SharePointGeoff

Excel Web App Video from Microsoft

Geoff Evelyn — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:16:04 +0000

One of the most difficult areas to engage users with in the adoption of SharePoint is sometimes wrongly perceieved to be the easiest because the assumption is the user must already be using the product. And when needing to get users productive with their client and web app Office 2010, there is sometimes a tendency in some providers to shy away from training users in them, particularly when it comes to SharePoint. Afterall, it looks daunting yes? Office 2010 boasts integration services with SharePoint, notably Excel, Access, Word, Outlook and some of the really cool integration aspects of OneNote, Visio, Performance Point – and they all have major solution benefits.

However, in order to properly pass on how to properly engage with these components to information workers one needs to take a step back from the technical. It’s simply foolish in talking about what buttons to press and what drop down menus to select when the user needs to know WHY they should be pressing them in the first place – they need to know what benefits will be provided through the use of the relevant service when using the components in the first place.

So last week, I was speaking with a client who was looking at using Excel with their SharePoint online platform. They had a few people who knew what Excel services was from a technical perspective, but they needed some more down to earth information for their users; even to the point of somekind of learning platform, where they could read on a topic, watch videos and follow through by emulating what they had learnt.

I did a bit of hunting and found an absolute gem – the below video is just one from the site here:

Excel Skills Builder

This video explains one topic close to my clients heart, and I found great in just planting awareness – and great for user adoption of SharePoint where Excel is concerned – hope you enjoy it!

Value Management in SharePoint – Part 2 of 3

Geoff Evelyn — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:26:20 +0000

In this second of a three part blog I will describe Value Management in SharePoint and how it can be applied when creating or implementing a new SharePoint solution. Note that in fact this can also be applied to existing SharePoint environments where there is a requirement to extend or enhance SharePoint.

As well as describing the premise of Value Management I will also be describing how to work, record and how a decision is reached on which alternative of a required solution is reached. And, in doing this I will be using real world examples to inspire and guide.

Before continuing with this blog, I would suggest that if you have stumbled on this without having read the first part of this article that you do so by visiting the following link:

Value Management in SharePoint Part 1

Objectives of SharePoint Value Management

SharePoint Value Management is primarily concerned with ensuring that the needs concerning a solution is clearly defined, and that those involved know what is going to be produced. The primary objective is to create a understanding, and a common one, that covers the design problem, identifies the design objectives, and gets a group consensus about various courses of action.

Before getting to grips with understanding the objectives, two points:

First, I said the word ‘solution’.

In the context of implementing a SharePoint service one may be thinking I am talking about developing and implementing a SharePoint solution -i.e. a custom farm solution. No, I am not talking about the details of taking a solution created by a developer and deploying it to a farm. And no, I am not talking about a specific service application like say Search Services, Visio Services, User Profile etc. SharePoint solution in this guide describes what it means record the work necessary to get to architectonically design what the client requires. That requirement might end up as a business workflow; or it might end up as an implementation of Access Services; it might be part of the work in designing a SharePoint site for a department / division; it may even be the study into what features and components to be included in a new SharePoint farm. So this understanding and agreeing the business requirements reaching agreement and therefore includes the decisions made to agree what is going to be in the product, how and who is going to do what. Value management is key to this as it can be used within designing anything within the SharePoint platform which will deliver a service.

And before you think, “huh, this is a business process, there’s nothing for technical people here”. Wrong. Value Management is a journey of discovery where technical know-how meets business requirements; during which both have a full understanding on the abilities of the product to deliver the solution. It is applied to SharePoint workers from Administrators to Developers to Architects to Programme Managers.

By working with Value Management techniques in SharePoint, this will falsify a notion for both sides (the technical camp and business camp involved) that deploying SharePoint is perceived as ‘easy’, a click-done-finish project, that simply applying a quick design based at the start is enough.

So, a comment from one SharePoint admin was “Ya boo. That’s boring, why cant I just build the thing and think about it later?”

Who do you think he was representing? The user? Doesn’t sound like it.

Key Understanding

When someone says ‘Hey, lets use SharePoint to solve our problem’, their ideas are often designed around pre-conceived solutions. For example, they may have seen the same solution carried out in another company. They may ‘assume’ that SharePoint has some component or feature that meets a business objective.

Whatever the reason, Value Management helps you challenge such preconceptions by questioning and testing the business objectives, and then distilling them into a list of key requirements that are independent of any solution – this means then SharePoint can be used to confirm whether these key requirements can be met.

Also, Value management is a key part of helping you determine a Return of Investment (ROI). If you recall, in the first part of this guide, I mentioned a question ‘What are we going to use SharePoint for’? Well, Value Management gives you that answer when applied to a specific solution that is going to be designed and delivered. It will inspire confidence that (a) the business understands and agrees the decisions made to deliver the solution and that (b) the technical requirements of the components being delivered by SharePoint can meet those requirements.

Workshop the ideas

You should carry out this exercise near the start of an initial investigation stage. At the point where there is going to be a scoping-out of the project. As that stage you would also know who the key stakeholders are, and how soon the project needs to deliver.

The workshop will require the involvement of key individuals at an appropriate level of knowledge and authority. For example, in the design of a specific site the key users, SharePoint specialist. In the design of a new SharePoint farm the key sponsors, like the SharePoint Architect, key members of interfacing technical teams, project manager.

In each of these workshops it is strongly suggested that the use of a coach to facilitate is recommended. This will help ensure the participants stay focused on the key aspects and to challenge their conclusions.

Step 1 – Structure the Objectives

To identify the key objectives of any SharePoint solutions means going through investigations. The best way I have experienced is to setup workshops and act as a kind of Project Facilitator. Interestingly, this works even better if there is a proper team identified. Anyway, that’s in another book of mine :p

When gathering requirements, making and agreeing on decisions, make sure that you state clearly what the objective is for the solution, and ensure that any ideas, suggestions, or points related to that key objective are captured as secondary and sub-objectives.

Secondary and sub-objectives are the key to working out the value of the solution; they give weightings, allows you to evaluate and assess the value of each.

By now, if you are reading this and thinking “hey I am a techie, a SharePoint Admin, what is all of this about objectives, secondary, sub-objectives and value – I don’t do any of those things in SharePoint”. I would argue that you are already doing that with your Sites and sub-sites – they are based on a topology, to the analogy you might want to think on is SharePoint site topology.

Like a site and sub-site, Each has a reason or a premise. The same thing goes with SharePoint objectives – to meet them you need to complete a number of secondary objectives. They are made up of sub-objectives. To explain this even further though, I’ll give you some examples of SharePoint objectives, each with a secondary objective.

Build a SharePoint Farm which has good availability and good network performance.
Build a Project Management site which has a Schedules management component.
Build a Server Automation tool which needs to be audited.

These may seem rather nebulous, but, from the outset, SharePoint solutions start in that fashion – No-one is a SharePoint Seer.

Of course, ideas generated during meetings without facilitation can end up in a solution which has many pitfalls (cost / resiliency / compliance / storage / etc). Therefore, its very important that enough investigation has been done to define the system specification (more information about this is in my book!) that meets the objective/

Continuing with the theme of structuring the objectives, here’s some basic examples of primary objectives and sub-objectives:

As you can see from the above three examples, we have taken a key objective, and then, through discussion, agreed the secondary objectives and then decomposed them into sub-objectives hence:

By the way, Mind Manager is absolutely brilliant for brainstorming objectives in my SharePoint sessions.

Step 2 – Assign importance weightings

Ok, taking the previous example of a Project Management Site whose objective is to store content related to a particular project we could come up with something like this:

Even at this level, we need to be clear on what areas of the site get more attention than others. For example, Budget Overview may not be important there is another central site that is used record financial information – there may be a decision to connect and provide that detail without duplicity to this site. Project Plans may be multiple project plans, and may even require their own sites, and therefore be of critical importance.

We need to record these as decisions and apply value management to each, so we need to start adding weighting (relative importance) of each objective. Taking the above again, I’ve applied some weightings:

One thing you may have noticed is that Project Artifacts becomes a repository but is now more important than Budget Overview. Also, that all weightings when summed equals 1.0.

Applying weightings is a delicate matter sometimes requiring a strong application of SharePoint knowledge combined with business acumen. Some people will say hey this is a decision made using a business analyst. Not true, remember that some of the examples I gave are not in the bounds of a business analyst. Building a software solution may simply be a technical discussion requiring technical agreement. Building a SharePoint farm covers more than a vision from a client as that produces a system specification outcome. Whatever happens, when applying a weighting bare in mind that these are subject to change and that could be due to a one or more factors.

Step 3 – Evaluate each option

Now that weightings have been applied to all of the objectives and secondary objectives, you will need to calculate what is known as a “Utility” score.

Taking the example in Step 2, enter a code against each of the objectives. The first secondary objective is A, followed by B for the next secondary objective, C for the next and so on. For each of the sub-objectives start with the letter of the secondary objective followed by the number of that sub-objective. For example, is a secondary objective is C then the first sub-objective of that is C1. Take a look at the following and you’ll get a better understanding. You’ll need to do this to create the table to store the Utility Score and Assess Value.

Once done, turn the information into a table:

Option	Objective	A	B	C	D	D1	D2	D3	Utility	Cost	Value
	Importance Weighting	0.25	0.35	0.15	0.25	0.60	0.30	0.10
SharePoint	Raw Score	100	100	90	90	100	80	20
	Weighted Score	25	35	13.5	22.5	60	24	2	182

CMS Product A	Raw Score	40	90	80	70	100	40	40
	Weighted Score	6.25	12.25	2.025	5.625	36	7.2	0.2	69.55

Doc Mgmt Product B	Raw Score	80	80	90	80	80	80	60
	Weighted Score	20	28	13.5	20	48	24	6	159.5

In the above table, CMS Product A seemed to fair good with Repositories but did not have all the features necessary especially against Objective A. SharePoint seems to cover the bases and achieves a higher utility score overall.

So how does this work? First, you need to enter the importance weighting values for each of the objectives. Then, for each objective, enter a value out of a 100 on whether the product going to be used can meet the objective. The higher the value, the better.

For the weighted score of each objective, multiply the importance weighting by the weighting score. Repeat this process for each of the objectives. Then finally, add up the score at the end to give a utility score. The higher the value the better the product fits the objectives.

In order to give this section the justice it deserves, make sure that you have the relevant knowledge resource – meaning, that you have someone who can give you objective advice concerning each of the products strengths and weaknesses against each of the objective. It is also extremely important that you show 100% honesty. If SharePoint does not meet an objective properly, it doesn’t.

Step 4 – Assess Value

Now onto Assessing Value. If you have followed all the steps so far, this section is a breeze. All you need to do is simply obtaining the present value (discounted) and whole life cost, a measure of the value can be derived:

Option	Objective	A	B	C	D	D1	D2	D3	Utility	Cost	Value
	Importance Weighting	0.25	0.35	0.15	0.25	0.60	0.30	0.10
SharePoint	Raw Score	100	100	90	90	100	80	20
	Weighted Score	25	35	13.5	22.5	60	24	2	182	10	18.20

CMS Product A	Raw Score	40	90	80	70	100	40	40
	Weighted Score	6.25	12.25	2.025	5.625	36	7.2	0.2	69.55	8	8.69

Doc Mgmt Product B	Raw Score	80	80	90	80	80	80	60
	Weighted Score	20	28	13.5	20	48	24	6	159.5	14	11.39

In the above example, SharePoints life cost is 10 million, versus CMS Product A at 8 million, and Doc Mgmt Product B at 15 million. As we can see, SharePoint has the highest value.

Step 5 – Check sensitivity

The process of scoring and ranking is not always objective. You must assess the sensitivity of those scores which any in the decision making process feel intuitively are misleading. As these are assessed the results can be continually used as a basis for debate and discussion.

Be prepared to re-do steps 2 through to 4 as many times are possible so that before you agree on the final solution that all objectives have been addressed against all the possible alternatives.

Critical Success Factors

Critical Success factors for Value Management are:

Senior management support and input – you need to make sure that at your workshops that decision makers are there to identify the priority of the objectives.
Appropriate level of management so that the results are not undermined.
Effective facilitation – make sure you have the right people to provide knowledge, ensure that you have a strong SharePoint specialist to answer queries and to help make decisions.
Sufficient information available – when looking at the alternatives, make sure you have the right information available that allows you to understand how the product meets requirements.

End of this Article

Whew! Reached the end of this article. Hope you have enjoyed reading this second part of Value Management, in which we discussed what it is, and how you can apply it in identifying whether SharePoint can meet certain objectives and its value in doing so.

In the final article, we will look at Value Engineering – this is a very useful method in SharePoint in refining a selected solution to optimise its value for money.

Also, please note that this series of articles is all part of helping you get to grips with SharePoint implementation and is wrapped up in my book – Managing and Implementing SharePoint 2010 Projects, and can be used in any situation where you are thinking of building a solution in SharePoint but need to work out whether SharePoint can properly meet the objectives, and the value returned on going down a selected route.

Value Management in SharePoint – Part 1 of 3

Geoff Evelyn — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:21:39 +0000

This is the first of a three part article. You may have heard statements like:

‘I need a good return on my investment of SharePoint’
‘I am paying a lot of money for SharePoint and people, what is it there to do?’
‘I need to know what to do and what not to do with this technology’

If you have answers to all of the above questions then you are on the way to ensuring good SharePoint adoption, and the solution put in place has been optimised for service delivery. Of course, you need to get there and in order to do so means understanding the key quality stamp of any SharePoint implementation – Value Management.

According to the Business Dictionary Value Management is:

“The Application of value analysis (value engineering) techniques for improvement of business effectiveness and efficiency.”

This article, split into three blogs, goes into detail on describing Managing Value for SharePoint, and the basis of the two key tools to Managing Value.

To help you understand the concepts, I will be drawing on real life projects and showing how using the techniques described was able to determine the best solution.

If you have any queries then please feel free to contact me via the website.

What is Managing Value

The objective when delivering any SharePoint solution is to optimise the use of the platform and its resources. Whilst much of determine the best solution to go for in terms of establishing effective decision making and control, managing value focuses on selecting the best option. This is irrespective of whether the plan is to build a SharePoint farm, determine the best site taxonomy, or building a site solution for a client to ensure user productivity is at its optimum – in other words, optimising the solution to deliver value for money.

Decisions taken during the early stages of implementation will have the greatest influence on the outcome and will significantly affect the total expenditure and benefits.

Take the folllowing scenarios:

Client A decides to go down the SharePoint root and deploys a single server farm for potentially 15000 users. Finds out later that in order to scale they will face some headaches and extra cost. Headaches due to a full investigation and appraisal of why there is no backup, degraded performance and resiliency. Cost due to the now increased licensing and infrastructure needed to resolve the issues investigated in ‘Headaches’

Note that managing value isn’t always just about saving money; its also ensuring the user requirement is met. Consider the following scenario:

Client B decides to build a Publishing site to accommodate a team new to SharePoint who are mainly going to collaborate with 30 or so documents.

Is this managing value? Probably not. There is a risk that, for example, the users start firing off features that as an administrator you would face extra calls for service on things you may not have full knowledge of, or worse still not governed for.

Client C wants to use store Visio diagrams in SharePoint, and wants to know whether this is a good idea.

Managing value is about identifying the best solution and weighing up the alternatives. Whilst Visio is great for things like drawing organisation charts, its link with SharePoint Designer in terms of workflow could be a distraction for users. Whilst some people will see this as a governance issue, its actually more to do with strategically how to position this tool with others – for example, the organisation might in fact be using K2. Nintex or another workflow third party supplier.

Experiences

From my experiences in the field, I’ve witnessed the results of SharePoint implementations put in place because (a) there were licences to be used and money to be spent (b) there was no alternatives addressed and the product was rush deployed (c) no objectives were defined so that what was put in place did not meet client need.

I think this is because those carrying out the implementations either did not take the time to carry out proper assessments and/or did not know of any procedure that could help them.

What are the key tools for Managing Value

So why do we need to manage value to implement a SharePoint solution? Can we not just jump in and give the client what they want?

Examine that last question – giving the client what they want. Giving the client what they want isn’t necessarily what they will adopt unless the cost for developing, purchasing and supporting is not within their needs. You need to ask yourself the question ‘What is the client going to use SharePoint for?’ and making sure that whatever you put in place goes someway to answering that question.

Time for an analogy you may have heard before – the Swing analogy… A council is asked to provide new swings for children in a local park. They put in two swings, but without protective bars to stop the children falling off. So, after complaints they then install special safety bars on the swings, but this then stops the older children using the swings. They then install more swings, but this takes up so much space that there is not enough space to install other amenities, like a place for people to sit for example. This results in less people using the swings and indeed going to the park. Eventually, very few visit the local park. And so the complaints and designs continue. And of course the obvious question will be asked ‘How was the swing solution analysed?’

So, two things here. Think of the cost paid by the council to provide the swings. Secondly, think of whether the swings will be continued to be used and the work and cost to get the safety bars installed. If you are already thinking of solutions, you are already trying to manage value.

To give the client what they want in SharePoint, of course you need to go through the requirements gathering, usage and design. Some of this is business design, the othert technical. However, whilst doing this you still need to question requirements, identify alternative solutions and assess them before agreeing with the client the final framework of the solution you want to put in place.

For the technically minded, they might refer to this practice as Solutions Architecture – in reality, it is simply Value Management.

There are two key tools you can use:

Value Management – selecting the solution that provides best value for money.
Value Engineering – optimising the value for money delivered by a chosen solution.

Value Management can be used during the initial investigation stage to test the business requirements and at the start of the feasibility and definition stage to assess alternative options.

Time to bring this blog to a close.

Now onto Part 2. This article describes how to use Value Management and Value Engineering in your SharePoint implementation to ensure that whatever solution you are attempting to put in place represents (a) best value for money and (b) refine the selected solution to optimise value for money.

Click this Link to read that article.

SharePoint Platform Availability – Mitigating the Risks

Geoff Evelyn — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:21:23 +0000

Was chatting to friends in a Pub about Disaster Recovery in SharePoint and in particular what constitutes a ‘fully available’ platform, focusing on those organisations just starting off with SharePoint. I thought I’d put my thoughts on a blog article and share them with you.

Well, it’s easy to forget in the heat of getting a single SharePoint production environment deployed, that without defining a fully available topology that one may be creating a single point of failure scenario, where the data is stored in a SQL or database instance is located on the same machine running the content management system, and leading to a serious risk of no SharePoint availability to the user-base.

Yes, SharePoint can have all services running on one server, however security and availability is a key facet in ensuring an effective and productive platform. In too many cases still, organisations adopting SharePoint for the first time start from a single server platform. Why? Maybe they wish to ‘trial’ SharePoint features, or maybe even because the budget is not enough to stretch the architecture, or perhaps because capacity planning was not done in the outset. Additionally, these are not scaled out to handle the increased user-base and/or their requirements. Whatever the reason, there is critical availability risk.

Considerable publicity has been given in recent years to the lack of security definitions and policies concerning the security of assets relevant to Content Management Systems (CMS). Because of the centralisation of assets into these CMS’s it has become more and more apparent that the risks to organisations have grown. And SharePoint, being a centralised collaborative technology means that more connected and critical assets.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that this has made organisations more conscious of the need to make their SharePoint systems more available. Most breaches of availability, however, are not dramatic; rather, they are minor incidents, errors and omissions which can accumulate into serious losses, if they occur regularly. It is a responsibility to consider architecting SharePoint which are more secure against such events.

An organisation can state they have a 100% available SharePoint environment if neither its ability to attain its corporate objectives nor its ability to survive can be adversely affected by an unwanted event. An organisation may be secure against some threats, but insecure against others. No organisation can be 100% secure, however, much planning is undertaken and much money is spent on countermeasures. Any organisation, or indeed any person, is liable to suffer from unwanted events.

SharePoint system security can be defined similarly. A SharePoint installation is a combination of many assets and resources (e.g. hardware, software, people, data, procedures, infrastructure facilities) designed to perform and provide collaborative services to the business. A SharePoint system is secure against say a particular threat (e.g. fire in the communications room where your production SharePoint environment is located) if countermeasures have been taken to reduce to an acceptably low level the amount of loss which the threat may be expected to cause (e.g. the same SharePoint environment is replicated either via Storage and/or Physically located in another building) over a given period of time (e.g. a week). There are three types of loss which an organisation does not want its SharePoint system to suffer:

Loss of availability and/or
Loss of integrity (i.e. accuracy)
Loss of high impact content

Whilst some of the SharePoint sites may not contain anything which is considered high impact, but even so, the first and second applies to any site. A loss of availability, integrity of confidentiality, whether accidental or deliberate, whether for a short or long time, will adversely affect organisational effectiveness, productivity and much more.

A threat to Sharepoint is any event whose occurrence would adversely affect one or more of the assets or resources which make it up. For example, what happens if all of a SharePoint farms SQL content databases are stored on one SQL server which isn’t backed up? What happens if all SharePoint services are running on one server and that server suffers a disk crash? What happens if the DNS server is unavailable? What happens if someone deletes an important file in a document library and no one notices for over a month?

Each of these assets is threatened by one or more of the following unacceptable events:

Interruption
Disclosure
Modification
Removal
Destruction

And these unacceptable events can happen accidentally or be deliberately contrived. Thus, there is a large number of ways in which the security in a collaborative and such an integrated platform such as SharePoint. Examples of some of the possible breaches of security are:

Accidental interruption of communication
Accidental destruction of hardware
Accidental modification of software
Deliberate removal of programs
Deliberate disclosure of information

There are three other categories of accidental threat:

Those involving the malfunction of some component (e.g hardware or software fault), as opposed to an accidental misuse of a component (which is a threat caused by a person)
Those which occur naturally and which damage or destroy equipment, buildings and other physical assets. Floods, hurricanes, fires, snow, ice, earthquakes etc. belong in this category.
Those which affect people and their capacity to do their normal work, Death, injury and disease belong to this category.

Where to begin

Therefore, in working with the business there needs to be a review of the SharePoint platform, and focus on any instances of its design for all possible breaches of security (i.e. all events, both deliberate and accidental, which can adversely affect the assets of SharePoint) and develop a strategy to prevent or minimise losses to the organisation as a result of any breach. Here’s a number of things that should be done:

Get a list of all assets in your SharePoint platform.
Where is the capacity plan – if you have not done this, do it, if you have it, review it critically. You are looking for any points where there could be a fail – look not just at the SharePoint servers, look beyond to ISA, AD, DNS, Exchange, SQL. Look beyond into Search connections, external contact sources. Examine your firewall and proxy. Examine third party connections; for example, Web applications that have their own functionality that may impact on SharePoint.
Once you have identified these, list against each all possible known failure points. Review issues concerning connectivity to these services. Dig up and audit logs concerning a failure to connect and document them. Audit all backups and schedules – identify a priority backup path.
Examine the sites, list those which have critical / confidential / both, contact the owners and get a business SLA recovery identification. Define your topology to ensure high impact content can be provided in the event of a disaster. Review the server provision of your SharePoint environment and plan to scale as necessary/
Create a risk management plan; now that you have identified known threats (and please note the list is NOT exhaustive); now is the time to select countermeasures for each issue.
Implement; Review, Review and Review again. Your SharePoint instance will grow; you must ensure that your SharePoint Security plan grows with it.

This area is pretty much overlooked, but is vitally important because of the increased scale of Social Networking and the development of CMS platforms, particularly SharePoint in being in the centre of a vastly connected infrastructure in an Enterprise. The major concerns of any security policy (i.e. avoidance of errors and recovery in the case of a breakdown) are not in any sense new; they are an essential part of any system.

Office 365 Standard Response to Request for Information – Security and Privacy

Geoff Evelyn — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:45:18 +0000

The Cloud Security Alliance published the Cloud Control Matrix, to support consumers in the evaluation of cloud services and to identify questions prudent to have answered before moving to cloud services. In response to this publication, Microsoft has created this document to outline how we meet the suggested principals and mapped them to the International Standards Organization (ISO) 27001:2005 and ISO 27002. With this standardized response we would like to empower customers with in-depth information to evaluate different offerings in the market place today.

Standard Response to Request For Information-O365-Security-Privacy_v2.docx

Standard Response to Request For Information-O365-Security-Privacy_v2.pdf

Ten Steps to a successful implementation of SharePoint

Geoff Evelyn — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:07:51 +0000

People have been requesting me do a shortened article to cover SharePoint Implementation from a higher level; a kind of whats my the key steps required to deliver SharePoint to a client. Please note there’s a whole bunch of webcasts coming soon to go into some more detail on each of the steps, so watch this space. If you need further information go ahead and give me a shout! Happy Reading!

One final point – if the following does not display correctly then please use this link:

http://www.geoffevelyn.com/spssite/mmap/spimpl/index.html

Service Delivery – Working in harmony with external SharePoint agencies

Geoff Evelyn — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:23:33 +0000

Time for a service delivery article, looking at working with external SharePoint agencies in a SharePoint environment in BAU…

If you are operating and managing SharePoint environments for your clients, you may find that there is a business requirement for enhancements or modifications to something to take place which would alter your controlled SharePoint environment. This business requirement may be one where there is a call for the intended work to be carried out by utilising services from an external ‘SharePoint’ on a sub-contracted basis.

Now, before continuing, and for arguments sake, this article does not consider how the ‘agency’ was chosen, and does not consider what they are going to deliver. Also, this article is not aimed at those using SharePoint online in the wonderful cloud of Office365 (service delivery differs there).

So, let us look at some of the reasons why an external SharePoint agency is chosen instead of meeting requirements using internal resources:

A new SharePoint environment is being deployed and needs to go into more than one office, and there are not enough people to available to deploy it.
A migration from one version of SharePoint to another.
Development of the platform (programming modifications and enhancements into the SharePoint platform).
Additional 3^rd party services (e.g. analytical, monitoring, etc.).
Insufficient resources available to manage the SharePoint deployment(s)

Taking on the services of an external SharePoint agency to carry out work means coordination, communication and harmony. Do not go down the route of simply opening the entire SharePoint environment, and saying ‘Hey, come on down, do your stuff’. If you do that we are talking ‘category 5 blunder’, as there’s no control of your environment, no idea on the outcome of their work delivered to the environment and worst of all no configuration management of SharePoint. On the other side, I definitely do not mean adopting a ‘Get your Hands off my SharePoint’, shutting windows in a Wild West mentality and cringing behind the blinds. That’s just plain obstructive and likely to let off warning bells from the business.

A structured approach is required:

You have all the information that details what is going to be delivered.
That the risks and issues are covered.
That there is a clear scope of work.
That there is a defined review – start and end.
Whatever is delivered is documented (to the hilt).
Whatever is delivered is handed over and to the clients satisfaction.

Is managing a SharePoint implementation programme the same as managing an agency to deliver a specific element of work to SharePoint? In a way, Yes. The process of managing a group geared to implementing a specific product is no different – control and configuration management is key.

Here’s a quote from a top flight manager in a blue chip company adopting SharePoint and doing it via a ‘SharePoint’ agency using the ‘hey come on down’ approach:

“It was mad. I had consultants all over the place… I was confused… No one knew who did what… Hardly anyone knew who was in charge… No one seemed to have a clear answer as to what they were doing, why and most importantly for how long”.

The above simply relates to the fact that communication is the missing element. The manager above didn’t know who the agency account manager was and no controls were put in place to review the work. Make sure you acutely know the agency account manager and that you are fully aware of what is going on and who is doing what, and why.

Communication and the Work Package

So, the first thing that needs to happen is that there must be set clear rules of communication between that account manager, yourself and the client. To establish that, there are three things the account manager needs to draw up. A scope that describes unambiguously exactly what will be delivered, a list of people who are involved and an agreed duration covering the engagement.

The documentation provided by the account manager covering the above is known as a ‘Work Package’. This Work Package is put before the client, who then needs you to validate the Work Package as the SharePoint person managing the deployment(s) and through you agrees who else needs to see and validate the work package before it proceeds.

Resources

Even when creating a Work Package, agencies in my experience sometimes forget to agree who will be providing the resources and/or when the resources will be needed. It is not specified in the Work Package, maybe because there is an assumption that the client will provide it, or that the agency will provide it. The issues arise when the agency requires access to client key resources – SharePoint access for example (which will require some kind of access to be defined). Not doing this upfront causes anxiety for the agency and creates a bottleneck for the client – especially if there are interfacing teams to contend with (production of access accounts follows a procedure etc.). Clearly, agreement on resource provision needs to be set in the Work Package at the beginning.

Control

Control of subcontractors is very important when allowing access to SharePoint environments. In most cases, access is not provided to company electronic resources unless the individual is part of the organisation, and there have been checks to ascertain the levels of security applied. You do not want to be part of the following issue!

“We had an agency, a SharePoint consultancy they were, to come and carry out a maintenance review on our SharePoint environments. We thought that by giving then direct and unfettered access to our network and SharePoint, they would be able to carry out an efficient and quick review. We also felt confident that they had the relevant skills required. So, we left them to their own devices. However, during their ‘review’ of SharePoint we lost access to the entire environment for over as day, all caused by a mistake made by one of the agencies consultants. That mistake cost us over 50k in lost revenue that day”.

Now reader, if you work in a ‘Desktop’ team, you would probably know that providing network infrastructure services access to clients goes through due process. However, that is simply not enough. We all know that providing access to resources is much more than a ‘fire and forget’ – meaning, that you simply provide access to the resources and then ‘walk away’.

Control of access means managing that access and that would mean recording what needs to be accessed, when, why and by whom. There needs to be a continual record of changes to SharePoint use and allowance to sites. Record the agency requirement to access SharePoint, reasons and duration of the access request. The process of managing changes to SharePoint is known as SharePoint Configuration Management, and is discussed in full in my book, Managing and Implementing SharePoint 2010 Projects.

Review

Continually, repeat, Continually review the work carried out by the agency. This means reviewing that work package. When do you do this? Constantly (yes, continually). Why? Well, for a start, it is all good for the agency to ‘run silent’ because there has been agreement on what they will deliver. But if you do not monitor their progress the work package will distort. The potential for a torpedo to be fired from the client simply because the agency has found a loophole in the work package that slows their progress is high if the work package is not reviewed regularly. Here’s another wonderful example of when not enough review means chaos – the following is an excerpt from a manager (maybe the same one from the previous example):

“The consultants said they would review our SharePoint environment, and the review scope seemed clear enough. The consultants went away, carried out a review and gave a report, which did not relate to our environment at all!”

What about Office365 and SharePoint Online?

Service delivery in SharePoint Office365 online differs because a key segment of control is not available – the server environment. This does not exist; things like monitoring and logging changes from the perspective of server to web analytics usage. Because these rules change, so does the relationship of how an external agency becomes involved. Anyway, am getting ahead of myself; and this will be covered in another blog!

Service Delivery – Working in harmony with external SharePoint agencies

SharePoint Archiving – Defining a way Forward

Geoff Evelyn — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:21:09 +0000

History has a way of repeating itself. Thankfully, when we learn from the mistakes of the past, we are able to address new challenges more quickly and in smarter ways. In the early 1990s, email emerged as a collaboration mechanism, speeding up communications between multiple parties. It started as a tool only available to high-ranking executives, but quickly grew into the most dominant form of communication.

As email use proliferated in the mid-1990s, the volume grew to the point where email servers buckled and IT organisations had to grapple the need to:

Maintain server performance and data-recovery time while an enormous volume of email sat on the production server
Back up exponentially increasing amounts of data
Perform time-consuming and expensive restoration of back-up tapes in response to discovery requests

These challenges led many organisations to email archiving. Archiving alleviates the burden on email servers by moving data to cheaper storage, minimises back-up windows by reducing the amount of data to back-up, and streamlines. Providing an interface through which to collect all potentially relevant emails and attachments without having to find and restore content from back-up tapes.

Currently, a very similar story is playing out with SharePoint. SharePoint enables efficient and effective team collaboration, version control for documents edited by multiple team members, and faster access to information via search, while enabling users to create new forms of important content like blogs and wikis in a managed fashion. SharePoint brings a new level of structure to high-volume, user generated content which, until recently had simply been dumped onto network file shares.

Due to a relatively low cost, ease of use, tight integration to Microsoft Office applications, and a wide range of features such as workflow, search, and access control, SharePoint has gained huge traction in the market.
As SharePoint continues to gain traction, organisations want to avoid the mistakes they made with email and instead proactively take control of SharePoint content before it takes control of them. As a result, many look to SharePoint archiving early in the process to enable storage management on the production SharePoint system, recovery of SharePoint content and data and centralised retention management.

Criteria for a SharePoint Archiving Solution

In choosing an archiving solution for SharePoint, it is important to ask these questions:
What scope of SharePoint content and metadata is captured?

Some solutions capture only a portion of SharePoint content, e.g., specific documents or document collections. This kind of capture supports fine-grained recovery. Others capture not only document-type content, but also all the context data for the environment—the rich data that makes a SharePoint site interactive (lists, blog and wiki entries, front-end web server information, and more). All of this content and metadata is important for compliance and recovery; a holistic archiving solution must capture and store it all. When content and context are captured, it is possible to perform coarse-grained recovery to restore or migrate full SharePoint environments.
How is the SharePoint content captured?

Content can be captured from SharePoint continuously or periodically. Continuous capture of all content related to specific departments guarantees needs for compliance.

Does the solution provide more than just lower-cost storage?

Archives provide great value in enabling the move of content from production systems to cheaper storage, but an archive that can also facilitate recovery provides even greater value. Having archiving and recovery in one solution means less complexity for IT to manage and greater operational efficiency and cost savings.

How does the archiving solution enable end-users to access SharePoint content?

When endusers go to SharePoint to get their content, they don’t want to be redirected and they don’t want to search two repositories for data. Rather, the right solution will make access seamless, leaving content directly accessible through the SharePoint interface. It will also integrate seamlessly with the SharePoint search index, allowing archived content to appear in search results alongside active content. Be sure that your archiving solution enables seamless end-user access so that you don’t have to train users on new ways to access their information.

How does the solution enable retention management?

Organisations struggle to implement defensible litigation holds.
A good archiving solution will allow very granular controls over retention; that granular control stems from comprehensive capture capabilities and flexible retention rules. A unified content archive allows an organisation to quickly implement item-level litigation holds

Is the solution part of an integrated content archiving platform?

The most efficient archiving solution unifies email, file, and SharePoint archiving. Not only does this make tasks like setting litigation holds faster and easier, but it reduces storage costs by providing single-instance storage across all the content sources.
What is required then for customers is a SharePoint archiving and recovery solution, providing a comprehensive capture approach for SharePoint content, enabling archiving and recovery in one solution.

SharePoint Benefits and Challenges

Organisations deploy SharePoint to make information more accessible to end users and to enhance collaboration among work groups.
The benefits SharePoint delivers are undeniable: better and more efficient team collaboration, version control for documents edited by multiple team members, and faster access to information through searches. SharePoint brings a new level of structure to high-volume, user-generated content. However, the viral spread of SharePoint throughout organisations combined with its distributed deployment model presents significant challenges to the efficient management of this collaboration environment:

Limited native backup and recovery.

The existing SharePoint backup solution is limited for any organisation beyond a small business because of the time for recovery (RTO), the inability to provide item-level recovery, and the significant hardware costs for recovery. The built-in SharePoint recovery tools require a separate recovery farm of servers and disks that can modify metadata such as date and time stamps and IDs of users who checked in the document when items are recovered. Recovery is a time-consuming, multi-step process. SharePoint’s native backup operation involves reading a large amount of data, so running it frequently can interfere with system performance and even block end-user access to sites. SharePoint does have a site level backup tool accessible via command line using stsADM, however, this is intended to back up and restore top-level Windows SharePoint Services Web sites, it is not designed for item-level recovery.

Increasing storage costs.

The distributed nature of SharePoint deployments allows content to grow virtually unfettered. While it is possible to manage storage size by setting size quotas on site collections, this may limit end-user productivity and it hinders the ability to manage the information lifecycle effectively based on size and age of content. It is also exactly what organisations tried— and failed—to do with email. Organisations using SharePoint can employ Information Management Policies, which can allow for the expiration of content, but these are time consuming to implement in environments with many web applications and/or multiple SharePoint farms. In addition, SharePoint’s Version Document Libraries store full copies of document versions (not just the delta between versions), resulting in significant additional storage costs.

Retention management.

It is challenging to implement effective retention and disposition policies to reduce compliance risks because of the lack of central control over distributed deployments and the difficulty implementing Information Management policies in organisations with multiple SharePoint farms.

In Conclusion

In ending this article, choosing a SharePoint Auditing format requires careful thought, planning and design. This design is carried out by a successful combination of the business through information analysis and SharePoint solution architects. In terms of Enterprise Content Management, it is one of the most important steps in realising the full power and potential of SharePoint in managing compliancy and archive retention.

SharePoint Archiving – Defining a way Forward

SharePoint Conference Full Farm Failover Demo – SPC11

Geoff Evelyn — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:22:36 +0000

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim was demoed using SQL Server “Denali” Always On to fail-over a 14.4 TB SharePoint content database to a secondary database server in 45 seconds. Very impressive, and you are able to get more information here including seeing the video of the event.

The 10 minute full farm failover keynote demo is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pandrew/archive/2011/10/06/video-published-of-the-full-farm-failover-demo-in-the-sharepoint-2011-conference-keynote.aspx

Note. This is a SQL failover, not a physical infrastructure failover – so to have a full DR for the entire SharePoint environment so say fail to another datacenter you would need to factor in failing over the Web front ends and associated pieces.

There’s more though!

Paul Andrew has also published the report covering the Very Large Scale Document Archive Test Report
with all the details on the scalability lab results here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pandrew/archive/2011/10/03/sharepoint-scalability-report-and-the-sharepoint-conference-2011-keynote-demo.aspx

Happy Reading!

Get Office 365

Geoff Evelyn — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:29:44 +0000

Collaborate in the cloud with Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync videoconferencing. As a Microsoft Silver Partner in Collaboration Services we are able to provide Office 365 to your organisation. At the highest level of collaboration, one is able to communicate and share complex information from within a simple framework. Microsoft’s Office 365 offers such a framework. Download a trial to see for yourself and see how Office365 can improve productivity.

Meetings from a laptop.
File sharing in the cloud.
Closing deals by videoconference.
It all works together.