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 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