariably comes from those departments whose teams and management have decided what they will use it for and how they will keep it organized.  But that hardly answers the larger issues of security and conformity to the company’s compliance policies. The issue is not one of control; it is one of ‘mutual empowerment’ for the creation of high-value solutions.”

Some specific steps being taken by many companies to get their arms around the SharePoint “phenomenon” include:

• Putting in a review and approval process to be followed by anyone wishing to create a new SharePoint workspace, to keep the sprawl from getting worse in the short term.

“We helped one client put a small server farm in place strictly for SharePoint,” explains RightPoint’s Ross Freedman, ” along with a simple request process for user groups to request server space for putting up new workspaces.  Not only did this put some structure around what had been an ad-hoc process, but it reinforced with every new site that SharePoint done well was a deep collaboration between users and IT.  The process didn’t communicate control nearly as much as thoughtful resource allocation and enablement.”

• Find out just what the current situation is. The emergence of third-party tools has reduced the effort required to scan the environment to discover how many SharePoint exist, what they’re running on, and whether they are team or individual sites. This will be invaluable in determining how much activity each site gets, which prioritizes the effort for contacting use departments to establish some basic structure for going forward.
• Designate an IT team, comprised of “the usual suspects” to be the custodians of SharePoint. Think of this team as a bulls-eye, with an IT administrator, database, web architect, network capacity engineer, Security and Compliance experts in the center and custodians of other aspects of the infrastructure affected by SharePoint (e.g. Active Directory, Exchange, etc.) in rings farther out.
• Conduct sessions with the current stakeholders using SharePoint to define where the line is between user administration/configuration and IT governance. Can users add templates when they discover one that is helpful or must this be requested from IT? Must document libraries be restricted by file type? What about remote users? What approval process will be required to permit extended team members from vendors, consultants, and suppliers to participate in a workspace? Many of these may require some deliberation before a firm policy is set, but these dialogs will be highly useful in maintaining a dynamic view of user needs for the platform.
• Demonstrate what’s possible and what productive habits look like by using SharePoint to establish a continuing channel of communication with users. Especially as user interest spreads through word-of-mouth, provide a resource for up-to-date information on IT resources, processes for extending SharePoint, special needs and organize the information is a manner to guide users toward productive habits.

The Fulcrum

The fulcrum of the SharePoint balance issue may turn out to be corporate culture, specifically the corporation’s longstanding practices about how technology is governed. Is IT primarily the custodian of capacity, backup, and recovery, or is IT the introducer of most technology innovation? If performing the essential knowledge-work of collaboration means that the “big iron” in the back office needs to be accessed in new ways, what is the protocol for validating new methods before making the investment to enable them?

“SharePoint really grays the lines between IT and the business.  SharePoint is such a colossal tool, really a Swiss army knife of a platform,” says Beck.  ”It can accommodate almost anything. Instead of organizing information on a webpage, we’re now organizing workflow functions on a webpage that once were available only as point-solutions. Organizations trying to fit SharePoint governance into some rigid framework of traditional IT management are in for a bumpy ride.”

Other comfortable, or at least familiar, lines are being blurred also – like the one between user interface and programming.  SharePoint templates and user interface elements take on almost application-type distinctness, since SharePoint’s can reach almost anywhere into a LOB application, a remote database, the web, or a team-member’s desktop.  What this does to corporate identity standards when the visuals aren’t just clicks for more content but touch off whole sequences of activity?

“SharePoint is a toolbox, pure and simple,” reminds Neff. “A huge one. But it doesn’t contain everything every possible use might require.  Additional parts are needed and basic services to get the most out of it.  In short, some resource is required to turn the toolbox into solutions, whether that is an internal IT group or an outside specialist firm. With something as deep and broad as SharePoint, solutions don’t just happen, they are constructed.”

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Robert Hamilton and Ben Bradley write about the intersection of technology and business for the Bradley Wiltjer Marketing Group, Inc. (www.bradleywiltjer.com) – a technology marketing agency that specializes in lead generation, marketing and media relations.