Implementation

The SharePoint 2010 Productivity Hub and the User Adoption Kit is a great method of centralizing knowledge in the organization, and providing materials to enable the communication of SharePoint to information workers.

In SharePoint, there are topology concepts to understand and consider. Servers have roles such as Web, Query, Index, Calculation, Application, and Database. Farms have relationships such as Authoring, Publishing, Development, Test, Staging, and Production as well as service applications covering Search, Profile, Access, Business Data Connectivity, Excel, Machine Translation, Managed Metadata, PerformancePoint, Secure Store, Word Automation, Work Management, Usage/Health, Visio and others. In a SharePoint farm, SharePoint is comprised of Servers, Web Applications, Databases, Site Collections, Sites, Lists, and Items (and in that order from a hierarchical perspective in that order).

The concept of this is difficult to describe graphically, and especially if you are going to design a topology for a customer you will need a good approach. I use Visio for designing topology diagrams, and I managed to get a couple of documents that provides an overview of topology concepts for SharePoint 2013. These are pretty good, if you need to understand the topology and therefore some other concepts such as performance, scale, fault tolerance, etc. These diagrams include topologies, based on the traditional approaches to building SharePoint architectures in these documents.

They are available for download here:

PDF: http://www.geoffevelyn.com/downloads/sps_2013_traditional_topology_model.pdf

VISIO: http://www.geoffevelyn.com/downloads/sps_2013_traditional_topology_model.vsd

I have been asked a lot about the actual process of upgrade from SharePoint 2010 and whether there is any best practice material. Yes there is, and its pretty good! This model explains the process that you use when you upgrade from SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Foundation 2013 or SharePoint Server 2013.

They are available for download here:

PDF: http://www.geoffevelyn.com/downloads/sp2013-upgrade-process.pdf

VISIO: http://www.geoffevelyn.com/downloads/sp2013-upgrade-process.vsd

The article is located here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=30371

Support service development for SharePoint is crucial to ensure sustained SharePoint Governance and User Adoption. I had the situation where in building a SharePoint support service that a customer needed the provision of support to be handled differently for a newly delivered SharePoint solution, and also needed that to be documented and agreed by the SharePoint sponsor. The reason for this is that they needed the support service to be measured against the supply of support to that solution, which was critical to the department and the organization.

Not a hardware, software, or people resource solution. It is an organizational strategy and methodology for documenting and implementing business rules and controls related to your client’s data. It brings cross-functional teams together to identify data issues impacting the company or organization.

When getting an organization to make an investment into using SharePoint (irrespective of premise i.e. on-off, or SharePoint version), a SharePoint Feasibility Study should be carried out for them. A Feasibility Study identifies the following:

• What are the current information and management challenges? What needs to be put right?
• What are the alternatives (including ways to achieve those objectives), including costs and benefits of each?
• What is the recommended solution, which not only gives reasons for choosing the option but also discusses its feasibility? (how difficult will it be to carry out?, and will the recommended solution meet all the requirements).

As part of my book, SharePoint 2013 User Adoption Planning and Governance, below is a SharePoint Delivery Detail Plan. This plan encompasses the tasks required to deliver a SharePoint solution from Envision through to User Adoption. You are also able to download this link at the foot of the diagram.

Am working on my forthcoming book concerning the delivery of user adoption and platform governance, and thought that I would share a summarised section which concerns the creation of SharePoint support. a crucial area that relates to how SharePoint services will be managed.

Nb. Am also working on an article which goes into further detail looking at SharePoint support and what are the necessary items to put in place to guarantee success (rather like my Ten Steps for SharePoint implementation article ). This will be available soon…

Please read on though – hope the summary is useful!

A key component of Platform Governance (i.e. the management of the infrastructure and related services) on SharePoint is the understanding of security and how that affects user collaboration. Here’s a webcast I attended as a guest speaker concerning security challenges through SharePoint collaboration.  Please note, this is high level, and not technical.