18 SharePoint Best Practice and In-Depth Methodologies - EPC Group

EPC Group Best Practices and
Methodologies Overview – Volume 3
18 Articles Covering Real-world “In the Trenches” Consulting Experiences

By: Errin O’Connor and the EPC Group Team of Experts
Errin O’Connor is the author of Microsoft SharePoint
Foundation 2010 and Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 Inside Out by Microsoft Press
Published September 2012

EPC Group | www.epcgroup.net | E-mail:sharepoint@epcgroup.net | Toll Free: (888) 381-9725

Table of Contents
Dissecting a Decade of SharePoint Consulting Success - Article 2 of 4: Whiteboarding .............................. 8
Whiteboarding Your SharePoint Road Map.............................................................................................. 8
Your Overall SharePoint Hierarchy - Whiteboarding ................................................................................ 8
Why Can’t You Just Give Us Sites .............................................................................................................. 9
Whiteboarding and the Big Picture........................................................................................................... 9
Branding UI Mockups ......................................................................................................................... 10
SharePoint 2013 Preview Summary - Managing Your Current SharePoint 2010 Initiative with 2013 in
Mind ............................................................................................................................................................ 10
Overview of SharePoint 2013 ................................................................................................................. 10
A Few Quick Security Points................................................................................................................ 10
Server-to-Server Authentication ......................................................................................................... 11
When Configuring SharePoint 2013 My Sites ..................................................................................... 11
SharePoint 2013 - User Profile Service Application - Activity Feed Job .............................................. 11
SharePoint 2013 – New Communities Feature (with Microblogging) ................................................ 11
SharePoint 2013 – The “Following” Settings ...................................................................................... 12
The SharePoint Server Feed Cache and Last Modified Time Cache ................................................... 12
SharePoint 2013 eDiscovery and In-Place Holds – “eDiscovery Centers” .......................................... 12
Configure Communication between SharePoint Server 2013 Preview and Exchange Server 2013
Preview ............................................................................................................................................... 12
SharePoint 2013’s Business Connectivity Service (BCS) ..................................................................... 12
SharePoint 2013 and Mobility ............................................................................................................ 13
The Single Biggest Change – SharePoint 2013 “apps” ........................................................................ 13
Service Applications in SharePoint 2013 and Upgrade Considerations to Test the SharePoint 2013
Preview ............................................................................................................................................... 14
Supported Editions for Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 Preview .................... 14
Summary of the SharePoint 2013 Preview ......................................................................................... 14
Developing a Hybrid SharePoint 2010 ERM ECM Platform (SPaaS) ......................................................... 15
A “Phase 0” Approach for SharePoint 2010................................................................................................ 16
My Site Implementation in SharePoint 2010 – A Best Practices Strategy .................................................. 18
SharePoint Consulting - Developing a SharePoint 2010 Steering Committee ............................................ 20


SharePoint 2010, Mobility, Browser Compatibility, Compliance, and its Continued Dominance in the
Marketplace ................................................................................................................................................ 22
Navigating the “World of SharePoint 2010” and All It Encompasses ......................................................... 25
The SharePoint 2010 “Magical Mystery Tour” ........................................................................................... 28
The Perceptions vs. Reality of I.T. and New Technologies ........................................................... 28
Scenarios to Consider ......................................................................................................................... 29
Items That Are Coming Down the Pipe – Like it or Not.................................................................. 29
Selecting the Right SharePoint Consulting Firm: Comparing Apples to Apples, or Apples to Oranges ...... 31
SharePoint 2010 Web Standards, Accessibility, and Usability Quick Reference Guide .............................. 34
SharePoint 2010 Accessibility ................................................................................................................. 34
Is Records Management and Usability, Together, Even Possible? ............................................................. 38
Why Large Enterprise and Global SharePoint Deployments Will Not Work in the Cloud .......................... 41
Best Practices for SharePoint Cultural Change Management - From the SharePoint Consulting Trenches
.................................................................................................................................................................... 43
Understanding Change in a Corporate Environment – EPC Group......................................................... 43
Common Types of Change in a Corporate Environment ........................................................................ 44
How Different Individuals Accept Change .............................................................................................. 45
Managing Environmental Change ........................................................................................................... 46
Understanding Power Dynamics and Change ......................................................................................... 48
Understanding Specific Changes that SharePoint Introduces ................................................................ 49
Governance and Potential Conflicts ....................................................................................................... 49
Knowing Where to Put Information........................................................................................................ 49
Knowing How Information Is to Be Handled........................................................................................... 50
Knowing Who Makes Which Decisions ................................................................................................... 50
Implementing Global Intranet Governance with a Proper Long-term Roadmap ....................................... 50
What is Governance? .............................................................................................................................. 50
Why Governance? ................................................................................................................................... 51
A Typical SharePoint Governance Plan (Uni-Centric Deployment)......................................................... 51
Global SharePoint Considerations .......................................................................................................... 51
Global WAN Performance ....................................................................................................................... 52
Global Farm Administration Considerations........................................................................................... 52
Global Help Desk and Support Considerations ....................................................................................... 52


Global Governance: Isolation Levels Examples....................................................................................... 53
Global Governance: Service Agreement Examples ................................................................................. 53
EPC Group Lessons Learned .................................................................................................................... 54
Your Global Organization's Intranet Strategy ......................................................................................... 55
650 Successful SharePoint Implementations – Dissecting a Decade of EPC Group Enterprise SharePoint
Success ........................................................................................................................................................ 56
Background ........................................................................................................................................... 56
Success! ................................................................................................................................................ 56
How Did We Get to the Message Above (Go-Live)? What Were the Steps that Ensured our
Successful Implementation?............................................................................................................... 57
SharePoint Training Session(s) ..................................................................................................... 57
Let’s Get Into Dissecting a Successful Engagement and the Method to EPC Group’s Project
Methodologies ........................................................................................................................................ 59
Project Initiation and Planning - Initiation and Definition Activities .................................................. 59
My Next 3 Articles Detailing EPC Group’s Decade of SharePoint Success Will Entail: ........... 66
Implementing SharePoint within Federal Government Agencies – Best Practices “From the Consulting
Trenches” Tips for Government IT Executives & Appointees .................................................................. 67
High Level Best Practices: SharePoint Source Code Management and the Related Deployment Process 69
50,000 Foot Overview ............................................................................................................................. 69
Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 69
Source Code Management– Coding Considerations ......................................................................... 70
Source Code Management ................................................................................................................. 70
Deployment Requirements/Objectives.............................................................................................. 70
Legacy SharePoint Deployments ...................................................................................................... 71
Legacy Deployment Limitations ......................................................................................................... 72
SharePoint 2010 Deployment ............................................................................................................ 72
Visual Studio 2010 Integration ....................................................................................................... 72
Creating solutions............................................................................................................................. 73
Building solutions ............................................................................................................................. 73
Packaging solutions ......................................................................................................................... 73
Deploying solutions .......................................................................................................................... 74
Remote Deployment ............................................................................................................................ 75


Tools Involved ....................................................................................................................................... 75
Solution Lifecycle in SharePoint .............................................................................................................. 75
Adding a solution to the Solution Store......................................................................................... 76
Solution Deployment and Distribution ........................................................................................... 76
Deployment Best Practices................................................................................................................. 76
SharePoint Consulting Best Practices for a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Deployment ............................... 77
Farms....................................................................................................................................................... 77
Web/Application Servers ..................................................................................................................... 77
Additional Web Server recommendations .................................................................................... 78
Database Servers................................................................................................................................. 78
Additional Environments ..................................................................................................................... 79
Development Environment.............................................................................................................. 80
Server Patches ..................................................................................................................................... 80
SharePoint 2010 Security Accounts .................................................................................................. 81
Required accounts ........................................................................................................................... 81
SharePoint Logging ............................................................................................................................. 82
SharePoint Management Tools ......................................................................................................... 83
Root Cause Analysis ....................................................................................................................... 84
SharePoint Search ............................................................................................................................... 86
Configure Kerberos Authentication.................................................................................................... 87
Kerberos configuration changes in SharePoint 2010 Products ................................................ 87
Considerations when upgrading from SharePoint Server 2007 ................................................ 88
Delegation across Domain and Forest Boundaries .................................................................... 88
Known issues .................................................................................................................................... 89
Additional background ..................................................................................................................... 89
Kerberos Authentication Checklist ................................................................................................. 90
Client integration .................................................................................................................................... 91
Microsoft Office Integration ................................................................................................................. 91
Microsoft Office Integration ............................................................................................................. 92
Browser Support ................................................................................................................................. 100
Mobile Browser Support .................................................................................................................... 101


Development......................................................................................................................................... 101
Customization Deployment Process (Application Development) ............................................... 101
Code Development and Deployment .............................................................................................. 104
Master Pages ...................................................................................................................................... 105
Command Line Administration ......................................................................................................... 105
Creation of PowerShell Scripts .................................................................................................... 106
Define Cmdlet Nouns..................................................................................................................... 106
Define Cmdlet Noun Properties ................................................................................................... 107
Define Cmdlet Verbs and Parameters ........................................................................................ 108
Define Cmdlet Errors, Progress and Pipeline ............................................................................ 109
SharePoint Designer 2010 versus Visual Studio 2010........................................................................... 110
Packaging and Deployment Technologies ..................................................................................... 110
SharePoint Features ...................................................................................................................... 110
SharePoint Solutions ..................................................................................................................... 111
Web Part Packages ....................................................................................................................... 111
Installation Types ............................................................................................................................... 111
Manual Installation ......................................................................................................................... 111
Scripted Installation ........................................................................................................................ 111
Automated Installation ................................................................................................................... 111
Customization Packaging, Deployment, and Installation ............................................................. 112
Packaging and Deployment Technologies ..................................................................................... 112
SharePoint Features ...................................................................................................................... 112
SharePoint Solutions ..................................................................................................................... 112
Web Part Packages ....................................................................................................................... 112
Code review Process (SharePoint Services Team)...................................................................... 112
Types of Code Review Activity ..................................................................................................... 113
Installation Types ............................................................................................................................... 114
Manual Installation ......................................................................................................................... 114
Scripted Installation ........................................................................................................................ 114
Automated Installation ................................................................................................................... 115
Upgrade Strategy ...................................................................................................................................... 115


Things to consider .............................................................................................................................. 115
Site Usage ............................................................................................................................................... 116
Administrative ..................................................................................................................................... 117
Quotas and Limitations (Examples) ................................................................................................ 117
Creating Site Pages ........................................................................................................................... 118
File and Document Limitations ..................................................................................................... 119
File Naming Tips................................................................................................................................. 120


Dissecting a Decade of SharePoint Consulting Success - Article 2 of 4:
Whiteboarding
Whiteboarding Your SharePoint Road Map

In most any enterprise SharePoint implementation, SP 2010 or 2013, one of the single most valuable
tools I find that most frequently provides that “Aha!” moment to both the business stakeholders and
I.T. (Information Technology) management is the $99.00 to $199.00 OfficeMax (or your favorite office
suppliers) whiteboard. This magical piece of bolt on the wall plastic has provided me and my team at
EPC Group.net more progress with our clients in the initial envisioning and requirements gathering
phases than any other tool. (It’s time to break out the red, green, and blue markers!)

SharePoint initiatives are in many cases described in the initial phases of an enterprise implementation
in abstract which can sometimes cause the (business) project stakeholders to get off track as they
think they are possibly hearing or understanding something different that the technical side of the
table is explaining that may not mesh in detail with known business terms.

Your Overall SharePoint Hierarchy - Whiteboarding

There is always a challenge in describing the SharePoint front-end (the Sites and Hierarchy) with the
back-end Site Collections and Content Databases. The business, understandably, just wants to store
their content and are typically wondering why it is such a big deal for them to describe the exact type
of content (size, type, content types metadata, etc.) to I.T. in this initial phase. I like to use the
analogy when I whiteboard an enterprise or global SharePoint solution with EPC Group’s clients that
the hierarchy (sites, landing pages, templates, etc.) are the front-end visual pieces but if “we were to
remove this whiteboard from the wall” behind it we would find all of these “50 gallon drums or
buckets” that represent our content databases.

The content databases are critical (as the technical team knows) to store the content in a governed
manner for which the growth of these content databases is scaled and new content databases will be
created once the other content database(s) reach a specific size limit.

I like to then ask the business and technical teams to imagine strings connecting sites and site
collections to these content databases which will then connect to other areas of SharePoint in the
overall hierarchy which will affect areas such as search and even more importantly tie into security
(Active Directory SharePoint Security Groups, etc.)


Why Can’t You Just Give Us Sites

I think many of us have heard countless stories of SharePoint 2007 and the comparison to HBO’s
Deadwood or the “Wild Wild West”. I have experienced a lot of users detracting from SharePoint 2010
before they have even used it because of their “experience at their previous job where SharePoint was
just not governed.” I think we can all give a bit of blame to Microsoft’s marketing or sales department
(just a tad bit) for the “build it and they will come” Kevin Costner movie the “Field of Dreams”
mentality.

Build it and they definitely will come but the SharePoint Golden Rule, storing content in one place or
one version of the truth is key to SharePoint’s long-term success. There is no reason you have to call
your SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013 implementation “SharePoint”. Give it a name that is
relevant to your company and think of it as a core ecosystem to your business rather than just a piece
of Microsoft software. You will be amazed at the response you get from your user community when
you tailor the name, logo, or implement a bit of branding to make SharePoint your own.

My (Insert Company Name) or some other clever name for this new “powerful and game changing
platform” for which you are offering to your user base can be named anything you like and there is no
reason to just stick to “its SharePoint”. Naming contests to name the new SharePoint deployment are
always interesting but I swear the owner of the contest tends to stack the deck and ends up naming it
something they like in the end but I guess they held the cards.

Whiteboarding and the Big Picture

The great thing about getting the key stakeholders in a room and Whiteboarding not only the
SharePoint site hierarchy or site collections but the ability to get into detail about Active Directory
Groups that exist within the organization that may manage the permissions to the sites or to be able
to identify when these AD Groups are not sufficient to meet the needs and where SharePoint Security
Groups may then be identified as a security solutions.

Another major element of the Whiteboarding process is the population of the Profile Service in relation
to My Sites and how these fields are going to be published. There are always curve balls in this realm
when dealing with Global organizations. For example, in Germany you are not allowed to publish the
manager of an employee or specific other fields. This can become a bit of a governance challenge but
can easily be overcome when the key stakeholders are talking through the entire technical process
and workarounds for specific regions or datacenters.


Branding UI Mockups

When implementing a SharePoint 2010 or 2013 deployment, you will get the best user experience and
user buy-in if you implement an organizational specific “master page” or look and feel. With mobile
being more and more prevalent there are multiple ways to approach this but for this articles sake I
would recommend at least some CSS and logo updates to your sites to bring people into the portal.
The development of custom “master pages” can be a 4 or 5 week project so it’s key to determine your
budget allowance andor constraints around this type of tailoring of SharePoint.

EPC Group rolled out a deployment for several different NASA locations and the locations that did have
the branding (custom look and feel) did have about a 20% increased usage over the “plain”
SharePoint Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) templates. Branding is something that can be done in later Phases
but it’s key to keep in mind your organization’s mobile device strategy when road mapping and
planning your custom SharePoint branding initiative.

SharePoint 2013 Preview Summary - Managing Your Current SharePoint
2010 Initiative with 2013 in Mind

Overview of SharePoint 2013
With the SharePoint Server 2013 Preview being released yesterday there are a lot of organizations
who are currently involved in large SharePoint 2010 deployments who are wondering how best they
can adjust or minimize any system architecture or information architecture changes as well as
governance updates to their current initiative.

I have had the pleasure of being able to test SharePoint Server 2013 for about the past year and with
the preview and public information becoming available I wanted to put together this article to cover
some of the major changes that are coming with SharePoint Server 2013 (also SharePoint Foundation
2013) and things for you to think about in your current or planned SharePoint 2010 implementation.

Due to some release information restrictions I will use a lot of information verbatim that Microsoft
released publically yesterday but it is key to go with a Hybrid SharePoint Deployment methodology in
your current SharePoint 2010 deployment to adapt properly to a future upgrade of SharePoint 2013.

Note: As I have seen with SharePoint 2003, 2007 and 2010’s releases, some features may change or
be put into a future Service Pack but this is where the product stands publically today.

A Few Quick Security Points
In SharePoint 2013 Preview, claims-based authentication is the default and preferred method of user
authentication and is required to take advantage of server-to-server authentication and app
authentication.


The use of classic mode authentication, also known as Windows classic authentication, is discouraged
in SharePoint 2013 Preview and you can only create or configure web applications for classic mode
authentication with Windows PowerShell cmdlets.

Server-to-Server Authentication
“Server-to-server authentication enables you to share resources that live on various servers in a
SharePoint farm and access services, such as Exchange Server 2013 Preview and Lync Server 2013
Preview that are distributed among servers. Server-to-server authentication in SharePoint 2013
Preview also supports resource sharing and access with additional services that are compliant with the
server-to-server authentication protocol.”

For SSL: “Web applications that include server-to-server authentication endpoints for inbound server-
to-server requests, or that make outbound server-to-server requests must be configured to use
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).”

When Configuring SharePoint 2013 My Sites
SharePoint 2013 My Sites are hosted by a web application and rely on a User Profile service
application. SharePoint 2013 My Sites also requires a managed metadata service application and you
should also have a Search service application to use with My Sites as without the Search service
application the 2013 My Sites functionality will be affected. 2013 My Sites should also be configured
on their own Web Application (hence your SharePoint 2010 My Sites should as well) as well as Site
Collection (called the My Site Host Site Collection).

SharePoint 2013 - User Profile Service Application - Activity Feed Job
The User Profile Service Application - Activity Feed Job creates system generated posts in the feeds for
the following events:

 Following a tag
 Tagging an item
 Birthday celebration
 Job title change
 Workplace anniversary
 Updates to Ask Me About
 Posting on a note board

Note: Organizations who are developing custom web parts or features for Birthday Celebrations,
Workplace anniversaries, etc. should note this feature is out of the box in SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint 2013 – New Communities Feature (with Microblogging)
This feature allows you to create communities within your organization. You can create Community
Sites (with an OOTB template) as well as Community Portals. This is outside of your department
hierarchy that you currently use in SharePoint 2010 and should continue to go with in SharePoint
2013 but a mindset change should come into play around Departmental Sites vs. Communities and
Community Portals as this is getting into Social Collaboration Professional Networking in SharePoint
2013.


SharePoint 2013 – The “Following” Settings
“In the SharePoint Server 2013 Preview, following is a user-initiated action that indicates the user's
interest in a specific document, person, site, or tag. When users follow an item, new activities about
that item appear in the users’ newsfeeds on their My Sites. Users view all their followed items from
their My Sites.”

Note: This is something that will need to be added to your SharePoint 2010 SharePoint 2013
upgrade Governance Strategy in the future as there are settings governance around “Following” that
should be taken into consideration.

The SharePoint Server Feed Cache and Last Modified Time Cache
“The SharePoint Server 2013 Preview feeds require the Feed Cache and Last Modified Time Cache. The
Feed Cache maintains recent conversations and activities of entities. The Last Modified Time Cache
maintains the last modified time for all items in the Feed Cache. The Distributed Cache service
manages both the Feed Cache and the Last Modified Time Cache.”

Note: This is another example of added features coming out in SharePoint 2013 that organizations
should keep in mind as you may be developing custom features in your SharePoint 2010 deployment
around activities cache, etc.

“Last modified time information for recent conversations and activities” for much improved auditing as
well as user participation, etc. within a community or within SharePoint 2013 in general for
collaboration.

SharePoint 2013 eDiscovery and In-Place Holds – “eDiscovery Centers”
In SharePoint 2013, you can create eDiscovery Centers. There are Search service applications as well
as the determination of what content each Search service application should crawl. You can have a
single “eDiscovery Center” or multiple “eDiscovery Centers” and even associate the different centers
with the Search Service so that all discoverable content is crawled by a particular Search Service.

This is an extremely exciting new feature and will only add to SharePoint’s stance as a leader in not
only collaboration but a True ECM Records Management Platform with industry leading Social
Professional Networking.

Configure Communication between SharePoint Server 2013 Preview and Exchange Server
2013 Preview
If you will use a SharePoint eDiscovery Center to discover content in Exchange Server, you must
configure SharePoint Server 2013 Preview and Exchange Server to interact.

Note: To discover content in Exchange Server from a SharePoint eDiscovery Center, you must be
running Exchange Server 2013 Preview.

Also, Content is only discoverable if it is crawled and indexed by the Search service application that is
associated with the web application that the eDiscovery Center is in. It’s important to identify this
Search service application when you are planning for eDiscovery in SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint 2013’s Business Connectivity Service (BCS)
“Every Business Connectivity Services solution is unique because each business has unique data
integration problems that it is solving by using Business Connectivity Services. The solutions can
range from something simple and straightforward that a power user or IT professional (who has the


appropriate permissions) can perform by themselves, to complex solutions that require developer, IT
professional, and end-user solution development involvement”

This is a shift to an extent from SharePoint 2010’s BCS mindset as instead of creating a centralized
BCS for the entire organization to pull from you can tailor it more towards specific departmental or
project needs and even to a type of role like a Power User. This is an extremely exciting new feature
as reporting is going to be more powerful with audience driven capabilities.

SharePoint 2013 and Mobility
Microsoft is absolutely committed to mobility in SharePoint 2013 to work on pretty much every mobile
or edge device out there. Also, there is a concept of a Microsoft Office 2013 Application being licensed
to a user and not just a device which is a new concept. A roaming type of license will be released so
that users can access "their" copy of Office 2013 wherever they are on which ever device they have
with them.

The Single Biggest Change – SharePoint 2013 “apps”
“The apps for SharePoint provide a new method to deliver specific information or functionality to a
SharePoint site. An app for SharePoint is a small, easy-to-use, stand-alone app that solves a specific
end-user or business need. Site owners can discover and download apps for SharePoint from a public
SharePoint Store or from their organization's internal App Catalog and install them on their SharePoint
sites. These apps for SharePoint integrate the best of the web with SharePoint 2013 Preview. They do
not replace SharePoint features and solution packages, which customize or enhance SharePoint sites.
Unlike features and solutions, which farm or site collection administrators have to install, apps for
SharePoint are stand-alone applications that owners of sites can add to their SharePoint sites. The
apps for SharePoint have a simple lifecycle - they can be installed, upgraded, and uninstalled by site
owners.”

The following are examples of apps for SharePoint that site owners could add to their sites:

 An app that provides event planning tools.
 An app that provides a shopping cart experience for a site.
 An app that sends a note of recognition for good work (kudos) to someone in the organization.

This is where Microsoft is offering a public SharePoint “App Store” concept as well as the private onsite
company specific “App Store” concept. Your organization can have an “App Store” or almost along the
same lines as the “Center of Excellence” concept where you have reusable solutions that can be
deployed across the organization. Workflows, Web Parts, etc. (apps) can be more prevalently
displayed to the organization. I think “private clouds” (i.e. Onsite or On-premise” environments,
probably 70% of the SharePoint world will not feel comfortable purchasing apps from Microsoft’s app
store right from the beginning due to information security risks or perceived risks as they will more
than likely insist that the code be provided with the “app”.

I have been a longtime proponent of the “Solutions Gallery” in an onsite Center of Excellence and this
is a similar concept and is great for Microsoft to roll out in SharePoint 2013 as it will be more
prominently featured and promoted throughout the organization.

There is also a consideration of an app license as well as support and any change requests for that app
and will the developer support that and if so what is the cost and if its internal, can there be charge
backs to that department, etc. This will all be part of SharePoint 2013’s governance model and should
start to be added to your existing SharePoint 2010 governance strategy.


Service Applications in SharePoint 2013 and Upgrade Considerations to Test the SharePoint
2013 Preview
“The following service applications have databases that can be upgraded when you upgrade from
SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Server 2013 Preview:

 Business Data Connectivity service application
 Managed Metadata service application
 PerformancePoint Services service application
 Search service application
 Secure Store Service application
 User Profile service application

Attaching and upgrading these databases configures these service applications. Settings for other
services will have to be reconfigured when you upgrade.”

Supported Editions for Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 Preview
“The following table lists the editions available for SharePoint Server 2010 and the supported and
unsupported ending editions when you upgrade to SharePoint Server 2013 Preview.”

Starting Edition Supported Ending Edition Unsupported Ending Edition

SharePoint Server 2013 Preview,
Enterprise edition
SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2013
Standard edition Preview, Standard edition
You can convert to Enterprise
edition after upgrade.

SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2013 SharePoint Server 2013 Preview,
Enterprise Edition Preview, Enterprise edition Standard edition.

SharePoint Server 2013 Preview,
full product
SharePoint Server 2010, Trial SharePoint Server 2013
edition Preview, Trial edition
You can convert to the full product
after upgrade.

Summary of the SharePoint 2013 Preview
SharePoint 2013 has a lot of exciting new features and it will be interesting to see how the SharePoint
Product Team at Microsoft continues to build and package but the features and solutions within 2013
should give you and your organization added confidence in the fact that you have selected a solution
that Microsoft is backing with its full support and has tagged SharePoint as its flagship product.


Developing a Hybrid SharePoint 2010 ERM ECM Platform (SPaaS)
In developing any Enterprise Records Management (ERM) or (ECM) Platform, the key to long-term
success is your organizations ability to develop a roadmap that takes into consideration the
hybrid types of business and functional requirements that the systems user base will encounter in the
many months and years to follow its launch.

I am focusing on SharePoint 2010, but its key to take a step back and not just focus on the
technology, SharePoint, but what the true needs of the organization are and how best an
implementation can not only improve the work lives of the staff but to provide Return on Investment
(ROI) to the organization.

This ROI can be measured in terms of productivity, limitation of legal and litigious exposure of "old"
records no longer required by the approved retention schedule, improve search, or even
decommissioning several other systems with the licensing, support, and O&M costs associated with
those "other" systems.

There are so many organizations midstream in their initiatives that are not taking into consideration a
“core set of metadata content types” but also the need for mobile compatibility and the development
of a roadmap that takes into account the functional or business needs that may come into play 24
months down the road.

A SharePoint Platform as a Service (SPaaS) with a hybrid approach will allow you to avoid so many
pitfalls and the need to re-architect or modify the system in the future. What should be in this
SharePoint Platform as a Service?

Good starting points for services to include are as follows: (Note: Think in terms of a Hybrid
SharePoint Ecosystem)

 Records Management Service

 Workflow (Reusable) Service

 Business Intelligence Reporting Service (Dashboards, Scorecards, etc.)

 Collaboration Service

 Intranet Service

 Extranet Service

 A possible Internet facing SharePoint Service

 Mobile “Edge Device” Service

 Learning Management System Service (Training)

 Application Development Service

 Corporate Communication Service

 File Share Replacement Service

 Social, or I prefer, a Professional Networking Service (My Sites, etc.)


 Scanning Service (OCR) (Paperless Green Initiatives)

SharePoint 2010 can accomplish all of these elements, but it is absolutely crucial for you and your
project team to be forward thinking and not scared to face these items that will inevitably come up in
a meeting in the next 24 months so why not be prepared.

The lack of, andor, how to govern these items can be a major factor in many organizations not
moving forward on several of the items I have listed above but I will address that in a future post.

To touch on one, the mobile world is here so if you are not developing your solution to be compatible
or to be able to adapt to mobile technology in the future, you may be creating a whole new project for
yourself in the future. These elements are true whether you are talking about a major government
institution, a Fortune 500 company, or a 500 user SharePoint rollout.

In my posts to follow, I will drill down on strategies that will help you accomplish these challenges and
help to ensure your SharePoint initiative is a success not only in phase 1 but in phase 5 or phase 6.

False starts in early phases can alienate your user base and stifle future phases or major ROI
elements of SharePoint so get your hybrid SharePoint Platform as a Service (24-36 month) roadmap
together as soon as possible.

A “Phase 0” Approach for SharePoint 2010
An approach that I have seen work well for a large number of organizations either implementing a
new SharePoint 2010 enterprise implementation or possibly upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to
SharePoint 2010 is to complete a “Phase 0” initiative prior to rolling out a full blown Phase 1 project.

“Phase 0” is a term for a project that helps the organization take a deep look at themselves to develop
a "SharePoint 2010 roadmap” and should be very forward looking into an organization’s I.T.
strategy. SharePoint 2010 is a Platform that can support an unparalleled number of both business
needs and your staff’s functionality requirements in terms of an application.

As part of my job as EPC Group’s CEO is to sit down with CIO’s, I.T. Directors, Legal and Compliance
Department heads, and business owners to find out what exactly their current “state” is and what
technology it is that they have implemented, how well it is working for their organization, and to
discuss how SharePoint can assist them in providing real Return on Investment (ROI) for their
organization.

I like to really step back from the technology (that being SharePoint) and just look at what the
business is trying to accomplish and how I.T. is supporting their organization’s (really their end-user
or clients) needs. This conversation and project methodology can take a million different twists and
turns at the beginning, but it really comes down to how best I.T. can utilize their available budget and
time constraints.

What applications, licensing, hardware, staff, and biggest business concern (or squeaky wheel) needs
to be addressed. But this all has to be done the right way by developing a 24-36 month roadmap to
take into consideration the ever changing technology or mobile world we have all been accustom too
in this “we expect the information now” mindset.


A CIO or I.T. Director may be focused on an enterprise strategy where a “Legal and Compliance”
department may be looking at records and how best to focus on implementing or enforcing a records
retention schedule to lower its possible litigation exposure and simply get the organization’s “records”
in order.

That begs the question, what is a record and is everyone on the same page about the importance of
that record? Is I.T. currently focused on implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM or
ERM) solution or rather to develop a “Portal” type solution to enhance the organizations collaboration
between staff members? Is there a concern regarding the licensing model purchases (a possible
existing Documentum, LiveLink, FileNet, or Internet solution) that is currently being utilized to meet a
specific need or possibly being discussed and is a possible political landmine? (These need to be
addressed).

Microsoft SharePoint is being utilized in most every major organization (in varying capacities) from
Wells Fargo to Viacom (MTV) to the Department of State and at the Pentagon. It’s being used in
varying capacities at pharmaceutical companies, most every branch of the U.S. Government, the
world’s top financial institutions, and even at your local YMCA chapter. It’s becoming as common as
Microsoft Word.

SharePoint needs a roadmap and a solid governance strategy as well as a support model and a
configuration customization policy. You will need a training strategy (including train-the-trainer and
power users) and to really look at where the organization is going in email (records) management as
well as automating paper-based processes into workflows.

What is that big “quick win” you’re looking for in SharePoint? What is the ROI analysis you’re looking
to provide? If you already have SharePoint implemented you may be looking at performance,
redundancy in farms, what in the world a “cloud” solution could do for you and the many add-ins
(3rd party SharePoint solutions) and security concerns you may need to address.

If you’re looking at replacing your existing document management system, Internet solutions,
Intranet solution, or file shares with SharePoint or adding mobile capabilities to your organization you
may be asking an entire different set of questions.

This is why a “Phase 0” project can be so valuable but even if your organization is in Phase 1 or Phase
2 of an existing enterprise implementation, it’s never too late to ask these questions and level-set on
your roadmap or “pop the hood” to do a health check and assessment (or ROI check) on what you
currently have going.


My Site Implementation in SharePoint 2010 – A Best Practices Strategy
A SharePoint 2010 Enterprise initiative must be approached in a manner to ensure it is implemented
with a “Platform Strategy” and “SharePoint as a Service” in mind. This not only includes the
implementation of a Document Management Records Management SharePoint 2010 enterprise
initiative in mind but all of the other facets that SharePoint 2010 bring to an organization.

I speak with business leaders and CIOsIT Directors on a regular basis during my day-to-day activities
at EPC Group and one question I continue to hear from many organizations is, “what is your opinion
on how we could successful roll out SharePoint 2010 My Sites to our organization and how many other
similar companies like ours are rolling it out”? The answer is currently about 6040 in that 60% of
organizations are rolling out My Sites and 40% are in a “wait and see” pattern and are struggling with
legal & compliance or leadership who have serious concerns about rolling out My Sites.

I always discuss with client, in terms of a record, what is the difference between an email or a
post on a My Site? Is there really any difference in the two from a legal perspective and unless the
organization regularly monitors a large subset of employees emails, which is rare. My Sites are my
more easily monitored and governable. In this, SharePoint 2010 My Site Governance is key and some
initial core areas of consideration should be:

 All My Site Public View content must contain only work-related material. This includes work-related
documents, discussions, pictures, links, calendar events, and related content.

 No My Site Public View content can contain any confidential or private data. If the organization would
not allow all users within the company with a domain login to view this information, consider whether
it should be on your My Site Public View.

 Content pertaining to human resources or legal (sensitive in nature) is typically considered confidential
and should not be listed on My Site Public View.

 No PII or PHI (personal health information) information should ever be present in My Sites

o PII: Organization may differ on what PII they may consider PII data. Data about an individual that
could potentially identify that person, such as a name, fingerprints or other biometric data, email
address, street address, telephone number or social security number. A subset of PII is PIFI
(personally identifiable financial information).

o PHI: under HIPAA includes any individually identifiable health information. Identifiable refers not only
to data that is explicitly linked to a particular individual (that's identified information). It also includes
health information with data items which reasonably could be expected to allow individual
identification.

 Public and already released financial data must be reviewed prior to its posting on My Site Public View.
(i.e. Reports, etc.)

 Content on the private site must not contain personal audio files, inappropriate pictures, or other
materials not allowed within the organization.


 All discussions or blogging done within a My Site must follow company policies and must not contain
sensitive company material or defamatory comments about any person within the organization.

I think a key area for organizations to look at is first not thinking of My Sites as the “Facebook” of the
enterprise, even thou it was a lot of similar characteristics. Facebook is a poorly governed (by its out-
of-the-box configured) nature and the user is responsible to setting proper permissions, showing what
posts can be publically viewed, etc.

It’s key to think of SharePoint 2010’s My Site as “Professional Networking” and that is the only term
they should ever be referred to as that help set a standard and mindset within users. The other key
area of concern I see is that organizations fear that existing and approved “policies and procedures” or
“standard operating procedures” could be confused by someone’s “best practices” post on their My
Site and again this is easily addressed. Having users sign either an online My Site “Professional
Networking” user agreement or a paper based user agreement with the governance items and conduct
responsibilities clearly spelled out is a great way myself and my professional networking teams at EPC
Group have seen completely change the mindset and landscape of fears organizations face.

My Sites are an extremely powerful tool that, in my estimation, 40% of organizations are putting on
the back burner or “in a later phase” that is causing them to loose productivity with this amazing tool
at their fingertips (and by the way you already purchasedown it). You can institute My Site
governance policies as well as actually configure the My Site templates with only the web parts and
functionality you would like your user base to access and you do not have to give them all the
capabilities right out of the gate.

My advice would be to pilot My Sites within 1 or 2 departments and test these strategies with these
users and see how much ROI you really get out of them as I can guarantee you will be amazed at user
productivity. One last area of concern I wanted to address is that organizations sometimes see the
“My Site” as a replacement to the users existing personal file share. This may or may not be the case
but my setting quotas on the My Sites and instituting required Content Type Metadata selection
when they save documents will make a huge difference in your thinking in this area. These documents
will also allow the users to fully search them with SharePoint’s native search and save the user time
by searching rather than hunting and pecking around usually very poorly organized file shares.

In the past 4 months, we have completed over 5 extremely large enterprise My Site implementations
in both the commercial (2 Fortune 500) and 2 mid-size organizations (1 government) and have not
seen issues where they caused any major issues but rather training requirements to help users get
used to having this powerful tool at their fingertips.

In summary, pilot My Sites for "Professional Networking" within 1 or 2 departments as you will not
regret it.


SharePoint Consulting - Developing a SharePoint 2010 Steering
Committee
Within an enterprise SharePoint 2010 deployment, a key best practice to ensure your organization’s
long-term SharePoint’s success is the creation of a SharePoint Steering committee and engaging
andor including your organization’s key business and technology leaders to this committee. The
SharePoint Steering Committee is the overall governing body of Microsoft SharePoint that ensures the
technology is implemented so that it will fit the business and functional needs of the organization for
years to come as well as to ensure the decisions that are made will not affect future upgrades of the
technology.

I have been working with my senior architecture team at EPC Group on a series of white papers to
provide to the SharePoint community through our SharePoint Consulting efforts and lessons learned.

Define
First determine who the key stakeholders are that should be involved in the SharePoint Steering
committee. Initially, develop a somewhat generic forum to discuss the phase 1 and future phase 2
(phase 3, phase 4, etc.) issues as the committee will learn over time how best to work together and
will identify internal committee roles that will work best within the organization. Typically, these are
Business Leaders, IT Managers, Key Technology Stakeholders, Legal, and Records Management
owners, etc.

Educate
It is key that the SharePoint Services Team demo to the SharePoint Steering Committee any existing
solutions that have been created in phase 1 and discuss the types of requests that are coming in to
the SharePoint Services Team to help the Steering Committee understand the overall scale of the
SharePoint, its growth and the types of business units within the organization making the requests.
Ongoing demos should continue to be demoed to the SharePoint Steering Committee to reflect any
updates or new projects.

SharePoint 2010 Steering Committee Best Practices
The SharePoint Steering committee is comprised of key stakeholders who oversees the strategic
service direction and provides policy guidance.

The SharePoint Steering Committee will be comprised of a number of roles through the organization
including the SharePoint Services Team Senior Management and SharePoint Stakeholders. SharePoint
Stakeholders are defined as those in the business units which rely on the SharePoint Services as a
part of their business operation. The committee will meet regularly with defined success criteria and
measurable goals based on project definition, design and timeline.

The SharePoint Steering Committee should meet regularly to revisit structure, responsibilities and
membership to ensure maximum effectiveness as well as potential scope changes for the organization
to address changes in business conditions and technology.

The role of the SharePoint Steering Committee will be to:

•Aligning SharePoint initiatives to overall business goals.
•Set strategic and functional guidance to the SharePoint Platform Service(s) Team.
•Continually assess SharePoint project viability.
•Determine corporate standards.
•Approve all governance, standards and policies.

Note: With large enterprise organizations, other business units or subsidiaries worldwide may adopt
some of their own regional governance policies (i.e. development, etc.) and the SharePoint Steering
Committee will be responsible for taking these local considerations into the overall SharePoint 2010
Governance to ensure SharePoint governance stays up-to-date and relevant.


•Approve content publishing policies and assigning departmental and functional ownership.
•Approve SharePoint branding/usability/look and feel.
•Approve changes to the SharePoint Governance Document.
•Review any 3rd party SharePoint Software Vendor purchase requests to ensure that any large
licensing purchases are taken into consideration at the enterprise level.
•Ensure the SharePoint training strategies continue to fit the needs of the organization.
Roles

An overview of Best Practices responsibilities for the an organization’s SharePoint Steering Committee
are as follows:

Roles and Their Responsibilities

SharePoint Steering Committee Chair Person
Responsible for Chairing the SharePoint Steering Committee and owning sign-offs and casting the
overall vote or decision should any impasse occur.

SharePoint Platform or Services Owner
The overall platform or service owner of SharePoint who is responsible for all SharePoint Product and
Technology Efforts and Leads the SharePoint Steering Committee meetings and is the manager of the
SharePoint Services Team.

SharePoint Services Team Manager
The manager of the SharePoint Services team who is responsible for managing the day-to-day
activities of the SharePoint Services team and delegating the incoming requests coming into the team
from the different business units.

Records Management Representative
A key stakeholder for Records Management within the organization and ensures the technology and
business decisions being made for the SharePoint System continue to follow the records management
standards within the organization.

Development Team(s) Representative
A key stakeholder or manager representing the SharePoint development teams and providing input on
the continued development and how best the custom SharePoint Solutions should be managed and
added into the SharePoint platform (i.e. continuing the development of a SharePoint as a Service
Concept I have written about in the past).

SharePoint Training Representative
A key stakeholder from training that will continue to monitor the ongoing activities of the SharePoint
2010 initiative while continuing to deliver training to the different audiences to meet the ongoing and
possible changing needs and requirements of the SharePoint user base within the organization.

Help Desk or Service Desk Representative
A key stakeholder from your organization’s help desk service desk or I.T. support staff that will
monitor the activities of SharePoint and report back to the committee on metrics regarding support
calls, possible resolutions to reoccurring issues, and ensure they continue to be properly trained and
proactive regarding the overall SharePoint Services within the organization.

SharePoint Governance, as we all know is one of the major keys to any organization's SharePoint
long-term success, and implementing a SharePoint 2010 Steering Committee is something that myself
and my team at EPC Group.net have helped to establish within organizations and it’s something that is
overlooked in at least 80% of enterprise SharePoint implementations.


SharePoint 2010, Mobility, Browser Compatibility, Compliance, and its
Continued Dominance in the Marketplace
Like a stock trader who has purchased a “put” on a stock in hopes the stock value will decrease, I
continue to see articles and blogs every now and then asking questions and making statements on
doubts about how long SharePoint can remain dominant or how it will adopt to the ever changing
mobile world. Also these folks question how SharePoint 2010 can meet compliance and eDiscovery
challenges or replace Documentum, LiveLink, FileNet, or other ECMERM systems.

My theory on these writers or speakers who have these opinions (or hopeful “stock puts”) is that they
do only that… write and speak but really don’t ever set foot into a client’s conference room or have
more of a vested interest in LiveLink, OpenText, etc. succeeding, and don’t spend 5 days a week over
months working with a client on their initial business requirements, political challenges, functional and
compliance requirements, development best practices, roadmap, and governance challenges that
the organization faces or will face. It’s one thing to speak in theory or abstract but a whole different
world when you have a timeline, budget, and a client who is investing a great deal on a high profile
project that will affect most everyone in the organization.

Mobility and SharePoint 2010

When implementing your SharePoint 2010 environment, which should be a Hybrid Platform to meet
many of your organizations challenges over the years to come, mobility is something that must be in
your organizations roadmap.

It is critical to gather your organization’s mobile requirements, such as:

 Is the organizations staff accessing IntranetECM content and will they need a specific tailored
experience?

 What type of content do they want delivered to their mobile device?

 What devices (and version of the devices) is the organization going to allow (govern) users to have to
access SharePoint? (I.e. Just BlackBerrys and iPhones or other devices as well?)

Note: This includes the browser compatibility governance the organization will allow.

 Are there specific business units or departments that would benefit from having business intelligence,
analytics, and reports available at their fingertips wherever they are in the world and would that
provide true ROI to the business?

 How will the organizations requirements around mobile affect our existing SharePoint roadmap or the
existing configuration deployment we have in place and how can we adapt to stay ahead of the
mobile curve

SharePoint 2010’s Mobile Browser Compatibility

SharePoint also supports a wide variety of mobile browsers, which includes:

 IE Mobile on Windows Mobile 5/6 and newer versions

 Safari4 and newer versions on the iPhone (3/4) and iPad (1/2)


 BlackBerry 4.x and newer versions

 Nokia S60

 Openwave 6.2, 7.0 and newer versions

 NetFront 3.4, 3.5 and newer versions

 Opera Mobile 8.65 and newer versions

Governing Mobile Devices Browser Support

Another little known fact is that you can govern the specific devices that can access your SharePoint
experience and actually redirect the user to a specific template based upon SharePoint recognizing the
mobile device’s browser and sending them to the specific template for optimal user experience.

I am guessing the detractors of SharePoint 2010’s mobile capabilities have not actually sat down with
multiple clients and gathered the requirements, developed, implemented, and successfully rolled out
either custom or tailored mobile applications to Fortune 1000 or large government organizations.

Technical Note: “In SharePoint 2010, the USERAGENT recognize for accessing mobile browser to
redirect to a mobile view is managed by the file “compat.browser” within the server’s IIS directory
that manages device profiles (If the web application port is, for example, 80, the file path will be
"inetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories80App_Browserscompat.browser"). With a text editor, the
file can be modified to change redirect behavior. The IsMobileDevice attribute of that mobile browser
when set to FALSE will cause SharePoint to bypass the mobile view for that browser.”

This means you can govern the exact mobile devices as well as the pages these users will see to
ensure an optimal mobile experience.

The PC is Not Dead, but We Are Headed Back to the “Dummy Terminal” Days (Somewhat)

We are years away from seeing major organizations completely get away from a desktop or laptop
machine being used as a primary means of accessing the web browser to do their day to day tasks
and activities. With that said, limiting the space on the user’s machine and forcing them to save their
documentscontent into SharePoint with the proper metadata (content types) tagging is upon us. Also,
in the email world as PSTs are becoming a thing of the past, and we will also see the increase of users
having increased (shorter) retention scheduled on their email to force them to either delete the email
as it is not relevant or to movearchive it to SharePoint for storage as a record.

Note: There will always be exceptions when a user has a project or activity that may take years to
complete and the email must be maintained for years to come but viewing email as well as social
professional networking content as a record is definitely here today.

There have been 40+ enterprise projects that myself and my firm at EPC Group have implemented
using SharePoint 2010 were the clients requirements were that SharePoint content must be
compatible not only using Internet Explorer (IE) but also Safari (for MAC users) as well as Mozilla
Firefox and Google Chrome. This was accomplished and you can, after a little configuration and
testing, get almost the exact same experience on these browsers. There are some things natively that
the users will not have the exact same experience with on these different browsers but that is where
ensuring your mobile business and functional requirements are aligned properly to ensure project


success and client satisfaction.

Compliance in SharePoint 2010

Your organization’s SharePoint 2010’s Enterprise Content Management Strategy should include
information regarding:

 Personally Identifiable Information (PII)- PII is broadly defined as information that can be traced
back to a specific individual. Employees must distinguish between Protected PII and Publicly
Releasable PII. All information identifiable to a specific individual is protected PII unless listed as
publicly releasable PII.

 If government, Controlled Unclassified Information– "Controlled Unclassified Information" is a
categorical designation, formerly referred to as Sensitive but Unclassified, that refers to unclassified
information that is (i) pertinent to the national interests of the United States or to the important
interests of entities outside the Federal Government, and (ii) under law or policy requires protection
from unauthorized disclosure, special handling safeguards, or prescribed limits on exchange or
dissemination. [1]

[1]White House Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, Designation and
Sharing of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), May 7, 2008

 508 Compliance - Section 508 requires that federal agencies’ electronic and information technology
is accessible to people with disabilities. GSA has been charged with the task of educating federal
employees and building the infrastructure necessary to support Section 508 implementation. Using
this web site, federal employees and the public can access resources for understanding and
implementing the requirements of Section 508 as they apply to the development, procurement,
maintenance, or use of electronic and information technology products and services, including
software applications and operating systems, web-based internet and intranet information systems,
telecommunications products, video and multimedia products, self-contained closed products and
desktop and portable computers.

Note: For additional information: http://www.section508.gov/

SharePoint’s Continued Dominance

As I mentioned in a previous article, what other system can allow you to implement a Hybrid
Platform with one licensing model, one common skillset for your support staff, and browser, mobile,
and Microsoft Office compatibility with Social Professional Networking capability all built in? There is
not one out there and that is why Documentum, LiveLink, FileNet, and many others are more and
more wanting to “play nice” with SharePoint and offer more integration capabilities so that they have
some option of even getting in the door or not being replaced.

Microsoft Office 15, rumored to be planned and in initial development in Redmond, will
include SharePoint 15 (with a rumored release of sometime in mid to late 2014) which will continue
to build on SharePoint’s already industry quadrant leading Enterprise Content Management, Social
Professional Networking, mobility, collaboration, etc. to continue to be the market leader and “The
Platform Ecosystem” for which organizations will turn to for at least the next decade.


Navigating the “World of SharePoint 2010” and All It Encompasses
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is one of the most popular software programs platforms in history and
with it has come a community with a near cult following as well as a large number of extremely
powerful products that can integrate with it and continue to allow it to be tailored to your
organization’s specific business needs.

For a CIO or IT Director new to the world of SharePoint I can’t imagine the questions they must may
have as the blogosphere web can provide them with a fantastic amount of free information (correct
and unbelievably incorrect), but it is key to consider the source. Is this person that authored the
article 2 years into SharePoint and on their 1st or 2nd deployment or an administrator within their
company in a very specific environment meant to meet a specific need of their organization or a true
SharePoint expert or just an SharePoint trainer speaking in theory.

Playing devil’s advocate, and not to say I am the top expert out there on SharePoint, but I know of
myself and a handful of others in the U.S. who have been working with SharePoint since its 2001
release (in the Tahoe days).

It pains me to read 17 articles on governance that all have a different opinion but what are their
experiences? (Client’s Sources, etc.) What set of external circumstances did this “governance
project” have in terms of political landmines, possibly the business or I.T. having issues with the
development department(s) or even the parent company who “owns” the top level SharePoint farm
but a division or partner firm wanting to stand-up their own specific SharePoint farm to meet
requirements or a timeline that the parent company cannot meet.

Business does not always play nice with I.T. and vice versa.

System Architecture – Environment

You can absolutely virtualize your entire SharePoint environment, including your SQL Server(s). My
team at EPC Group has done it on 75+ SharePoint 2010 projects with absolutely no issues. This has
been a long standing questions regarding, “Should we keep the front-end web servers virtual and
make the SQL boxes physical?” You can absolutely virtualize the entire farm with no issues.

Third-Party Tools and SharePoint ISVs

Over the past 8 or 9 years I have had the sincere pleasure of working with some of the top SharePoint
ISVs out there and over the years some of come and gone but they key players are still there such as:

1. Idera

2. Metalogix

3. AvePoint

4. Axceler

5. Colligo

6. HiSoftware

7. Tzunami


8. WebPartGallery

9. Bamboo Solutions

10. Quest

11. KnowledgeLake

12. And many others I do not have room to mention but are very reputable

From an I.T. Director or SharePoint decision maker’s standpoint, what product is right for your firm?

Are you looking for a disaster recovery solution, a Performance Monitoring, Security tools, Migration
solutions, SharePoint Email tools, 508 compliance solutions, Web parts, a tool to take out the trash
and clean the kitchen sink?

In all fairness there are so many ISVs with high integrity that really want to do what is right for the
client and then there are others that are transactional and want to sell you the entire suite, all the
support you can buy, and put fear in you that the sky may be falling unless you purchase their
product.

It is critical that you develop our initial business requirements as well as your SharePoint roadmap to
take into consideration the true needs of your business and then look at the support staff you have
available.

Could one of these powerful third-party tools almost act as another full-time employee (FTE) and offer
substantial ROI? In many cases, I have personally seen this be the case but do your homework,
demo, test, and ask the tough questions.

SharePoint Conferences

Prior to reading this section you may want to have an Advil or Tylenol bottle close at hand. I have had
the pleasure of speaking at most every type of SharePoint conference in the U.S. and a few in Canada
and I can tell you that all of these conference have the very best intentions in mind; Sharing
information to the attendees so they can take it back to their place of work and perform at a high level
or provide this knowledge to co-workers, etc.

Having spoken at over 100 conferences in the past 2 years I see a pattern developing recently thou
that is starting to take the “fire” or interest out of some of the conferences.

That issue is repetitive information and the same topics being shared time and time again. Titles that
start with things like:

 Best Practices

 Real-World

 From the Trenches - ok that was mine :)

 Lessons Learned

Note: These are all great but its time someone kick the conferences up a notch and provide case
studies, bring their clients, show massive amounts of screen shots, and talk about the failures and


how they were overcome and how you had to sit down with the client and have the hard conversation
to get through an issue and keep the project going.

Taking the same exact Technology type sessions from one coast to the other will work for a short time
but it will not sustain longevity and attendees will indeed stop attending.

EPC Group is current engaged on several SharePoint projects that are 24+ months long (80K plus
users) and with any project there are going to be small issues (and sometimes large ones) that must
be ironed out and there must be constant, granular communications and conversations from both the
consulting side and the client side (a marriage of sorts or at least a long term dating relationship) to
make a project that is so high profile successful that everyone in the company has access to it as jobs
may be on the line.

SharePoint is unique in that sense; we are not installing some one-off solution that only one
department will use every now and then. This is a platform, an ecosystem for which is core to the
business.

There is so much Return on Investment (ROI) in a SharePoint 2010 initiative it is almost comical but
sometimes it takes pioneers from within and a power user super user concept to get people to
realize it or take a chance on innovation with this supercharged platform.


The SharePoint 2010 “Magical Mystery Tour”

The Perceptions vs. Reality of I.T. and New Technologies

When discussing with a client who is considering or beginning the process of rolling out SharePoint
2010, I sometimes feel like a broken record in saying, “yes, it can accomplish that” or “it can be
implemented to replace this or that system” but in reality these are all true statements. I read an
interesting article the other day regarding Facebook and its comparison to corporate technologies and
SharePoint in particular.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003 (2 full SharePoint releases ago) had My Site (social)
capabilities but it was before its time and management, legal, compliance, and CIOs were rightfully
concerned and doing their due diligence in seeing how this new feature, along with others, such as
blogs and wikis would positively or negatively affect their organization. Many of these organizations
with these concerns thou also relied on file shares and antiquated HTML or custom .asp Intranets and
good enough was better than the risk perceived.

There are some organizations that have taken SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010’s (social)
professional networking capabilities (My Sites) and practically stood them on their head in doing some
real work (i.e. allocating budget and resources) with huge ROI. SharePoint 2010’s capabilities bring
your staff together to increase productivity, provide knowledge bases, open discussion areas to larger
groups, while providing this in a secure environment is beyond powerful.

What is the difference between someone sending out an inappropriate email to a person or group of
people or someone posting something possibly inappropriate on their My Site? Yes, they are both
against company policy and should be removed and the issue dealt with accordingly.

My advice and urging is for organizations to step outside their comfort zone and invest in using
SharePoint’s features (as you probably already own the licenses) and look at its Web Content
Management, Document Management, Business Intelligence, Intranet, and Professional Networking
capabilities.

There is no doubt that organizations have pulled back the reins on investing time and effort on the
utilization of a new technology and have turned their focus on their existing technologies, keeping the
status quo, and staying in between the lines. I had a conversation with an organization’s Director of
I.T. last month and he told me, “If you compare what we used to spend (effort and budget) on
innovation 8 to 10 years ago compared to now, it’s completely night and day.” He went on to say,
“Our organization spends 10% of what it used to on innovation and it seems to be some fear of the
unknown that is driving this.”

The I.T. Department within organizations is not the anti-sales department but an enabler to help you
and your staff increase productivity, decrease wasted time on searching or finding content, protecting
the organization from litigation, and making sure you have the tools to make your job easier.


Scenarios to Consider

This could be an area of conversation that could go on for hours, but I wanted to give a list of a few
examples of what clients have approached EPC Group with in the past 4 months to kickoff this
scenarios topic.

1. We have a LiveLink system and our users can’t stand to use the LiveLink interface and they love
SharePoint’s easy to use interface so they end up just storing documents in SharePoint and that is not
“our system of record.” Can we front-end LiveLink with SharePoint until our OpenText license expires?

2. We have a massive file share system where I am sure there are a ton of duplication as well as
applications, large files, possible databases, and data that we are not sure what to do with… how can
we migrate this successfully into SharePoint?

3. We want to roll-out SharePoint 2010 to a few departments and integrate it via Single Sign-on with the
major LOB systems in those departments. How best can we do this without affecting future upgrades
or patches that Microsoft releases on SharePoint 2010?

4. We want to implement SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise as our ECM solution but do not know where
to start or have a retention schedule, what should we do?

5. We have to be 508 compliant in SharePoint, what solutions are out there and how do we do this the
right way the first time as there is no room for error?

6. We want to upgrade SharePoint 2007 to 2010 but have done major customization and also have
developed custom .NET KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in 2007 and want to now use
PerformancePoint, what is the best approach?

7. Should we use some external cloud service or should we implement our own solution in-house? What
are the pros and cons of that long term?

I sincerely enjoy my interactions with clients looking to implement SharePoint 2010 and there are best
practices and past performance projects to show to all 7 questions above and SharePoint 2010 can
meet all of these needs.

The major issues with a lot of the areas of concern tend to be political or a lack of ownership within
the organization to drop the hammer and say this is the way it’s going to be. SharePoint initiatives are
most successful with executive sponsorship or that visionarymaverick who is willing to drive and
embrace change.

Items That Are Coming Down the Pipe – Like it or Not

To maintain a competitive advantage, most companies are going to have to embrace new technology
and start getting prepared for Tablets, Mobile Device access, and truly implementing a records
retention policy along with a system of record (ECM/ERM) that is fully searchable and high
performing. Microsoft has purchased Skype and one can only wonder what they have up their sleeves
with this as well as developed their new Lync Unified Communication solution.

Facebook, Netflix, self-check outs, on-demand cable shows, iTunes, and others things have changed
the culture of what people, being your user base, expect. Your company may or may not have the
budget right now to purchase new licenses or revamp your technology until 2012 or later but there are


still options out there to prepare such as SharePoint Foundation 2010, Skype, getting off your file
shares, and implementing strategies.

These strategies should consist of your organization’s IT Roadmap (including SharePoint) as well as an
Enterprise Governance Strategy (including SharePoint and how you are going to deal with Mobility).

The last item I wanted to touch on is eDiscovery, as we live in a litigious world and being prepared
and making that investment to be prepared may turn out to save you a great deal in the future. That
equates to implementing a records management strategy in your organization and identifying “what is
a record.” Also think about how best email is being managed and what are your technical options
around streamlining your organizations technology.


Selecting the Right SharePoint Consulting Firm: Comparing Apples to
Apples, or Apples to Oranges

Background on One of Many Similar Situations I Have Come Across in the Past 24 Months

As a disclaimer to this article, I do own a SharePoint consulting firm, EPC Group.net, and am writing
this based on my opinion and those of CIOs and IT Directors that I have interacted with over the past
24 months.

In working with clients and gathering their business requirements as well as their detailed functional
requirements as well as listening to their past experiences in working with SharePoint consultants on
previous versions like MOSS 2007 or SPS 2003, or even SharePoint 2010, I continue to hear an
opinion and small pattern for which I thought I should address.

As an example, a few months ago I was asked to assist in scoping out a full FileNet to SharePoint
2010 migration initiative. There was no existing metadata, the security of FileNet was quite old and
not aligned with the business, and the users could not get off of FileNet and into SharePoint fast
enough; a department within the firm had implemented their own small SharePoint 2010
implementation and a number of staffers in this company had seen its capabilities and wanted in, and
wanted in yesterday.

Trying to be politically correct here as much as possible, a 15 day SharePoint Deployment Services
engagement, for which EPC Group shies away from as we tend to not see the value in it for our
Enterprise clients, was not going to resolve this Enterprise Content Management (ECM) initiative and
there was several months of hard work ahead for not only the company but for which ever firm they
selected to trust and engage with on this undertaking. To my surprise the CIO called me and said he
had 5 quotes on his desk that ranged from $56,000 to $310,000. Let’s just say for conversation sake,
the Statement of Work I developed was not on the cheaper side as myself and my team who worked
on this proposal with me for several days understood the level of effort, had gone back into Project
Server and pulled out 3 similar project plans to verify tasks, etc. and in no way was any firm in the
world going to accomplish this initiative for $56,000 or anything near that number. It’s important the
client understand what the SharePoint firm is delivering, what is the engagement model, what type of
project management are they expecting, how much face to face knowledge transfer should they
expect, etc... (As I could go on and on but I believe this is a point that many in the SharePoint arena
to not like to address).

Note: Not a whole lot can be accomplished in a 15 day initiative, especially if you are looking for
knowledge transfer, which I believe is the absolutely key to long-term SharePoint success.

The Clients Perspective

I don't envy the client situation when going out to select a SharePoint Consulting partner to take on
this task and there can be the route for which they do their own due diligence and come up with a list
of 3 or 4 of the top firms in the US with 300 or 400+ or more of these projects under their belt or
depending on the organization, put out an RFP and let the masses try and prove their prowess or
expertise. Personally I don't have huge preference when working with clients to win their business


based on my firm EPC Group's past performance and reputation and I am probably speaking for
several other SharePoint firms out there but I would also caution clients to truly look into who they are
receiving quotes from...

When selecting a SharePoint Consulting firmpartner, consider the proposal’s numbers (cost) vs. the
quality and experience of the delivery team. With the 20 or so firms that have been founded in the
past 24-36 months which I track (along with the other firms in the US), many of them are trying
to underbid the project to win it to build a past performance or reference base, but in many cases
firms who have been in the SharePoint consulting arena for 10 years end up getting a follow-up call
from the client asking for a health check and assessment as well as a quote for a new initiative as they
found out they need to throw-out the past few months of work and start over due to the disaster they
have just experienced.

This is sometimes due to the SharePoint roadmap that was never developed, the experience level of
the consultants, possibly the "1099 subcontracted for this job consultants" this original firm hired
when signing up for a Dice.com account shortly after winning the project to hire a few "Senior
SharePoint Consultants" that did not live up to the SharePoint Senior Architects Consultants for
which they were “billed” at and pitched during the sales and project scoping process.

The Other "Big Vendors" in the Room

SharePoint is the most powerful and flexible enterprise solution who has taken on the past 800 pound
giants and in its forth release (SharePoint 2010) as made EMC, OpenText, and others “call a bit of
uncle, or there have been some board meetings in which the saying, “If you can’t beat em’, joint
em’..” or "we have to open up our APIs to be SharePoint (seamlessly) friendly" just may have been
uttered (my personal opinion of course).

Doing Due Diligence for Yourself and Your Firm When Selecting a Consulting Firm

It is critical that you look at not only certifications, experience, any beta testing or TAP program
experience from those that were there at the pre-release, authoring of SharePoint publications, real-
world experience, and those that talk about making mistakes and learning from them. Sometimes it
important to not talk about SharePoint at all but listen to the business problem and ensure the
consultants do not have blinders on and make it everything in the project just about SharePoint,
SharePoint, SharePoint....

1. What defines a Senior SharePoint Architect Consultant vs. a consultant who has been
subcontracted to work on 1 or 2 deployments?

2. Remember that just because a consulting firm may have the product vendor "or something similar"
in their name, that doesn’t mean they necessarily know what they are doing or have the rock stars at
the table to successfully complete your project (yes, even if they want to bid twice as much as the
others who proposed a statement of work or hourly rate, etc.).


State of SharePoint

A large number SharePoint firms have been founded in the past 2-3 years (as I mentioned above) and
at least 5 seasoned firm I know of have been purchased in the past 18-24 months by larger firms. I
have been asked at conferences, "what about outsourcing SharePoint development and using a few
information architects to control the face time"? Outsourcing SharePoint development overseas
doesn’t not work on a large scale unless you have months and months to near 'fingerprint in stone'
every single possible detail (business and functional requirement). If a change is needed, it will take
several weeks to turn around, update, and receive it back to implement in your dev farm to test. You
must ensure all your development environments are synchronized. Your developers must
have experience in 2007 as well as 2010 to ensure you understand the issues in upgrading because
SharePoint 15 is coming out sometime in 2014. (Note: we may get a sneak peak from the SharePoint
product team in the very near future).

The External "Cloud" versus your own Internal "Private" Cloud

In my opinion, and with concerns of the recent outages of several of the large clouds, companies who
must connect to external business data or have developed custom applications in house (web parts,
workflows, master pages, using the BCS, etc.) are not going to jump on the bandwagon of an external
cloud in the near future (especially with the negative press of day or two long outages) but rather
implement and “Internal or Private Cloud” (no matter how many other expert bloggers may work for
or own Cloud Computing organizations, again this is my opinion from sitting with prominent CIOs from
the private and government sector). I believe there is value to the cloud for SMB type businesses but
Fortune 5001000 and major Government organizations need 24/7, 365 uptime and the ability to
manage custom code, connect to external data sources, federate security seamlessly, and a whole lot
more, and do it yesterday.

SharePoint Trainers vs. Consultants

Trainers who blog are not always experts in, “in the trenches” consulting and you may get a robotic or
rehearsed answer; ensure the blogs and experts you follow are actual consultants who have sat in
“war rooms” hours on end to whiteboard and solve real world problems where there are budgetary
and political considerations as well as timelines, resources, and peoples jobs from the client on the
line.

3rd Party Vendors ISVs

There are a large number of SharePoint 3rd party solutions (ISVs) who offer amazing solutions that
can help you to lower your internal maintenance costs and almost act like another full-time employee
(FTE) for your firm. On the other hand, ensure you are only buying what you need as some ISVs have
moved to the model of bundling up their entire suite of products that not only cause a massive
footprint on your servers but also cause you to possibly spend budget that you do not need to spend.

A Recent Area of Concern - Internal Politics and SharePoint 2010's Massive Functionality

Internal politics can absolutely be the death of a project and the firm you select must be able to tell
you the hard truth about this and you should take it in stride. I have witnessed the application
(SharePoint) teams literally fighting tooth and nail with the development, legal, or legacy solutions


(Portal, ECM, etc.) and vice versa. SharePoint Server 2010 has an unbelievable amount of
functionality (i.e. ECMERM, Portal, Collaboration, SocialProfessional Networking, Business
Intelligence, etc.). It is bound to cause political issues and find some people concerned about job
security with their legacy systems.

SharePoint Licensing

Microsoft is adding 20,000 new users a day or 7+ million new users a year (for the past 5 years) so
resolving issues and understanding SharePoint’s capabilities to provide ROI to your firm is in your best
interest.

SharePoint 2010 Web Standards, Accessibility, and Usability Quick
Reference Guide
The following is a SharePoint 2010 Web Standards and Usability Quick Reference Guide following EPC
Group’s best practices for SharePoint GUI development (master page) and configuration best
practices.

SharePoint 2010 Accessibility

 A way to guarantee interoperability of the website

o SharePoint 2010 Supports any Operating System

o Any browser across multiple platforms, (i.e., Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)

o Any edge device (iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.)

 Standards

o WCAG 1.0/2.0

o Section 508 (US) HIPPA Related

o PII and PHI: (Personal Identifiable Information) and (Personal Health Information )

 Accessibility Levels, Best Practices AD Group, SP Security Groups

SharePoint 2010 Web standards & Accessibility Best Practices

 Standards

o Well-formed XHTML 1.0 Strict

o WCAG 2.0 Level (Double A)

 Central Administration

 Settings User Interface

o Note: The Central Administration and Settings interfaces can also be modified to meet corporate
standards


Well-formed vs. Valid XHTML

 Well-formed XHTML

o Lower-case tags

o Self-closing elements

o Attributes’ values wrapped in quotes

o In-line elements wrapped in block elements

o Document types everywhere

 SharePoint 2010 supports

o Markup for Accessible Rich Internet Applications

o Not in XHTML DTD

Web Standards & SharePoint 2010

 Grammatical correctness of markup

 Standards types

o HTML 4.01

o XHTML 1.0/1.1

 Standards levels

o Transitional

o Strict

o Frameset

 Quirks mode

Accessibility in SharePoint 2010

 SharePoint take aim at WCAG 2.0 AA

o Accessible Rich Internet Applications

o Supported by the latest browsers

 This includes IE 9, Chrome, Firefox, etc. as well as iPad (tablet edge device) browsers

o Implemented across the whole platform

 SharePoint 2010 should always be implemented with a “SharePoint as a Platform” and “SharePoint as
a Service Methodology in mind.”

SharePoint Validation Problem Areas – Best Practices

 Legacy markups & customizations can become a major issues in SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
Branding Migration efforts

 Silverlight Web Part(s) and where Microsoft is headed technologically (phasing Silverlight out)


 WebPartZone specific to SharePoint 2010

 WebPartPage specific to SharePoint 2010

 ImageField specific to SharePoint 2010

 Rich Text Editor specific to SharePoint 2010

Silverlight Plugin Generator

 Problem

o SLPG doesn’t escape JavaScript code

o SLPG uses iframe to solve caching issue with Safari

 Solution

o Add comments before loading the JavaScript

<script type="text/javascript">

//<![CDATA[

//]]>

</script>

 This is meant to phase out the iFrame

WebPartZones & SharePoint 2010

 Problem

o Renders tables around Web Parts

o Adds non-existing attributes to Web Part’s div (HasPers, allowDelete, etc.)

 Solution

o Custom Control Adapter

o Override the rendering

 Drawbacks

o Breaks WPSC

Web Part Pages and SharePoint

 Problem

o Renders hidden Web Part Zone using hidden input fields

o Input fields directly in the page instead of wrapped in a div

 Solution

o Custom Page Adapter


o Wrap the contents in a div

ImageField and SharePoint 2010

 Problem

o Uses HTML 4.01 to store the image value

 Solution

o In code: retrieve the value as ImageFieldValue and write the
img tag yourself

o In XSLT: This is a more advanced area for skilled SharePoint Subject Matter Experts

In-line Styles SharePoint 2010

 Problem

o Using the style attribute is not allowed

 Solution


o Regex replace

 Drawbacks

o Very expensive

o You may some lose branding/functionality

CSS Styles and SharePoint 2010

 Problem

o CSS validation returns errors

 Solution

o Replacing with your own CSS (Corporately Approved)

 Drawbacks

o Requires some serious customization and configuration

Rich Text Editor SharePoint 2010

 Problem

o WAI:ARIA markup not in XHTML DTD

 Solution

o Custom Control Adapter

o Regex replace

 Drawbacks


o Expensive on large pages

JavaScript Links

 Problem

o Links with href="javascript:"

 Solution


o Regex rewrite of links

 Drawbacks

o Very expensive

o You may lose some functionality

Key Lessons Learned

 Implementing web standards and accessibility in SharePoint 2010 is easier than in the previous
release, SharePoint (MOSS) 2007

 Plan for accessibility from the beginning of the project – Get your roadmap and governance strategies
for all areas in place

 Accessible branding is the key to success

 Be careful what you promise and vet it with SharePoint developers to ensure its possible

 Accessibility on the Internet does matter

 508 Compliance is something that is becoming more critical every day and auditors are looking for
508 Compliance issues

Is Records Management and Usability, Together, Even Possible?

Why are 75% of the organizations in the United States (with an enterprise presence) looking at
implementing a records management solution and why are they drawn so much to a particular
Microsoft platform?

Can you have an enterprise content management (ECM) enterprise records management (ERM)
solution with an easy to use interface that users are drawn to? How about a centralized platform that
the organization can use as a Service? Lastly, can the organizations Intranet be seamlessly integrated
as well as your file shares, exchange public folders, and other online or proprietary applications?

Ohh, and it needs to be accessible via an extranet and on mobile (Tablet and smartphone) devices as
well. The answer to these questions is why FileNet, LiveLink, Documentum, eRoom, and about 15
other platforms I can think of are losing market share by the day. I know I may get the “open source”
and Microsoft detractors or those whose technology platform are in the direct line of fire of this tool or
whose online “cloud” service can’t match up (comments), but that is understandable.


I thank my lucky stars every night that I joined the right team. Implementing a multi-million dollar
ECMERM solution several years ago and literally having users not use it has happened all over the
map. Enter SharePoint 2010…

I will also play devil’s advocate for a second as I had an interesting conversation with a client the
other day regarding their company’s new records management plans and future roadmap. The
organization had already made its mind up that SharePoint was not a true records management
platform.

In fact, they did not even want to see a live demo of 3 different Enterprise Content Management
(ECM) solutions that EPC Group had built and were in production for 3 Fortune 500’s that everyone
would recognize as almost baseball and apple pie in the U.S. Did MOSS (SharePoint 2007) cause this?
Probably so, and if all they had seen was an out of the box “record center” in MOSS than I can hardly
blame them. In SharePoint 2007, there was a whole lot of customization configuration that had to be
done to compete with the FileNet, LiveLink, and Documentum’s of the world.

It was very possible but not very attractive to the masses. In over 150+ implementations of
SharePoint 2007, my teams and I at EPC Group don’t disagree on what you may have seen in MOSS
(out-of-the-box) but SharePoint 2010 is a whole different animal and SharePoint 15 is not going to be
any different…but back to the main point.

Why have so many Fortune 1000 organizations aligned themselves and committed to a SharePoint
future roadmap strategy? They combined Gartner leading quadrant records management
requirements with a tool that is easy to use and can meet the needs of 10 different
enterprise requirements including socialprofessional networking and guarantee of a solution that will
be around for at least another decade.

What would users think of when they hear the word usability or just “easy to use”?

 Effective and efficient in supporting work

 Easy to learn and memorize

 Error tolerant and efficient in error recovery

 Allows for a pleasant and safe working environment

 Making sure our end-users have an easier time learning new training, remaining productive, and
accepting change if the end product is easy to use.

So what does usability really impact? What’s the ROI (we are looking at the bottom line these days!)?

 Continued productivity in core task activities

 Acceptance of changes

 Increased effectiveness in training

 Increased speed of adoption at its core?

 Users can complete high-impact, critical must haves

 Users have productivity level understanding of easy to use ECM and collaboration tools


Note: Also, if you’re not doing it before your competition or spending the time and money to innovate
you may lose market share and fall behind.

A lot of us who work from both sides of the isle (the company looking for a consulting firm and partner
to assist them in integrating such a high profile project solution AND the consulting organization who
is trying to not only win your business but show why they are different than all the other SharePoint
firms and why you should feel safe spending your available budget and signing on for the
engagement) understand budget is tight and every last dollar must be squeezed but there can be no
cutting corners or taking shortcuts. It’s a hard decision for clients’ companies but one that must be
decided. When does not spending money and saving budget start to kill innovation?

Usability is not only about the Internet Browser from a laptop or desktop and SharePoint 2010, it’s
about mobility and those “edge” devices. Every single item discussed above must also be thought of in
a case of a tablet device or a smartphone.

Usability must be managed in your companies MME or Mobility Management Experience. You may
refer to it as a different acronym and I believe this thought process will continue to evolve but take
into consideration not only company issued devices but the iPad that your CFO is about to get for
hisher birthday. How do you manage usability on that device and govern it? Can you even do that
and are your companies’ policies and procedures not yet updated to cover a situation like that? You’re
not alone and it’s something that must be addressed and soon.

By selecting a platform that is going to give you not only ROI by replacing other expensive systems
and allowing everything to be centralized, but to choose a solution that is going to be uttered every
few seconds because it’s being used constantly its key to measure its “Usability Value” -

 Measurement and validation of end-user performance

o Core work tasks

 Critical Must-Haves

 High Impact changes

o Easy-to-use Information Management and Collaboration tools (Add SocialProfessional Networking)

 Measurement of solution’s value to Businesses and End-Users

 Identify performance and feedback-based usability gaps and provide recommendations for solutions to
usability gaps

 Advocate on behalf of End-Users and ensure their feedback is heard

 Decrease need for redesign in the future or missing things like mobility -> Evergreen
What true solution “statement” or usability “core values” should be required for success?

 SharePoint 2010 brings significant changes for the end-user

o New work practices and attitudes around E-mail, messaging, and social (professional) networking

o New collaboration and document sharing practices

o New work operating system and digital work environment (Think about going green in the future with
OCR Scanning solutions that are seamlessly integrated with SharePoint 2010)


 SharePoint 2010 End-Users will have an easier time learning new training, remaining productive, and
accepting change if the end product is easy to use.

 Ensuring the usability of SharePoint 2010 will involve a process of examination, testing and refining by
applying usability methodology.

o This must include 508 compliance which has been overlooked for years but is now a core requirement
for many organizations (especially government)

This all falls under governance, no surprise, but instead of just throwing around the G word, think true
“Operational Governance” and a living breathing Governance strategy that aligns with
your organization’s roadmap.

Myself and my team and EPC Group constantly discuss how an enterprise SharePoint project touches
just about every area of an organization. Usability user experience is one that is not always on the
forefront of peoples thoughts but it should be.

Why Large Enterprise and Global SharePoint Deployments Will Not
Work in the Cloud
“Everyone is going to want one of these,” Gary Dahl half-joking said. Gary Dahl is an author and
advertising executive, but more importantly, the inventor of the Pet Rock.

A Cloud-based SharePoint Server 2010 enterprise-wide (i.e. Fortune 1000 sized company) andor
globally implemented deployment simply will not work. It may be initially appealing, but without the
organization’s Information Technology executives completely owning the environment and its
governance, customization, and federation strategy it will be a long-term failure and future migration
project (from the external cloud into an internally hosted Private Cloud).

An enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented in a Private Cloud, an environment
internal to the organization with total control of its servers, permissions security, customization and
deployment policies, and federation between line-of-business systems and various data sources is the
only deployment platform global and large enterprise organization should focus on.

There is a place for a cloud-based SharePoint 2010 deployment in small to medium sized businesses
who only mostly require out-of-the-box features and functionality and siloed departmental
permission strategies. Organizations like these can utilize a cloud-based solution to not only be quickly
up and running on a SharePoint 2010 solution but take advantage of the lower cost of ownership.

There may be some folks jumping up and down stating that a SharePoint, cloud-based hosted
SharePoint environment, can easily scale to 5,000 or 15,000 users and I don’t doubt it can, but what
does “scale to” really mean? SharePoint 2010 should be implemented as a Service with a Platform
Hybrid methodology in mind. It will evolve to more than 1 or 2 specific business or functional
requirements. It may be a collaboration and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution initially,
but will eventually have workflows, executive dashboards KPIs, Social Networking, and probably
many other capabilities. SharePoint 2010 seamless federation and single sign-on integration with
other business systems is a core requirement of many enterprise and global companies.


It is very challenging to federate a hosted SharePoint 2010 solution with your organizations other
internally hosted applications and data. It is also a challenge to deploying custom SharePoint-based
applications your internal I,T, staff may have built within the cloud.

The SharePoint “App Store” concept is something of beauty but it is limited in scope in a hosted
SharePoint cloud. There may be a set of reusable web parts the cloud may offer that may appeal to
the masses, like an image rotator web part or commonly applicable solution for Policies and
Procedures; simple things like weather or aggregation web parts but they are still mostly limited to
data and content within the cloud or data that is publically accessible.

When you are working with business and functional requirements of enterprise and global
organizations, you are also going to run across requirements wildcards such as:

 Countries who have issues with storing data in US-based data centers who must adhere to
the Freedom of Information Act as well as the Patriot Act.

 Organizations who store HIPPA-related data andor PHI and PII sensitive data.

 The storage of tax related documents and the way that content must be tracked and secured.

 The administrative access of the cloud hosting company (as they still can probably give themselves
access, if desired, which can open the firm who is hosting their organization’s SharePoint deployment
and content there up to possible litigation).

 Wanting to deploy and host custom applications built on SharePoint within the cloud environment |
Deploying custom web parts built internally

 Federating massive active directory environments to a SharePoint cloud

 Federating internal data sources and other line of business systems to the external cloud

 Implementing Executive Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that pull from multiple
data sources including those that are non-SharePoint based

 Deploying custom workflows that may have multiple “swim lanes” and may cross and need to access
these multiple data sources

 Managing your organizations future SharePoint Mobile Experience and related "edge devices"

 Sensitive or Highly sensitive data

o Both in the private sector as well as in government, there is data that is highly sensitive and possibly
top secret. This goes without saying, but you must take your organizations governing laws as well as
retention and access control policies into consideration at all times.

o This includes information security related to applications hosted on the platform for which your data is
stored

Myself and my firm at EPC Group have also run across Countries and International Laws that prohibit
the storage or access of content outside the borders of their country. We have dealt with this in places
such as Germany and many countries in Africa where the ability to search data cannot return results
either inside or outside (depending on the scenario, internal or external) of the country.

I believe that the Private Cloud internally hosted and mostly on virtual platforms, is the only real
solution that large enterprise and global organizations should rely on to meet their current and also


future I.T. roadmap for SharePoint Server 2010 as its capabilities lead to SharePoint becoming a
hybrid ecosystem within most of these organizations.

Best Practices for SharePoint Cultural Change Management - From the
SharePoint Consulting Trenches
I wanted to share with the AIIM and SharePoint Community the overview of a White Paper that myself
and my team at EPC Group.net have been working on by studying approximately 35 enterprise
SharePoint 2010 implementations we have completed between March 2011 and November 2011.

It is not unusual for those implementing SharePoint 2010 to experience a fair amount of change and
conflict as part of their deployment process. Other than e-mail, no other product that you will
implement will have as wide or personal “touch and feel” as SharePoint 2010 if you intend to
implement this product in a wide, deep, and pervasive way. When SharePoint Server 2010 is
implemented in your environment, you’re not just implementing a simple document management or
Web-based collaboration solution. You’re implementing change; Culture change. Business process
change and Information management change. Usually, when change happens within an organization,
power balances get shifted and conflicts can ensue.

Understanding Change in a Corporate Environment – EPC Group
It was once thought that a manager could simply tell everyone that they were going to do things a
certain way and everyone would salute and follow. In today’s corporate environment, that is a
misconception. In fact, there are several misconceptions about change that need to be recognized.

The first misconception is that a great solution, like SharePoint 2010, will be accepted just because it
is a great solution with real ROI. When it comes to SharePoint, it might be a great software product
with a lot of helpful features that solve many existing information management and collaboration
problems, but that doesn’t mean it will be readily accepted. The fact is that even some of the best
ideas are not readily accepted. Remember the old Sony Beta technology for videocassettes? Sony had
a clearly superior technology to the VHS videocassettes, but due to poor marketing and other factors,
the VHS became the adopted standard. If we borrow from family theory for just a moment, family
therapists will tell you that the family system will put pressure on the individual who is changing to
remain the same—even if the change is for the better. Human beings are wired to resist change. Just
because it’s a good (or even a great) idea doesn’t mean the idea will be automatically accepted.

Another misconception is that all you have to do is explain the new idea and the explanation, by itself,
will remove the resistance to change. Explain it, perform some training activities, and get people
excited and you’re done. No follow-up is needed. No care and feeding is warranted. If you’re thinking
this way, please be prepared for a long, sustained effort. The reality is that introducing change in an
organization requires persistence. You need to be in this for the long haul if you’re going to be
successful.

New software roll-outs always represent change at the desktop. (You need to consider SharePoint to
encompass a similar effect as updating the Office suite at the desktop because of its pervasive and
persistent touch and feel.) Have you ever rolled out a new software product only to find that, over
time, the product is not persistently used and the old methods are still the primary methods of
accomplishing work? In many organizations, change can be an illusion while the old reality persists.


A third misconception is that implementing change slowly while building grassroots support will result
in nothing getting done. In fact, the opposite is true. What research has shown is that while bottom-
up change is more gradual, it addresses resistance more effectively. The emphasis in bottom-up
change is on participation and on keeping people informed about what is going on, so uncertainty and
resistance are minimized. Furthermore, research has revealed that people are not resistant to change;
they are resistant to being changed. People are better at coping with change if they have participation
in bringing the change to reality. This is why—with or without grassroots support—the best way to
introduce SharePoint into your environment is through a gradual, collaborative process where your
users, managers, and executives all have input into the overall deployment objectives and direction.

Common Types of Change in a Corporate Environment
Experts in change management tell us that organizations can experience several common types of
change:

 Structural Change. This type of change looks at the organization as a set of functional parts that
need to be restructured. The parts are re-configured (re-organized) to achieve greater overall
performance. Mergers and acquisitions are two examples of structural change.

 Cost Cutting. This type of change focuses on the elimination of nonessential activities or on other
methods of squeezing costs out of operations.

 Process Change. This type of change focuses on altering how tasks and activities are accomplished.
Examples include re-engineering processes or implementing a new decision-making framework. The
introduction of new software products onto the desktop clearly falls into this type of change.

 Cultural Change. This type of change focuses on the human side of the organization, such as a
company’s general approach to doing business or the relationship between its management and
employees. Cultural change nearly always involves relational change. Since relationships are built on
personal interaction, how people communicate and interact with each other helps build the culture.
Introducing SharePoint Products and Technologies into your environment introduces culture changes
because SharePoint Products and Technologies introduce new communication paths and new ways of
relating to co-workers, partners, vendors, and customers.

SharePoint represents change in three out of the four areas: structural, process, and cultural. It is
structural in that the major parts of the business (however this is defined) will need to adjust their
work habits to incorporate SharePoint’s features into their daily work routines. For example, end-users
will be managing Web sites while power users will be managing a range of Web site administrative
tasks including the security of the information that resides in SharePoint. Another example is
managing documents in a library versus a file server. This is a significant change that will be felt by
everyone in the organization.

SharePoint represents huge process change because we’re now going to ask everyone in the
organization to (more or less) get on the same page when it comes to information management and
information process management. And since SharePoint has a huge touch and feel at the desktop
level, the process changes will be experienced by nearly everyone in your organization who uses a
desktop computer.

Finally, SharePoint represents significant cultural changes because of the way it handles information
and the new communication paths that are created by its introduction. Collaboration moves from e-


mail threads to team sites. Discussions are handled online while offline synchronization involves
Microsoft Office Outlook or Groove. Workflows introduce an electronic way of gaining document
approvals, and communication about approvals involves both e-mail and the browser. Hence,
implementing SharePoint Products and Technologies in your environment represents significant,
pervasive change. If this aspect of your deployment is not managed correctly, the chances are
increased that your deployment will either fail or not be as successful as initially envisioned.

How Different Individuals Accept Change
Not everyone in your organization will accept change in the same way or at the same pace. This
thinking has been around since the early 1900s, but was refined in 1953 by E.M. Rogers in his
book, Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers defined diffusion as the process by which innovation is
communicated through channels to the members over time. In this thinking, diffusion included four
main elements:

 Innovation. The new idea is incubated and defined.

 Communication Channel. The methods or paths that messages flow over between individuals. Time
Three factors were mentioned here, but for our purposes, the innovation’s rate of adoption is the one
factor that is most important. How fast the new idea is accepted and utilized is part of the diffusion
process.

 Social System. The set of interrelated groups that are working toward a common goal.

The overall thrust was that a new idea or an innovation needed to be defined, communicated, and,
over time, adopted within the social system of the organization. From a diffusion viewpoint,
SharePoint represents the new idea or the innovation. The communication channels that currently
exist in your organization will need to be utilized to introduce SharePoint Products and Technologies to
your environment. The rate of adoption will likely depend on how adept you are at working with the
five groups described below and meeting each of their needs. And a solid understanding of your social
system, the stakeholder’s needs, and your overall culture will enable you to manage the potential
pitfalls along the way. As you look to implement SharePoint in your organization, you’ll need to be
aware that these four factors cannot be avoided: You must define, communicate, be patient, and work
within the social structure of your organization if you’re going to be successful.

The theory of diffusion holds that a new idea will be adopted faster when the following is present:

 The new idea is perceived to have more value than the current system.

 The new idea is compatible with existing values, past experiences, and current needs.

 The new idea is not overly complex.

 The new idea is testable before its production implementation.

 The new idea results in visible, measurable positive outcomes.

Critical mass is achieved once enough individuals in the organization have adopted the new idea so
that the idea is commonplace and self-sustaining. In short, critical mass means the new idea will
survive. The problem with achieving critical mass is that there is a time lag in how fast new ideas are
adopted. This is why it is important to understand the different groups that naturally exist in your
environment as you try to introduce SharePoint Server 2010 into your environment:


 Innovators. This group makes up about 2.5 percent of the overall population. They accept new ideas
quickly and need little persuasion. They often like new ideas simply because they are new. They tend
to be venturesome, daring, and risk-takers. They also tend to have the financial resources to absorb a
loss if the new idea proves to be unprofitable. Finally, this group has the ability to cope with a high
degree of uncertainty about the innovation along with the time to understand and apply the technical
knowledge the innovation represents.

 Early Adopters. This group represents about 13.5 percent of the overall population. They are open to
new ideas, but will accept them only after serious consideration. This group usually holds the greatest
degree of opinion and thought leadership within an organization. They tend to look for the strategic
opportunity an innovation can provide. They serve as role models for others in the organization and
they tend to be highly respected.

 Early Majority. This group represents about 33 percent of the overall population. These folks
frequently interact with one another and tend to be followers, not leaders. They want to see that
others have been successful with the innovation before they adopt it themselves. Critical mass is
usually achieved once this group has adopted the new idea.

 Late Majority. This group is also about 33 percent of the overall population. These folks tend to be
skeptical and cautious and will usually adopt new ideas only when pressured to do so.

 Laggards. This is the last group to adopt a new idea, which by the time they adopt it, is a current or
fading idea. This group possesses no opinion leadership at all. They tend to be isolated and suspicious
of new ideas and will filter these ideas through referential points in the past. Their acceptance of a
new idea results from other’s pressure coupled with the certainty that the innovation cannot fail.

Managing Environmental Change
Once we understand the basic ideas in Rogers’ (and others’) work, there is an opportunity to apply
how change should be managed when it comes to doing a SharePoint implementation.

First, in some environments, SharePoint 2010 will be perceived as a huge step forward by the
decision-makers because of the features and benefits inherent in the program, such as collaboration,
information aggregation, or publishing. Many customers with whom we work don’t have a problem
seeing the obvious advantages that SharePoint brings to the organization. Yet sometimes, there is
little grassroots, managerial, or information technology support; when this support is absent, the task
of working within existing communication channels and the social culture will be foundational to
success.

Second, SharePoint 2010 is rarely seen as a system that is incompatible with the organization’s values
and goals. Because the system is so flexible, it can be used by nearly any organization. We have yet
to encounter a customer who found that SharePoint was inherently in conflict with his organization’s
goals and values.

Third, SharePoint 2010 is sometimes thought to be a system that is highly intuitive for non-technical
people who work with it on a day-to-day basis. This assumption needs to be challenged. While
SharePoint’s interface is rather easy to use and is somewhat self-explanatory, we still find that users
need a solid base of education on how to use the product and the scenarios in which certain features
would be used. Some customers have balked at purchasing SharePoint until they knew their user-base
would be adequately educated to use the software appropriately. In short, everyone in your


organization will need education if you are planning on obtaining a robust Return on Investment (ROI)
for the money your organization has spent on SharePoint licenses.

Fourth, SharePoint 2010 can be (and should be) tested in a proof-of-concept (POC) before it is
deployed into production. POCs can be great tools to learn about a new software product and simulate
a production environment. In our experience, however, the danger is that the POC often morphs into a
production environment because the test team members tend to really test SharePoint, find that they
like it, and then dump all sorts of mission-critical information into the POC. After that, they have little
interest in pulling out the information and re-doing their work in a production environment. So while a
POC or some type of pre-production test is a good idea, you should also have clear agreements about
when the POC will start and stop and the expectations that users will have regarding the information
they have placed into their POC sites.

Finally, the ability to measure SharePoint’s ROI is probably the highest pain point in this entire
discussion. How “success” is defined is elusive and this results in measurements that tend to be more
emotional or anecdotal in nature as opposed to being more structured and objective. But there are
some ideas you can work with to help understand if your implementation is successful or not. First,
count the number of site collections in your farm. Just add up the number of “sites” on your content
databases and this will be a rough equal to the actual number of site collections in your farm. Second,
you can measure database growth patterns and determine if the growth rate is what you had hoped it
would be. Third, you can count the number of people who have attended SharePoint training as
another metric of success. Or you could use one or more of these metrics plus others that you develop
yourself and then use those numbers to determine if your implementation is successful or not. While
still a subjective measure, it will add some statistical support to your conclusions.

Most organizations don’t roll out SharePoint to everyone on the same day. Most IT personnel would
strongly advise against this. Given that there are five types of people in your organization (from an
adoption-of-innovation standpoint), best practice is to find one or two groups that like to work with
new technology and roll out SharePoint just to those groups. Not only will they enjoy having a new
technology with which to work, but you will have the opportunity to refine and mature your rollout
processes so that by the time you’re rolling out to the Early Majority, you’ve fixed the bugs in the
rollout process and have better defined how to use SharePoint in your environment and how to
present its usage to your users.

So find out who your Innovators are in your environment. Go to them with SharePoint. Let them use it
and get excited about it. They tend to be opinionated, so get their feedback on how to use SharePoint
better in your environment and then use them as your first “win.” Others will see what is happening,
the Early Adopters will likely want to get going with SharePoint, and your adoption will spread. In our
experience working with customers, most have a hard time throttling their deployment because the
demand for this product is so strong. Don’t give in to the large demand. Stay methodical about your
deployment and ensure that you move along at the rate you had hoped. Don’t let demand push you
into going too fast. If you do, you might find that the demand was more vocal than serious. Going
more slowly will help you resolve nagging problems early in the deployment so that those in the Early
and Late Majority groups will have better experiences once they start using SharePoint.

Having said all this, it is highly probable that you’ll roll out SharePoint Products and Technologies to a
departmental team composed of people from all five groups. If possible, try to avoid this scenario. But
if you must roll out to a group that is mixed in their attitudes about adopting SharePoint Products and


Technologies, then please take the time to communicate with them about the “how’s and whys” of
SharePoint Products and Technologies and ask for their input and help in adopting SharePoint Server
2010. While bottom-up changes take longer, the resistance will be less and, in the end, you’ll have a
more successful deployment of SharePoint in your environment.

Understanding Power Dynamics and Change
If you’re like most information technology professionals, it is likely that you don’t spend much time
thinking about the power dynamics in your organization. Yet, there is nothing more demoralizing than
feeling you have a creative idea or a unique skill to help solve a significant problem and then
encountering resistance to your ideas from individuals within your organization. You might even be
someone who has become disillusioned and cynical about the realities of how managers and peers
improperly use their power in ways that negatively affect you.

What is power? Power is the potential of an individual (or group) to influence another individual or
group. Influence, in turn, is the exercise of power to change the behavior, attitudes, and/ or values of
that individual or group. It is easier to change behavior than attitudes, and in turn, it is easier to
change attitudes than values. Power and influence are always at work within organizations. For
example, most organizations experience conflict over resources, schedules, or personnel. These
conflicts are inevitable and their resolutions often require the intervention of someone with influence
and power. Organizations consist of individuals and groups with divergent interests who must figure
out how to reconcile these interests.

Power comes from several sources within an organization, and those sources are as follows:

 Formal Authority. Formal authority refers to a person’s position in the organization hierarchy. The
higher in the corporate hierarchy or the greater the scope and scale of responsibilities, the more
power that person will have. Most workers today don’t respond well to the raw use of formal authority.

 Relevance. Relevance refers to a person’s ability to align work activities with corporate priorities. The
more relevant a person is in his or her job, the more powerful that person will be. For example, in a
company that focuses on innovation, the vice president of research and development will likely yield
power and influence that is beyond her stated job description.

 Centrality. Those occupying central positions in important networks in organizations tend to have
power because others in the organization must depend on them for access to resources or for help in
getting critical tasks accomplished. Hence, a person’s position in the workflow can yield power or
influence beyond a stated job description or place in the organizational chart.

 Autonomy. The greater one’s ability to exercise discretion or freedom in his position, the more power
and influence that person will have within the organization. These people generally do not need to
seek out approval from a superior. Tasks that tend to be novel or highly technical tend to have
considerable autonomy, since it is difficult to develop guidelines or rules on how the work should be
done.

 Visibility. Those whose job activities tend to be highly visible to other powerful people within the
organization will tend to have more power than those whose job performance is less obvious.

 Expertise. Those who possess technical expertise or hard-to-find skills typically are people who are in
a position to influence the opinions and behavior of others. This is because others need to rely on their
expertise or skills to accomplish their own goals and objectives.


Understanding Specific Changes that SharePoint Introduces
For those who are new to SharePoint, an immediate change will be how documents are accessed and
consumed. At present, many companies have shared network drives that host large data sets with
hundreds or even thousands of folders with tens of thousands of documents. It is not uncommon to
hear of shared network drives that host a terabyte or more of data, much of it redundant, old,
outdated, and unusable. So, two problems immediately present themselves in this scenario.

First, as SharePoint is increasingly used, users will not access the shared network drive to work with a
document. Instead, they will access the document using a URL namespace via their browser or their
Office client. The catch is that it’s difficult to use the Office client to access a document library until the
user has manually created a Web folder client connection to the document library, or the user has
created a mapped drive to the document library, or the user has visited the library and worked with
documents in such a manner as to have the Web folder client connection automatically created in their
My Network Places on their desktop. This need to “visit-first” in order to obtain a shortcut route to the
document library can be frustrating for your users.

Logically, the shared drive’s contents will likely not be hosted in the same document library. In nearly
all scenarios, this shared drive’s content will be re-hosted in SharePoint spanning many, many
document libraries. So, what once was a single drive mapping for the end-user that resulted in wading
through countless folders to find their documents now becomes accessing information through a
plethora of Web folder client connections while learning to manage documents across many different
document libraries and sites.

Governance and Potential Conflicts
It is very important that proper governance is for the new SharePoint environment is in place. Without
strong governance, you’ll likely encounter at least three major conflicts in your SharePoint
deployment:

 Confusion about where information should reside

 Confusion about how information is to be handled

 Confusion about who makes which decisions in SharePoint

Knowing Where to Put Information
You cannot assume that users will know where their information should be hosted in your SharePoint
environment. Without communicating a corporate-wide set of expectations about where information
goes in SharePoint, users will be left to make the decision on their own and you’ll find that each one
will have a different idea as to where their own information should reside.

If your organization can’t bring itself to make core governance decisions, then conflict is bound to
erupt based on the lack of direction for your SharePoint deployment. Because users will decide where
their information goes, they will necessarily end up negotiating where they will collaborate within
SharePoint.

Someone in your organization needs to make some high-level decisions about where information will
go and who will manage it. These decisions need to be communicated and then enforced if you plan
on avoiding conflict surrounding where information goes in SharePoint.


Knowing How Information Is to Be Handled
In most organizations, there are different kinds of information with different security levels. For
example, payroll information is often highly secured, whereas public Web site information is generally
less secured.

When users are developing information within SharePoint, they cannot be assumed to know how their
information should be managed. For many, the prospect of managing and securing their information is
a new task; in the absence of direction, they’re bound to violate some unwritten rule or expectation.
Best practice is to have an organization wide information architecture from which document-type
definitions can be described and then implemented in SharePoint.

Knowing Who Makes Which Decisions
At the core of your governance plan is the need to decide who can make decisions within your
SharePoint implementation. A myriad of configuration settings are available for manipulation at four
basic levels: farm, Web application, site collection, and site. Generally speaking, SharePoint farm
administrators will manage the options at the farm and Web application levels, whereas power users
with advanced training will manage the options at the site collection level. Nearly everyone in your
organization who is involved with content creation or management will manage configuration values at
the site level.

Your governance plan needs to specify which people and positions will be able to make decisions and
commit changes at each of these four levels. Planning this out before you deploy SharePoint Server
2010 is the optimal method of ensuring success for your SharePoint deployment.

Implementing Global Intranet Governance with a Proper Long-term
Roadmap
You have probably been flooded with external sources telling you what SharePoint Governance really
is and I am here to state mine and my SharePoint Consulting organization, EPC Group’s, definitive and
believe only true way to implement Global Intranet Governance with a forward looking roadmap to
match. For Global organizations with tens of thousands of users, the Return on Investment by
following this strategy below should be in the millions. I have written a number of articles for AIIM but
I can confidently stand behind my position on Global Intranet Governance and Roadmaps because EPC
Group is engaged in there literally every day and for nearly the past decade.

To state a few probably obvious facts, but to build the case for EPC Group’s strategy here:

What is Governance?

 Governance is the set of processes and policies affecting the way a system is directed, administered or
controlled.

o Includes the relationships among the stakeholders involved and the goals of the system.

o Creates mechanisms that try to reduce incomplete information


Why Governance?

 IT’s capability is directly related to the investment choices taken by management that have long term
consequences for various stakeholders

 Governance implies a system in which all stakeholders, including the board, executive management,
customers, and staff have clear accountability for their respective responsibilities in the decision
making processes affecting IT.

A Typical SharePoint Governance Plan (Uni-Centric Deployment)
The following are typically subjects hit on in a SharePoint Uni-Centric Deployment plan:

 People

o Roles & Teams

o Sponsorship

 Process and Policies

o Security

o Content Management

o Hardware & Services

o Procedures

 Communication and Training

o Communication Plan

o Training Plan

o Support Plan

Global SharePoint Considerations
(Note: These are all specific to Global, Large Scale, and Fortune 1000 Deployments)

 WAN Performance

 Farm Administration

 Help Desk and Support

 Cross Farm Services

o User Profiles/My Sites

o Managed Metadata

o Search

 Availability and Replication


Global WAN Performance

 A typical LAN user will generally have an initial page load time of about 2 seconds.

o A broadband user, with continental latency, would experience up to 2x-4x response time (e.g. 4-8
seconds)

o A broadband user, with global latency, would experience up to 4x-8x response time (e.g. 8-16
seconds)

o Low bandwidth, and extremely high latency response times’ experience is hard to predict

Global Farm Administration Considerations

 Provisioning

o Web Application Creation

o Site Collection Creation

o Content Databases

 Features and Solutions

 Local Service Applications

o Excel Services

o Access Service

o Vision Graphics Service

o Word Automation Services

o Word Viewing

Global Help Desk and Support Considerations

 Operations

o System Administrators

o Site Collection Administrators

 Multi-Tiered Support

o Tier 1: Help Desk

o Tier 2: Subject Matter Experts

o Tier 3: Farm Administrators

 Support and Administrative Training


Global Governance: Isolation Levels Examples
Level Definition SharePoint Meaning (Potential)

Isolation Tier 1 (I1) ·Out of the box SharePoint ·Same SharePoint Farm
Same IIS Application Pool
(Global) ·Out of the box Security
·Same Web Application
·Uptime During Business Operating Hours
(7am-5pm EST M-F) ·Same Site Collection

·Same Content Database

Isolation Tier 2 (I2) ·Custom SharePoint Features ·Same SharePoint Farm

(Global) ·Unique SharePoint Permission ·Separate IIS Application Pool

·Uptime During Business Operating Hours ·Same Web Application
(7am-5pm EST M-F)
·Separate Site Collection

·Separate Content Database

Isolation Tier 3 (I3) ·Third Party Application ·Separate SharePoint Farm

(Local) ·Custom Functionality ·Separate IIS Application Pool

·24 x 7 Uptime requirements. ·Separate Web Application

·Unique SharePoint Permission ·Separate Site Collection

·Separate Content Database

Global Governance: Service Agreement Examples
Service Level Agreement 1 (SLA 1) ·Recycle Bin Policy set to 30 ·Same SharePoint Farm

·Weekly Full Backups and Daily Incremental ·Same IIS Application Pool

·Uptime During Business Hours Backup ·Same Web Application
Retention for 6 months
·Same Site Collection

·Same Content Database

Service Level Agreement 2 (SLA 2) ·Recycle Bin Policy set to 120 ·Separate Farm

·Weekly Full Backups and Daily Incremental ·Separate Database Server

·Backup Retention 6 months

·Backup Retention for Incremental Backup for


4 Weeks

·Uptime During Business Hours

·After Hours Technical Support

EPC Group Lessons Learned

 —Intranet and Internet Deployments

1. Identify Global Governance Board early

2. Roadmap features and solutions for at least 12 months

3. Get buy-in not only from global stakeholders but from local support groups as well

4. Create a unified governance model for ALL farms as though they are one

 —Project and Team Collaboration Deployments

1. Identify the Global Governance Board early

2. Set limits on what is globally governed and what is locally governed

3. Create a high-level global governance which focuses on overall policies, architecture and
processes

4. Create local governance extensions which cover people, local policies, local processes and
operating procedures and needs.


Your Global Organization's Intranet Strategy

Summary

A Global SharePoint Intranet or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Deployment is a whole
different animal than a non-Global deployment. In the weeks to come I will touch on additional
considerations such as using tools such as Riverbed to increase SharePoint's WAN performance,
language packs, international law considerations such as the Patriot Act, the Freedom of Information
Act, etc. and how those can affect your server placement and how to implement a Global deployment
with real cost savings in mind.

I have been extremely lucky to be surrounded by my brilliant colleagues at EPC Group who have also
been on the ground in places like Germany, Australia, Japan, etc. and experience these situations first
hand and I enjoy sharing this type of real “in the trenches” knowledge from our lessons learned over
the years.


650 Successful SharePoint Implementations – Dissecting a Decade of EPC
Group Enterprise SharePoint Success

Background

I am writing this article as myself and my organization has embarked on and completed our 653
successful SharePoint implementation. In the sections below, I am going to dissect how an Enterprise
or Global SharePoint implementation project can become a success 99% of the time. With SharePoint
being one of the most popular software platforms in the world, there are new 20 webinars a week
from this month's newest experts, 30 new articles on “how governance should really work, this
way….”, and 5 new SharePoint firms popping up every few months (with quite a few failing and others
being acquired, for both good and bad reasons.

I am extremely proud of my team at EPC Group.net as we celebrate this 650 successful project mark
and 13 years of being in business. This article is meant to cover over a decade of real-life SharePoint
“In the trenches consulting”, the 500 gallons of coffee consumed, hundreds of working (train-the-
trainer) lunches, and thousands of hours of design, implementation, development, and configuration
experience that I would like to share from EPC Group with the AIIM community.

Success!

When you log in to your computer tomorrow morning, your browser’s home page will display our
organization’s new “SharePoint” solution. This is an exciting time for us because this new
(ECMIntranetCollaboration or “Hybrid” = all of these) platform has been designed to provide not
only a consistent look and feel but a user-friendly way for our organization’s staff to store your
documents, collaborate with your team members, classify sensitive and business critical information,
as well as open up a “Professional Networking” (Social Networking) platform for you to communicate
and have your own personal My Site within the organization.

Note: I have posted hyperlinks to previous articles on the topics in the previous section at the end of
this article for your review and reference.

Please follow the training links that have been provided to the new SharePoint Training Site that
contains not only how-to videos but a wealth of information on how the new system operates and will
benefit and increase productivity throughout our organization. We have identified Power Users within
each department and these users will assist with any “level 1” type questions about the new platform
and the links provided in the help section will allow you to contact the “Help Desk SharePoint
Support Team” for any additional issues or questions you may have…

Thank you,

The SharePoint Executive Sponsor


How Did We Get to the Message Above (Go-Live)? What Were the Steps that Ensured
our Successful Implementation?

SharePoint Training Session(s)

Before any go-live of a new SharePoint 2010 platform or future SharePoint release, you first have to
ensure successful training as well as identification of Power Users Super Users. EPC Group likes to
hold training and train-the-trainer session with our clients. (Sample agenda included below) Note: The
pages numbers are out of our training guide and do not need to be referenced.

Agenda - level 1

I. Getting Acquainted

a. Welcome to SharePoint Portal (pages: 9 - 10)

b. Finding information when you need it (pages: 11 - 13)

c. Browsing the Site Map (page: 14)

d. Orientation to a Site (pages: 16 - 18)

e. Navigating in SharePoint (pages: 19 - 20)

f. The Anatomy of a SharePoint Site (page: 21)

II. Setting Up A Site

a. Custom and out of the box Templates (pages: 22 - 23)

b. About Lists (pages: 24 - 34)

c. Working with Announcements (pages: 35 - 37)

d. Working with Calendar (pages: 38 - 40)

e. Using Contacts (pages: 41 - 42)

f. Using Tasks (pages: 43 - 45)

g. Using the Link List (pages: 46 - 47)

III. Working with Documents and Document Libraries (pages: 55 – 76)

a. Overview

b. Adding Documents to a Library

c. Working in Explorer View


d. Checking out/in

e. Versioning

f. Recycle Bin

g. Sending Links to Files in SharePoint

IV. Working with Columns and Views (pages: 79 - 95)

a. Overview

b. Editing Column Properties

c. Adding Additional Columns to a List

d. Creating a Custom Column

e. About/Creating Views.

Agenda - level 2

V. Securing a Site (pages: 108 – 124)

a. A Word about Permissions

b. Understanding Permission Levels

c. Adding Users to Default SharePoint Group

d. Creating a Permission Level

e. Creating a Custom SharePoint Group

f. Editing a Group’s Permission Level

g. Removing a User from a Group

h. Assigning a User Individual Rights

i. Editing a User’s Permissions

j. Managing Access to Libraries and Lists

VI. Administering Your Site (pages: 126 – 132)

a. Managing Regional Settings

b. Monitoring Site Usage and Space Allocation


c. Monitoring Site Usage

d. Monitoring Space Allocation

e. Auditing SharePoint Sites

VII. Advanced Topics

a. Custom Content Type & Metadata

b. Web Parts InfoPath Forms &
Workflow

d. Business Solutions

e. Custom Site Templates

Let’s Get Into Dissecting a Successful Engagement and the Method to EPC
Group’s Project Methodologies
Project Initiation and Planning - Initiation and Definition Activities
Once the EPC Group sales and consulting staff has worked with our clients to scope and build the
overall proposal and the project has been won, it is time for the Project Management Office (PMO) to
start engaging as well as planning the details such as:

· Create Work Breakdown Structure

· Perform Resource planning

· Create Project Schedule

· Preparing the Budget

· Conduct Schedule Review

The EPC Group team now develops the supporting plan definition activities and Project
Initiation activities such as the:

· Communication and Controlling Procedures

· Compile and inspect Project Definition Document

· Review and Approve Project Definition Document


EPC Group then rolls into our project kickoff sessions Preparing for Kickoff

Conduct Project Review and Kickoff Processes

· Implement EPC Group’s Project Control Documents and our internal Project

Server 2010 environment

· Kicking of Requirements Gathering

o Conduct Initial Requirements Gathering Sessions and Determine

Audience

o Content Sessions

o Conduct Content Requirement Session

· Services Sessions

o Conduct Services Requirement Session


· Equipment Sessions

· Conduct Global Equipment Requirement Session

· People Sessions

· Conduct People Requirement Session

· Conduct Global People Requirement Session

· Backend Application

· Conduct Backend Application Investigation

· Steering Committee Sessions

· Conduct Steering Committee Member Interviews

· Develop Requirements Document

· Conduct Requirements Document Review and Apply Updates

· Requirements Document Complete

 Obtain Requirements Document Client Sign Off

 Requirements Phase End Review

Conduct Phase End Assessment - Requirements Phase End Review Complete


Onsite Reviews

Conduct 1st - Onsite Review Planning Session

Development Environment

 SharePoint - ORDER HARDWARE & SOFTWARE COMPLETE

 SharePoint - HARDWARE & SOFTWARE RECEIVED

 SharePoint - STAGE HARDWARE & SOFTWARE COMPLETE

- Provide SharePoint team support in Development Configuration

- Provide complete knowledge transfer sessions, build documents, etc.

Governance Document

Governance Overview Meeting - (Identify Roles and Responsibilities)


Discover Working Sessions

 Define SharePoint Service

 Define Equipment for Environment

 Define SharePoint Platform as well as Supporting Software

 Define Policies - From Support, Training, Go-Live, Existing Company Policies, etc. (Note:
SharePoint is not meant to change company policy but to improve the user and company
experience on those policies)

Design Work Sessions

 Building Organizational Diagrams

 Build Proposed Model

 Define Information Management

 Define Organizational Structure


Governance Document Draft

 Construct SharePoint Services Documentation

 Construct Equipment for Environment Documentation

 Construct Software Documentation

 Construct Information Management Documentation

 Construct Organization Documentation

 Construct Policies Documentation

 Review Draft Governance Documentation with Client

Governance Document Final

 Construct SharePoint Services Documentation

 Construct Equipment for Environment Documentation

 Construct Software Documentation

 Construct Information Management Documentation

 Construct Organization Documentation


 Construct Policies Documentation

 Review Draft Governance Documentation with Client

Obtain Governance Document Client Sign off

SharePoint Roadmap

 Develop Roadmap Document

 Review Roadmap Document

Obtain Roadmap Document Client Sign Off

EPC Group - Begins Design Portion of the Initiative

 Design Process Overview Meeting

Server Configuration


 Identify document management approach

 Identify existing content sources _content audit or inventory

 Determine content migration methodology

 Review server software requirements

 Plan Recycle Bin use and Site recovery

 Determine site provisioning model and user experience

Determine Roles and Usage Patterns of Users

 Identify number and anticipated usage patterns of users of the Web front end

 Identify number and anticipated usage patterns of document management users

 Identify number and anticipated usage patterns of search users

Plan Capacity

 Determine normal load from roles and usage patterns

 Determine number of documents stored and document store size

 Estimate index size

 Determine needs for growth

 Determine peak load factor

My Next 3 Articles Detailing EPC Group’s Decade of SharePoint Success Will Entail:

 Security Best Practices and Consulting Methodologies

 Performance Best Practices and Consulting Methodologies

 Failover and Disaster Recovery Best Practices

 Reviewing and Selecting 3rd Party SharePoint ISV’s and Tools

 Localization Best Practices

 Long-term Maintenance Best Practices

 Content Navigation and Its Structure

 ECM Metadata Content Type Design

 Retention Schedule ECM ERM Workflow Development Meeting Expiration Basis Data of Related
Metadata

 Detailed Training Overview Best Practices – With an Emphasis on “Real World” Training and not
“Canned” Out-of-the-box Training

 Testing Break-fix, etc. Best Practices

 Communication Best Practices


 Migration Best Practices from Systems such as eRoom, FileNet, Hummingbird, Documentum, LiveLink,
and many others

 Project Management Communication Strategies for Consultants and Business Analysts

I would like to thank my many staff members at EPC Group for our success over the past 13 years
and these 650+ implementations as these methodologies and strategies were developed by a massive
team effort over many projects over these many years.

Implementing SharePoint within Federal Government Agencies – Best
Practices “From the Consulting Trenches” Tips for Government IT
Executives & Appointees
Walking into Continental Airlines to implement an Enterprise SharePoint Deployment is entire different
animal than walking into an organization like the Department of Justice (DOJ) for nearly the exact
same initiative, or should I say Task Order. (The DOJ has had a great deal of success in SharePoint
and I am merely using them as a large government institute example).

I had the privilege of having a breakfast meeting with the previous Chief Information Officer (CIO) of
the United States, Vivek Kundra, last year and it was refreshing to hear his ideas about how “Big
Government” should take the “lean” methodologies and best practices approach from private industry
as well as his ideas on how to cut out a lot of the “fat” and red tape.

He has since left his Obama Presidential CIO (1st ever Chief Information Officer) appointment to take
an Executive Vice President (EVP) position at Salesforce, but I am hopeful his ideas were passed on to
administration and/or the “powers to be” as implementing a game changing and bleeding edge
technology like SharePoint 2010 in a government organization can sometimes be a challenge.

I have been very vocal about my personal methodologies and best practices theories and those of
my Sr. architects at EPC Group on how best to implement SharePoint at places such as the Pentagon,
Department of Justice, multiple Air Force bases, the Department of State, Health and Human Services,
the National Institute of Health, and various 3 letter organizations.

From my 10+ years of SharePoint implementation experience and 653+ SharePoint implementations
(literally), I would like to express my personal 5 point plan (tips and first-hand experience advice
mandate) on how to ensure government-sized success 100% of the time (saving millions of tax payer
dollars) to CIOs, 2 & 3 Stars, high-level appointees, and the people that make the I.T. wheels turn in
D.C.

My personal soapbox: Errin O’Connor’s mandates for Federal Government SharePoint I.T. Success:

1. Streamline how to get to the best SharePoint talent without the need for subcontractors to then
subcontract to 2 other subcontractors… (I digress, but the amount of money I have personally seen on
submitting a Statement of Work Proposal to a Federal Agency and then the track that has taken for 2
or 3 more firms to get involved to take an initial hourly rate from $140/hour rate to an eventual
$240/hour rate blows my mind).


I am a taxpayer too and when you are talking about a 1500-5000 hour engagement, this is no small
amount of money (budget) to spend (so the “good old boys club” can play contract swap and task
order bingo and who has the approved 8a Stars lottery to fast track this project, to me, is personally
repulsive and a taxpayer waste.

 Note: I am taking nothing away from legitimate and deserving 8a Stars organizations as I believe in
what they do, rightly deserve, and what they contribute but I think the GSA should take a hard look at
this “status” as, in my opinion, is being abused. (Note: My personal opinion)

2. Do not be afraid to break the trends of the past | we are in the mobile age, a 1 Star General is
going to get an iPad for Christmas or for their Birthday and want to use it; Have your “MMGS”, Mobile
Management Governance Strategy, in order, yesterday.

3. The new employees coming into government careers are the “Facebook” generation, yes,
governance is key, but stifling (internal) content development keeps the status quo’

Note: A quick sidebar: I had a conversation with a Department of Defense related member, that
said, “Due to the economy, we are getting the best and the brightest candidates in the Army,
Navy, Air Force, and Marines that we have had in “some” years, and they expect information
now….”at their fingertips” and we are not prepared to service that request.

4. Do not just go with the consulting firm who developed the software, trust me, I have personally
hired some of them and they are not always the rock stars. EPC Group, who has had over 650
successful implementations (not tooting our own horn), and sometimes will question getting involved
in specific 6-8 month RFP proposals due to the fact that it is not worth the lengthy procurement
process and contract bingo eBay-swap will instead take a Fortune 500 Fortune 1000 engagement
that we know we can get executive buy-in and bring extensive SharePoint Return-on-Investment
(ROI) to the table. (Note: Without sharing our proprietary and time tested methodologies to every IT
firm interested in bidding the effort)

5. “Boutique” SharePoint Firms (like EPC Group), at the top of their game, are not always ok with
sharing their proprietary methodologies with the big “7” government contractors…. something to think
about and to weigh the risk factors. Why would a private firm (such as EPC Group or other respected
SharePoint firms), share their time tested, “in the trenches” methodologies with an approved
(massive) government contractor, who has the larger $250-500 million dollar Task Order and who can
add a minuscule “SharePoint Task Order” to the overall effort (under generic verbiage) to win and
staff deliver a project of 100-500k and risk that Big 7 firm, from turning and reverse engineering,
that methodology to their own benefit. It can happen...

Note: Some of the very top talent in the SharePoint arena would, in private admit, “they would rather
stay in the private sector arena and not risk their life work, i.e. risk 20k hours of 100+ employees
combined knowledge and best (learned from mistakes and lessons-learned that now work time and
time again), best practices for a 1 time project with zero promise of future phases with a firm who
won a $250-500 million dollar “generic” task order for “IT Systems Support”.

This to me is completely frustrating and not a way to increase getting the best and the brightest to get
the project done fast and efficiently. Some peoples, joking and under their breath stereotypes (about
all the red tape) didn’t come from thin air and why can’t we cut out that red tape and implement a


government solution for SharePoint 2010, including the NARA (The National Archives), as this
information is eventually going to become part of the Freedom of Information Act.

I know personally (public information) that some of the original Space Shuttle data, now in the
process of being or already archived, was originally stored in a SharePoint 2003 environment. How the
National Archives (NARA) going to take that data in and make it searchable? Are we going to put it on
a CD and test it (the CDDVD) yearly to ensure it’s still valid once a year? There is such a seamless
and better way this can be accomplished! (Imagine a SharePoint as a Service Platform within NARA,
taking in all Government SharePoint data seamlessly regardless of what version of SharePoint that
data is on?)

Final Thought…

My personal goal is for the United States government to get onboard with a solution, for not only
SharePoint, but the other document management systems as well, and collaborate (led by the
National Archives) to be able to take in (securely) these “content databases external data sources”
from SharePoint 2003, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, and future versions, in a seamless manner.

There are NARA teams in Colorado that are metadata specialists that can work with all of the
government agencies to develop a standard set of metadata (core content types) so that NARA can
inherit content from these systems (NASA, NAVY, DoD, etc.) in a seamless and secure manner to
ensure document security, seamless metadata “matching” and other requirements are stored in a
100% searchable and compliant manner.

Let’s cut the red tape with a huge set of scissors and let in some “out of the box” thinking into the
many governmental :institutional" way of thinking. There are so many extremely bright at IT folks at
the top of their game in IT working at these agencies but my personally opinion from observations as
that they feel sometimes one hand is tied behind their back when they want to make real progress
and real ROI changes to their organization.

High Level Best Practices: SharePoint Source Code Management and the
Related Deployment Process
50,000 Foot Overview
This article describes the source code management and deployment process for SharePoint 2010
initiatives and provides the current-state of SharePoint 2007 deployment analysis as well as listing the
various options and associated best practices for SharePoint 2010. This is a high-level EPC
Group process we put in place for our clients but in follow-up articles I will take this to a much
granular level.

Overview

The purpose of this article is to:

 Identify the different tools for source code management in SharePoint


 Provide best practices for source code management in SharePoint

 List the different tools for custom solution deployment in SharePoint

 Provide best practices for custom solution deployment in SharePoint

Note: For both organizations coming from non-SharePoint platforms as well as upgrading from
SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

Source Code Management– Coding Considerations
Platforms – Microsoft Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010

Features – Document Management/Records Management, User/Developer Communities, shared
code/service repositories.

Security – SharePoint Server Farm – Separation of the developer and live environment allows for
disassociated and secure coding that does not require prior approval or cause risk conflict. It is
recommended to use this approach to ensure separation of the environments and to allow for more
freedom in the development process. Live environments (QA and Production) will be subject to the
SharePoint Governance Plan.

Source Code Management

Source Code Management is considered part of Software Configuration Management (SCM) and
encompasses the tools, procedures and actors involved in tracking software changes over time. Myself
and my team at EPC Group have seen this be an area were organizations do to always focus their
budget on and can sometimes be lacking which can lead to long-term issues.

Visual Studio 2010 is the primary tool for development in SharePoint 2010 and it comes with out of
the box integration support for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010. TFS is more than an SCM tool as
it also provides a data warehouse to store project schedules, allows for continuous integration and
builds, project management and many other features. TFS is currently not an approved SCM tool per
the EA SCM standards. TFS provides the basis for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – an area
that encompasses more than just SCM.

Note: While TSF has better integration with Visual Studio, it does require licenses to be purchased.

SharePoint Deployment
Deployment is required to take a SharePoint Customization or Development Solution and put it on a
server. Development and deployment in SharePoint is different from development in .NET (ASP.NET,
Silverlight etc.). It involves steps that are unique to SharePoint (creating the DDF file, creating the
WSP etc.). These steps apply when deploying SharePoint solution to all environments (QA,
Production, Contingency, etc.).

Deployment Requirements/Objectives

A SharePoint deployment solution should, in most cases, meet the following objectives:


 Implementation of packaged code in development environment: The deployment solution
should be able to perform all the steps (create, build, package, deploy) for SharePoint deployments
right within the development environment (usually Visual Studio).

 Modification of deployment options and parameters: Ideally developers should be able to modify
the deployment parameters and options when deploying a SharePoint solution to different
environments. It is not desirable to have a solution that locks developers down with an obfuscated
process which is totally opaque and does not allow the team to control or modify any step of the
deployment process if needed. Having a customizable solution that developers can use to create
custom deployments allow flexibility and consistency across environments.

 Extensible: The SharePoint deployment process contains the following high-level steps: build,
package and deploy. A deployment solution should provide ways to extend a given step to fit the
specific policies of the organization or business unit for compliance, administrative/operational
consistency and other reasons.

 Retraction of deployment solutions: A developer goes through multiple iterations of development
and deployment while developing a solution. A deployment solution should be able to perform cyclical
retraction of SharePoint solutions and support continuous dev->test cycles of SharePoint
Development.

 Elimination of repetitive manual processes that reduce productivity

 Single-click build/package/deploy process integrated into Visual Studio IDE: Ideally a
developer can hit a single key and SharePoint will perform all the steps for deployment within Visual
Studio.

Legacy SharePoint Deployments

In SharePoint 2007, developers were introduced to the solution packaging framework which provided
the ability to package multiple kinds of features or components like features, assemblies, and files into
a single deployable artifact. The overall deployment process in SharePoint contained the following
steps (shown in the picture below):

 Create the solution: All the required elements of the SharePoint solution are created and implemented
within this step. This is usually performed within Visual Studio.

 Build the solution: Use MSBuild or custom scripts to build the solution.

 Package the solution: This involves creating the WSP for the SharePoint solution. This step involved
different steps: creating DDF file, running the MAKECAB utility etc.

 Deploy the solution: This involves taking a WSP file and running the appropriate STSADM commands
to deploy the WSP file into the SharePoint server so the solution is usable.

Visual Studio 2008 did not provide any standard in-built support for building, packaging and deploying
a SharePoint solution to a SharePoint farm. However, there were some point solutions/add-on tools
(STSDEV, WSPBuilder, and VSSWe etc.) available for Visual Studio 2008 for some of these


functions. All of these tools automated some of the steps in the SharePoint deployment process but
fell short of the intended goal.

Legacy Deployment Limitations

In spite of these tools, the developers still had to write custom scripts to tie all the steps of the
deployment process together. In a nutshell, the following were some of the limitations of the
SharePoint 2007 deployment process:

 Poor Integration: The legacy deployment process required introduction of third-party tools to
automate some of the steps in the deployment process. They were not integrated into Visual Studio
and Visual Studio was not SharePoint aware as well. Due to the lack of integration between
SharePoint and Visual Studio, each element of the solution existed in isolation with no direct
relationship to each other.

 Making Communication Confusion: The legacy deployment process was confusing and did not expose
the specific steps of the deployment process.

 Modification: There was no room to modify individual steps of the deployment process to meet edge
case scenarios.

 Automation: There was no way to automate the deployment process.

 Retraction: There was no way to retract an existing solution other than to write a custom script.

 Upgrades: There was no way to upgrade an existing solution.

 Artifact Removal

 Conflict Resolution: The legacy deployment solution did not provide conflict resolution in deployment
scenarios where the new solution creates a new version of existing SharePoint artifacts e.g. list
definitions etc.

SharePoint 2010 Deployment

Deployment in SharePoint 2010 still uses the same four deployment steps as in the Legacy
Deployment but the new deployment process implementation in SharePoint 2010 fixes the limitations
in the Legacy Deployment process.

Visual Studio 2010 Integration

Visual Studio 2010 provides first-class support for working with SharePoint projects in the following
ways:

 Single unified interface for the building, packaging and deployment processes: With the press of the
F5 key, Visual Studio 2010 can perform all the necessary steps involved in the SharePoint deployment
process. It can also associate the Visual Studio to the SharePoint process and thus, allow the
developer to debug the SharePoint solution right after the deployment.


 Auto-discovery of mapped assets: Visual Studio 2010 now provides mapped folders that can contain
things like images, CSS files etc. Visual Studio will automatically create module definitions for these
artifacts and automatically include them in the WSP when built by Visual Studio 2010.

 Visual Package Explorer: Visual Studio 2010 also provides a nice visual explorer to be able to easily
browse through the various components (features and folders) of the SharePoint solution (also called
SharePoint Items or SPI).

 Edit-in-place configuration files (manifest.xml): Visual Studio 2010 now provides very easy-to-
understand and use visual designers to work with the underlying manifest definition files. In addition,
one can get to the underlying XML file and hand-edit them for complicated scenarios if needed.

 Extensible framework: Visual Studio allows creation of custom projects, SharePoint items and thus,
provides ways to extend the deployment process in a customized way to fit various requirements.

Creating solutions

Visual Studio 2010 provides pre-built artifacts called SharePoint Items (or SPI). These SPIs cover
most of the commonly used SharePoint solution components that one uses. These SPIs are pre-
configured artifacts for common SharePoint projects and when selected and added to a Visual Studio
2010 SharePoint solution also automate generation of supporting artifacts (features, manifests,
.webpart files etc.) if such a feature does not already exist. The SPIs are also aware of the Visual
Studio structure for a SharePoint project. As noted earlier, Visual Studio 2010 provides an extension
framework where new custom SPIs can be created, added and used by others.

Building solutions

Visual Studio 2010 exposes properties to control the build process via a Property Sheet. These
options include:

 URL of SharePoint site to which the solution will be deployed

 Type of deployment: Sandbox vs. Farm

 Target of deployment: Global Assembly Cache (GAC) or BIN deployment

Packaging solutions

Packaging in SharePoint still happens between the build and deploy steps.

It is possible for a SharePoint 2010 solution to contain multiple SharePoint projects. By default, Visual
Studio creates a single WSP per project and so, in case of a solution with multiple projects, Visual
Studio will create multiple WSP files. The default deployment process within SharePoint 2010 builds
all the projects within the SharePoint solution but only the ones marked as “startup” will be deployed.
Though Visual Studio 2010 provides ways to customize so we could package output from all
SharePoint projects with the same solution to write to the same WSP, it is recommended as a best
practice to use a single WSP per SharePoint custom "project".


Deploying solutions

The last step in the SharePoint Deployment process: the deployment step has totally changed from
the previous legacy deployment process. Deployment step in SharePoint 2010 consists of many
components covered in the next few sections.

Deployment View

Visual Studio 2010 provides deployment designer views that allow customization of the deployment
step for a SharePoint project. Visual Studio 2010 adds a SharePoint tab under SharePoint project
properties. On clicking this tab, the designer will look as follows:

Pre-deployment tasks could include initializing directories or creating directories before a SharePoint
deployment while post-deployment tasks could include clean up tasks once the SharePoint deployment
is complete.

Deployment configuration

Visual Studio 2010 provides deployment configurations for use in SharePoint deployment. A
deployment configuration is a set of deployment steps with each step associated with a deployment
action. With each deployment configuration, we can associate pre- and post-deployment tasks as
shown in the Deployment View. Out of the box, Visual Studio 2010 comes with two deployment
configurations: Default and No Activation. The only difference between the two is the latter does not
activate the solution in SharePoint after deployment.

Typically, one will have to create custom deployment configurations to meet their specific deployment
requirements. A SharePoint project can contain multiple deployment configurations but only one
active deployment configuration at a time. When building a SharePoint project for deployment, the
deployment configuration to use can be specified as a parameter.

Deployment Step

A deployment step implements a specific step within a deployment configuration and is associated
with an action. When creating a deployment configuration, one has to specify the deployment steps
included in the deployment configuration and the order of execution of the deployment steps. Each
step consists of one or more tasks. Pre-defined tasks exists for common tasks like recycling the IIS
Application Pool, Retracting a solution, Activate a Feature etc. but using the Visual Studio 2010
Extensibility Framework, it is possible to create custom task definitions and plug them into the
deployment process by association with a suitable deployment configuration.

Conflict Resolution

One of the limitations of the legacy deployment solution in SharePoint 2007 was no way to do conflict
resolution. With the integration between Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, a developer can
perform conflict resolution. There is built-in conflict resolution for SPIs provided out-of-the box with
Visual Studio 2010. Developers can also customize the conflict resolution and detection logic using
custom SPIs. There are three main ways for conflict resolution for in-built SPIs:


 Automatic

 Prompt

 None

Thus, conflict resolution in SharePoint 2010 deployment is very powerful when used from Visual Studio
2010 as it is specific to each SPI.

Remote Deployment

Using Visual Studio 2010 to build and deploy a solution only works for deployments to the local
SharePoint Server or deploying a solution to an integration environment. Typically in most projects,
the developers do not have rights to deploy a custom solution to either QA or the Production
environment. A SharePoint Administrator would be responsible for deploying a custom solution to the
farm in the QA or Production environments.

The development team has to hand the solution binary (WSP file) over to the SharePoint Administrator
for deployment. It is recommended that the development team creates custom deployment
configurations for deployments to each environment: Integration, QA and Production so that there is
a consistent, well-defined and extensible set of steps associated with deployments in each
environment.

Tools Involved

As indicated earlier, SharePoint 2010 provides multiple tools for deployment depending on the nature
of deployment (local vs. remote). For local deployments on a developer or integration environment,
Visual Studio 2010 is a recommended solution. For all QA and Production deployments, Power Shell or
a custom scripting solution will meet the requirements.

# Tool Description Comments

1 PowerShell Windows Scripting/Administration Allows for granular,
Tool command script control

2 STSADM SharePoint services Command Line
Tool

Solution Lifecycle in SharePoint

When deploying a custom solution (a WSP file) to SharePoint, following actions happen:

 Add the given WSP file to the Solution Store

 Solution Deployment and Distribution: Distribute, unpack and install the solution to the front-end Web
Servers


 Synchronization if needed

Adding a solution to the Solution Store

Adding a solution to the solution store can be done either using the command line, Web Administrative
interface or through the SharePoint Object Model.

Solution Deployment and Distribution

It is possible to use a timer job to do deployments. In such cases, the deployments create a timer
job. This timer job is picked up by the timer service present in each front-end Web Server. The timer
job uses the SharePoint Foundation Administrative Web Service to access appropriate privileges to
deploy solution files to each computer.

Deployment Best Practices

Some of the best practices for SharePoint Deployment are:

 Use out-of-the box SPIs to implement the various parts of the SharePoint Development solution. Only
create custom SPIs if the out-of-the box SPIs do not meet your requirements.

 Collaborate with the team to discuss and decide the deployment configurations to use for each
environment. Ensure that the deployment configuration is agreed upon with everyone, is well
documented and is extensible if necessary.

 For remote deployments, use a PowerShell like standard script language to automate and implement
steps of the deployment process outside Visual Studio.

 Implement a Continuous Integration Platform and integrate that into the Deployment Process. Then,
decide on the frequency and schedule of the deployments to the Integration environment and
implement an automated deployment solution. This will enable the development to quality check the
integration environment on a daily basis ensuring that the latest code in SCM is working in an
operational environment.

 Create a QA environment which looks exactly like Production.

 Use proper and adequate logging and exception handling in custom SharePoint solutions. This will
help with troubleshooting problems encountered with a SharePoint solution in QA or Production where
one does not have access to Visual Studio to debug the problem.

 Ensure that the deployment scripts and custom deployment extensions are also versioned in the SCM
tool along with the source code written for the custom SharePoint solution.

 If possible, use sandbox solutions for testing a solution rather than using a farm solution.


SharePoint Consulting Best Practices for a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise
Deployment
The purpose of the article is to outline EPC Group best practice recommendations from an “In the
Trenches” SharePoint Consulting perspective for Enterprise SharePoint 2010 Environments. I have also
included supportable limitations outlined by Microsoft as well as best practice information that pertains
to SharePoint Server 2010. As I have been working with SharePoint from back in the "Tahoe" days
and have spent my entire career working around this product I very much enjoy sharing my thoughts
and experiences around this extremely powerful platform. (Note: Always implement it as a Hybrid)

Farms
Farms should be set up with the following server minimum requirements.

Web/Application Servers

The Web Application Servers at each location should be used primarily for SharePoint. The server
hosting the SharePoint components must have the following minimum software configuration:

Component Minimum requirement

Processor 64-bit, four cores

RAM 4 GB for developer or evaluation use

8 GB for single server and multiple server farm
installation for production use

Hard disk 80 GB for system drive

For production use, you need additional free disk
space for day-to-day operations. Maintain twice as
much free space as you have RAM for production
environments.

Software · The 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008
Standard

· Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010

You must download an update for Windows Server
2008 before you run Setup.

· Web Server (IIS) role

· Application Server role

· Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1



· Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0
(x64)

· Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0

· Microsoft Chart Controls for the Microsoft
.NET Framework 3.5

· Windows PowerShell 2.0

· SQL Server 2008 Native Client

· Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis
Services ADOMD.NET

· ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET
Framework 3.5 SP1

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF)

Additional Web Server recommendations

· A Web Application Server should have no more than 10 Web Application Pools.

· A web site should have no more than 250,000 sites per site collection.

· The maximum number of zones that can be set up for a Farm Web Site is 5.

· A SharePoint Farm cannot contain more than 20 managed paths per web application.

· The cache size set for InfoPath Forms service should not be over 300mb.

· Application Pools on the web application servers should be recycled at least once during off
hours.

· All sites should utilize Quotas to keep the size of the sites at a manageable size.

Database Servers

SharePoint requires SQL databases and prefers Windows Authentication. SharePoint is unaware of any
non-SharePoint databases on the SQL server. However it is recommended that the SharePoint
environment Database reside on a Dedicated SQL Server instance.


SharePoint requires SQL databases and prefers Windows Authentication. SharePoint is unaware of any
non-SharePoint databases on the SQL server.


Processor 64-bit, four cores for small deployments

64-bit, eight cores for medium deployments

RAM 8 GB for small deployments

16 GB for medium deployments

These values are higher than those recommended
as the minimum values for SQL Server because of
the distribution of data required for a SharePoint
Products 2010 environment.

Hard disk 80 GB for system drive

For Production, it is recommended that there are 4
additional disks available for Data, Logs, System
DB and System Use.

For production use, you need additional free disk
space for day-to-day operations. Maintain twice as
much free space as you have RAM for production
environments.

Software · The 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008
Enterprise or better.

· The 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server
2008 or better.

Additional Environments

It is highly recommended that each Location maintain at least three additional environments that are
not connected to the production environment. These environments are:

· Test. Integration area to test packaged deployment packages for pre-production.

· Pilot. Test deployment area to test applications changes.

· Development. Environment for application development and design for change requests for
new features and proof-of-concept.


It is highly recommended that the Test or Pilot environment for each location mimic the permissions,
content, infrastructure setup, custom solutions, and configuration of the Production environment.

If the hardware and software are available to mimic the Production environment, these servers can be
virtualized using Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware.

Development Environment

Configuring a good development environment and using the right tools are essential factors for a
pleasant and productive SharePoint Server 2010 development experience. When you are developing
solutions for SharePoint Server 2010, it is best to do the development on a machine that is running
SharePoint Server 2010. This will allow you to take full advantage of the development and debugging
improvements provided by Visual Studio 2010.

The development environment should be installed on a computer that has an X64-Capable CPU and at
least 2GB of RAM available to run SharePoint Server 2010. However, it is recommended that the
development machine contain at least 4GB of Ram. It is recommended that the Operating System be
Windows Server 2008 SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Since the basic requirements for a SharePoint
Server 2010 development environment are not the same as a Production Environment, it is highly
recommended that you do take the requirements listed in this Development section for creating any of
the other environments.

You can use several different configurations for your SharePoint Server 2010 development
environment. If your organizational budget allows, it is recommended that you use more than one
machine so that you can have SharePoint Server 2010 on one machine and the SQL Server residing
on another.

Additional machines add extra cost to the development process, so in many cases, using virtual
machines for the development environment is preferred. You can use virtual machine tools such as
Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware to accomplish installing SharePoint on a Virtual Environment.

Once the development environment has been set up with one of the recommended versions of
Windows Server 2008 and SharePoint Server 2010, you can then install the Development tools. At a
minimum you will need to install Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 on the development
machine to produce the base custom solutions needed for the environment.

Developers who have been trained according to Technology Standards should be granted
administrative privileges to the development environments to ensure that all features and
configurations are available while developing solutions. This is only for the development environment.

Server Patches

It is best practice to ensure that all SharePoint Server 2010 farms are always up-to-date with the
latest public service packs. It is also recommended that hotfixes are only applied in order to address
specific problems which are resolved with the said hotfix.


SharePoint 2010 Security Accounts

Required accounts

The DBA needs to create SQL Server logins for the accounts that are used to access the databases for
Office SharePoint Server 2010 and add them to roles.

It is recommended that SharePoint Server 2010 is installed by using least-privilege administration
installation approach.

The following table describes the accounts that are used to access the databases for SharePoint Server
2010.

Account Purpose Requirements

SQL Server Service This account is used as the SQL Server prompts for this account during SQL
Account service account for the following Server Setup. You have two options:
SQL Server services:
Assign one of the built-in system accounts
MSSQLSERVER (Local System, Network Service, or Local
Service) to the logon for the configurable SQL
SQLSERVERAGENT Server services.

If you are not using the default Assign a domain user account to the logon for
instance, these services will be the service. However, if you use this option you
shown as: must take the additional steps required to
configure Service Principal Names (SPNs) in
MSSQL$InstanceName Active Directory in order to support Kerberos
authentication, which SQL Server uses.
SQLAgent$InstanceName

Setup user account The Setup user account is used Domain user account
to run the following:
Member of the Administrators group on each
Setup on each server server on which Setup is run

The SharePoint Products and SQL Server login on the computer running SQL
Technologies Configuration Server
Wizard
Member of the following SQL Server security
The PSConfig command-line tool roles:

The Stsadm command-line tool Securityadmin fixed server role

dbcreator fixed server role

If you run Stsadm command-line tool


Account Purpose Requirements

commands that read from or write to a
database, this account must be a member of
the db_owner fixed database role for the
database.

Server farm The Server farm account is used
account/Database to:
access account
Act as the application pool
identity for the SharePoint
Central Administration
application pool.

Run the Windows SharePoint
Services Timer service.

SharePoint Logging

The SharePoint Server 2010 environment might require configuration of the diagnostic logging
settings after initial deployment or upgrade and possibly throughout the system’s life cycle. The
guidelines in the following list can help you form best practices for the specific environment.

· By default, diagnostic logging is configured to write logs to the same drive and partition that
SharePoint Server 2010 was installed on. Because diagnostic logging can use lots of drive space and
writing to the logs can affect drive performance, you should configure logging to write a drive that is
different from the drive on which SharePoint Server 2010 was installed. You should also consider the
connection speed to the drive that logs are written to. If verbose-level logging is configured, lots of log
data is recorded. Therefore, a slow connection might result in poor log performance.

· By default, the amount of disk space that diagnostic logging can use is not limited. Therefore,
limit the disk space that logging uses to make sure that the disk does not fill up, especially if you
configure logging to write verbose-level events. When the disk restriction is used up, the oldest logs
are removed and new logging data information is recorded.

· SharePoint logging should record medium to high events for normal usage days. However, if
there is an issue occurring, you can configure diagnostic logging to record verbose-level events. This
means that the system will log every action that SharePoint Server 2010 takes. Verbose-level logging
can quickly use drive space and affect drive and server performance. You can use verbose-level
logging to record a greater level of detail when you are making critical changes or troubleshooting
issues and then re-configure logging to record only higher-level events after you make the change.

· The diagnostic logs contain important data. Therefore, back them up regularly to make sure
that this data is preserved. When you restrict log drive space usage, or if you keep logs for only a few
days, log files are automatically deleted, starting with the oldest files first, when the threshold is met.


· Enabling the event log flooding protection setting configures the system to detect repeating
events in the Windows event log. When the same event is logged repeatedly, the repeating events are
detected and suppressed until conditions return to a typical state.

SharePoint Management Tools

All Farms should actively monitor and manage the SharePoint Farms.

Several Management tools (some very powerful 3rd party ISV tools with tremendous ROI) are available
to help monitor, analyze and manage SharePoint Farms.

Capabilities and Features

Manage Permissions · Perform a complete security analysis across your farm.

· Set, delete, reassign, or duplicate user permissions.

· Analyze permissions at any level of the farm down to the document
level.

· Identify permissions levels for users in both SharePoint and Active
Directory groups.

· Clean up users who are no longer in Active Directory but are in
SharePoint.

Interactive Analysis · Interactive analysis, not just predefined or static reports.
and Reporting
· Drill down or drill across to gain more detailed information.

· Compare historic patterns and trends to better plan out your future
requirements.

· In-depth analysis of SharePoint Audit and Change logs.

Analyze Usage and · Analyze activity down to the site, page, or document level.
Activity
· Identify who is accessing which documents, including details on that
activity (i.e. checking in a document, editing a document, or just viewing a
document’s properties).

· Isolate sites that are no longer needed and delete them.

· Compare activity from the past to help anticipate the future.

· Find sites with the most or least activity.

Analyze Content · Monitor and track the growth of sites for better planning.


and Storage · Analyze Web Part usage to determine which sites are using Web Parts.

· Ensure consistent branding and behavior: site themes, quotas, regional
settings, etc.

Monitor and track · Analyze Web Part usage to determine which sites are using Web Parts.
the growth of sites
for better planning ·

· Ensure consistent branding and behavior: site themes, quotas, regional
settings, etc.

Proactive · Automatic alerts to critical changes in your environment.
Management
· Know immediately when a site is added or deleted or a site’s permission
settings changes.

· Enforce policies to maintain standards.

· Schedule any analysis or action.

Move or Copy Sites · Move site collections, sites, lists, and libraries.
within Farms or
Across Farms · Quickly go from test environment to production environment.

· Reorganize your environment as part of an architecture change or a
business change.

Infrastructure · Efficient SharePoint Management.

· Manage and control multiple sites, site collections, and web applications
from one central location.

· Advanced search lets managers quickly and easily find sites to act
upon.

· Increase productivity with cross-site navigation and farm-wide
administration.

· Perform discovery/search functions across you farm.

Root Cause Analysis

The following steps should be observed when performing root cause analysis of issues identified in the
SharePoint Environment:

1. Understand the issue and gather data.


2. Reproduce the issue if possible.

3. List possible root causes.

4. Implement change through the companies RFC process.

5. Monitor outcome, verify, and document.

The Web Team should utilize multiple tools and methods for troubleshooting outages and issues that
are encountered in the environments. However, the following items outline the base components to
review and tools to use when trying to determine the root cause of issues.

· Event Viewer This tool is especially useful for understanding the underlying behavior by
evaluating application errors and warnings, or investigating system events that occur before, during,
and after a performance incident.

· Dump file analysis Analyzing dump files is an advanced troubleshooting and analysis approach
that provides low-level information about critical system errors and memory dumps. It enables you to
examine the data in memory and analyze the possible causes of such issues as memory leaks and
invalid pointers.

· System Monitor Tools such as System Monitor in the Windows Server® 2003 operating
system (called Performance Monitor in Windows Server 2008) are for establishing a performance
baseline, tracking trends, and compiling data on resulting performance after making changes.

· SQL Server Profiler This tool is a graphical user interface to SQL Trace for monitoring an
instance of SQL Server Database Engine or SQL Server Analysis Services. You can use this tool to
evaluate SQL Server performance aspects such as query times, stored procedure run times, and
deadlocks. This tool is especially useful for analyzing the underlying calls to SQL Server databases that
are housed on the storage area network (SAN). This tool should only be used to troubleshoot issues
and not on a daily basis.

· Log Parser Log Parser is one of the tools to monitor traffic, determine traffic sources
distribution, and establish performance baselines. This free tool parses IIS logs, event logs, and many
other kinds of structured data by using syntax similar to Structured Query Language (SQL). This
should not be run against a live production system during high usage times due to performance
implications.

Browser Troubleshooting Tools: Tools such as a Fiddler or HttpWatch are helpful for measuring
caching, page sizes, authentication, and general performance issues from a user browser perspective.

A SharePoint-specific knowledge base should be created to store known issues and resolution
instructions that have been encountered. Once the cause of an issue has been identified, a detailed
report should be created with resolution information to be added to the knowledge base. This
documentation should be used to provide future training on issue resolution and response processes.


SharePoint Search

When you plan crawl schedules and content sources, consider the following best practices:

· Group start addresses in content sources based on similar availability and with acceptable
overall resource usage for the servers that host the content.

· Utilize crawler impact rules on content sources when you need to decrease the time that a
crawl takes based on what the Index and Query server can handle.

· Utilize crawler impact rules when running crawls across the wan to minimize bandwidth usage.

· Place the Web server role on the same servers with the query role to increase performance and
reduce the effects that the indexing will have on other servers in the Farm.

· Full crawls should run at least once a week and incremental for highly visible content sources at
least once a day.

· Schedule incremental crawls for each content source during times when the servers that host
the content are available and when there is low demand on the resources of the server.

· Stagger crawl schedules so that the load on the servers in your farm is distributed over time.

· Schedule full crawls only when necessary. It is recommended that you do full crawls less
frequently than incremental crawls.

· Schedule administration changes that require a full crawl to occur shortly before the planned
schedule for full crawls. For example, we recommend that you attempt to schedule the creation of the
crawl rule before the next scheduled full crawl so that an additional full crawl is not necessary.

· Base simultaneous crawls on the capacity of the index server to crawl them. We recommend
that you typically stagger your crawl schedules so that the index server does not crawl using multiple
content sources at the same time. For best performance, we suggest that you stagger the crawling
schedules of content sources. The performance of the index server and the servers hosting the
content determines the extent to which crawls can be overlapped. A strategy for crawl scheduling can
be developed over time as you can become familiar with the typical crawl durations for each content
source.

· A Search index should not contain more than 100 million indexed items per search service
application.

· A Search index should not contain more than 10 million indexed items per index partition.

· Incremental profile imports should occur on a nightly basis and full profile imports on a weekly
basis.


Configure Kerberos Authentication

Kerberos authentication server grants a ticket in response to a client computer authentication request,
if the request contains valid user credentials and a valid service principal name (SPN). The client
computer then uses the ticket to access network resources. To enable Kerberos authentication, the
client and server computers must have a trusted connection to the domain Key Distribution Center
(KDC). The KDC distributes shared secret keys to enable encryption. The client and server computers
must also be able to access Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). For AD DS, the forest root
domain is the center of Kerberos authentication referrals.

Pros:

· Most secure Integrated Windows authentication protocol.

· Allows delegation of client credentials.

· Support mutual authentication of clients and servers.

· Provides potentially better performance vs. NTLM.

· Produces less traffic to domain controllers.

· Produces less traffic between domain controllers.

· Open protocol supported by many platforms and vendors.

Cons:

Requires additional configuration of infrastructure and environment to function
properly.

Requires clients have connectivity to the KDC (Active Directory domain controller
in Windows environments) over TCP/UDP port 88 (Kerberos), and TCP/UDP port
464 (Kerberos Change Password – Windows).

Kerberos configuration changes in SharePoint 2010 Products

Most of the basic concepts of configuring Kerberos authentication in SharePoint 2010 Products have
not changed. You still need to configure service principal names and you still need to configure
delegation settings on service accounts and potentially on computer accounts. However, there are a
number of changes you should be aware of:

· Constrained Delegation — Required for services which leverage the Claims to Windows Token
Service. Constrained delegation is required to allow protocol transition to convert claims to windows
tokens. Note that some SharePoint services and related products do not leverage the Claims to
Windows Token Service. Therefore, they can use basic delegation.


· Service Applications — In SharePoint Server 2007, the SSP services required special SPNs and
server registry changes to enable delegation. In SharePoint 2010 Products service applications use
claims authentication and the Claims to Windows Token service so these changes are no longer
needed.

· Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) — The WIF Claims to Windows Token Service (C2WTS) is a
new service used by SharePoint to convert claims to Windows tokens for delegation scenarios.

Considerations when upgrading from SharePoint Server 2007

If you are upgrading a SharePoint 2007 farm to SharePoint 2010, there are a few things you should
consider as you complete the upgrade:

· If web applications are changing URLs, be sure to update the Service Principle Names to reflect
the DNS names

· Delete the SSP service principal names as they are no longer needed in 2010.

· Start the Claims to Windows Token Service on the servers running service applications which
require delegation (e.g. Excel Services, Visio Graphics Service).

· Configure Kerberos constrained delegation with “use any authentication protocol” to allow
Kerberos constrained delegation with the C2WTS.

· Ensure Kernel mode authentication is disabled in IIS.

Delegation across Domain and Forest Boundaries

The Kerberos protocol supports two types of delegation, basic (unconstrained) and constrained. Basic
Kerberos delegation has the ability to cross domain boundaries in a single forest, but cannot cross a
forest boundary regardless of trust relationship. Kerberos constrained delegation cannot cross domain
or forest boundaries in any scenario.

Some SharePoint Services can be configured to use basic Kerberos delegation while other will require
the use of constrained delegation. Any service which relies on the claims to windows token service
(C2WTS) must use Kerberos constrained delegation to allow the C2WTS to use Kerberos protocol
transition to translate claims into Windows credentials.

The following service applications and products require the use of the C2WTS and Kerberos
constrained delegation:

· Excel Services

· PerformancePoint Services

· InfoPath Forms Services

· Visio Services


The following service applications and products are not affected by these requirements, therefore can
use basic delegation if required:

· Business Data Connectivity service and Microsoft Business Connectivity Services

· Access Services

· Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

· Microsoft Project Server 2010

The following service applications do not allow delegation of client credentials therefore are not
affected by these requirements:

· Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint

Known issues

SharePoint Server 2010 can crawl web applications configured to use Kerberos authentication if those
web applications are hosted on IIS virtual servers that are bound to default ports (TCP port 80 and
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) port 443). However, SharePoint Server 2010 Search cannot crawl
SharePoint Server 2010 web applications that are configured to use Kerberos authentication if the web
applications are hosted on IIS virtual servers that are bound to non-default ports (ports other than
TCP port 80 and SSL port 443). Currently, SharePoint Server 2010 Search can only crawl SharePoint
Server 2010 web applications hosted on IIS virtual servers bound to non-default ports that are
configured to use either NTLM authentication or Basic authentication.

For end-user access using Kerberos authentication, if you need to deploy web applications that can
only be hosted on IIS virtual servers that are bound to non-default ports, and if you want end users to
get search query results, then:

· The same web applications must be hosted on other IIS virtual servers on non-default ports.

· The web applications must be configured to use either NTLM or Basic authentication.

· Search Indexing must crawl the web applications using NTLM or Basic authentication.

Additional background

It is important to understand that when you use Kerberos authentication, accurate authentication
functionality is dependent in part on the behavior of the client that is attempting to authenticate using
Kerberos. In a SharePoint Server 2010 farm deployment using Kerberos authentication, SharePoint
Server 2010 is not the client. Before you deploy a server farm running SharePoint Server 2010 using
Kerberos authentication, you must understand the behavior of the following clients:

· The browser (in the context of this example, the browser is always Internet Explorer)

· The Microsoft .NET Framework


The browser is the client used when browsing to a Web page in a SharePoint Server 2010 web
application. When SharePoint Server 2010 performs tasks such as crawling the local SharePoint Server
2010 content sources, the .NET Framework is functioning as the client.

For Kerberos authentication to work correctly, you must create SPNs in AD DS. If the services to which
these SPNs correspond are listening on non-default ports, the SPNs should include port numbers. This
is to ensure that the SPNs are meaningful. It is also required to prevent the creation of duplicate
SPNs.

When a client attempts to access a resource using Kerberos authentication, the client must construct
an SPN to be used as part of the Kerberos authentication process. If the client does not construct an
SPN that matches the SPN that is configured in AD DS, Kerberos authentication will fail, usually with
an "Access denied" error.

There are versions of Internet Explorer that do not construct SPNs with port numbers. If you are using
SharePoint Server 2010 web applications that are bound to non-default port numbers in IIS, you
might have to direct Internet Explorer to include port numbers in the SPNs that it constructs. In a
farm running SharePoint Server 2010, the Central Administration web application is hosted, by
default, in an IIS virtual server that is bound to a non-default port. Therefore, this section addresses
both IIS Web sites that are port-bound and IIS Web sites that are bound to host-headers.

By default, in a farm running SharePoint Server 2010, the .NET Framework does not construct SPNs
that contain port numbers. This is the reason why Search cannot crawl web applications using
Kerberos authentication if those web applications are hosted on IIS virtual servers that are bound to
non-default ports.

Kerberos Authentication Checklist

In order to set up a basic Kerberos Authenticated application in SharePoint, the following items listed
in the chart should be accounted for.

Area of Configuration Description

DNS Register a DNS A Record for the web applications networked
loaded balanced (NLB) virtual IP (VIP).

Active Directory Create a service accounts for the web applications’ IIS
application pool.

Register Service Principal Names (SPN) for the web
applications on the service account created for the web
application’s IIS application pool.

Configure Kerberos constrained delegation for service
accounts.

SharePoint Web App Create SharePoint managed accounts.


Create the SharePoint Search Service Application.

Create the SharePoint web applications.

IIS Validate that Kerberos authentication is Enabled.

Verify Kernel-mode authentication is disabled.

Install certificates for SSL authentication.

Client Machine Ensure web application URLs are in the intranet zone, or a
zone configured to automatically authenticate with integrated
Windows authentication.

Firewall Configuration Open firewall ports to allow HTTP traffic in on default and non-
default ports.

Ensure clients can connect to Kerberos Ports on the Active
Directory.

Test Browser Verify authentication works correctly in the browser.
Authentication
Verify Logon information on the web server’s security event
log.

Use tools to confirm Kerberos authentication is configured
correctly.

Test SharePoint Server Verify browser access from the index server(s).
Search Index and
Query Upload content and perform a crawl.

Test search.

Client integration

Microsoft Office Integration

Microsoft Office client programs and SharePoint products and technologies are natural partners in a
productive, networked computing environment. Microsoft Office versions provide increasing levels of
integration with SharePoint products and technologies.


Microsoft Office Integration

Microsoft Office client programs and SharePoint products and technologies are natural partners in a
productive, networked computing environment. Microsoft Office versions provide increasing levels of
integration with SharePoint products and technologies.

This section describes how the 2010, 2007, and 2003 versions of Office work together with the 2010,
2007, and 2003 versions of SharePoint technologies. Although an overview of Office and SharePoint
features working together in past versions is provided, this section focuses on the integration features
of the Microsoft Office 2010 experience with Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

The scenarios outlined in this section show examples of how SharePoint 2010 and related servers can
be combined with capabilities of one or more Microsoft Office 2010 applications to deliver rich,
intuitive, and easy-to-use capabilities directly into the hands of desktop users.

The following table provides an overview of the features designed to work together between a specific
version of the Microsoft Office programs and the specific version of SharePoint products and
technologies. Levels of the combined value of these two products can be summarized as fair, good,
better, and best, and are further explained below.

Combined Value Description

Fair Microsoft Office 2000 or Office XP: Microsoft
Office 2000 introduced the first interactions
with Windows SharePoint Services, which
provides simple file operations that allow
people to open and save documents on
SharePoint sites from their Microsoft Office
2000 applications and receive alerts in
Microsoft Office Outlook 2000. Microsoft
Office XP builds on this level of data
integration to provide interactive access to
data stored on SharePoint sites, which
allows people to export list data to Microsoft
Office Excel XP and view properties and
metadata for files stored on SharePoint
sites.

Good Microsoft Office 2003 provides a good level
of integration with Windows SharePoint
Services, and SharePoint Portal Server 2003
which allows users to create documents,
organize team meetings and activities,
access and analyze data from SharePoint
sites, and use Microsoft FrontPage 2003 to
customize lists or Web Parts on SharePoint
sites. People can also use data integration
between the Office 2003 and Windows


SharePoint Services to move data to and
from SharePoint sites and create databases
linked to data stored on SharePoint sites.

Better Microsoft Office 2007 provides contextual
integration with Windows SharePoint
Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server, which allows people to interact with
SharePoint sites without leaving their
Microsoft Office programs, and provides two-
way synchronization with collaborative
information, documents, and business data
stored on SharePoint sites.

Best Microsoft Office 2010 with SharePoint 2010
gives people the ability to view and edit with
PCs, browsers, and mobile devices. This
combination also includes greater
capabilities for people to use Microsoft Office
applications to edit documents and work
with information from line-of-business (LOB)
applications while offline, and then
resynchronize when they’re reconnected to
the network. The ability to co-author the
same document or share a Microsoft Office
OneNote notebook reduces review cycles
and enhances teamwork. Microsoft Office
Backstage view puts many more SharePoint
2010 capabilities in the context of Office
applications, including greater automation of
metadata capture and streamlined access to
document libraries and SharePoint
workspaces.

The following tables show the integration features of different versions of Microsoft Office with
SharePoint 2010:


Browser Support

For users trying to connect to SharePoint 2010 environments the following browsers should be used:

· Internet Explorer 9




· Apple Safari (Several versions and the newly released version)

· Mozilla Firefox (Several versions and the newly released version)

· Google Chrome (Several versions and the newly released version)

SharePoint 2010 supports additional browsers but all users should utilize the company standard which
is Internet Explorer to minimize support issues.

Internet Explorer 6 is not supported for SharePoint Server 2010.

Mobile Browser Support

SharePoint also supports a wide variety of mobile browsers, which includes:

· IE Mobile on Windows Mobile 5/6 and newer versions

· Safari4 and newer versions on the iPhone (3 to newest release)) and iPad (1 through newest
release)

· BlackBerry 4.x and newer versions

· Nokia S60

· Openwave 6.2, 7.0 and newer versions

· NetFront 3.4, 3.5 and newer versions

· Opera Mobile 8.65 and newer versions

Governing Mobile Devices Browser Support

Another little known fact is that you can govern the specific devices that can access your SharePoint
experience and actually redirect the user to a specific template based upon SharePoint recognizing the
mobile device’s browser and sending them to the specific template for optimal user experience.

I am guessing the detractors of SharePoint 2010’s mobile capabilities have not actually sat down with
multiple clients and gathered the requirements, developed, implemented, and successfully rolled out
either custom or tailored mobile applications to Fortune 1000 or large government organizations.

Development

Customization Deployment Process (Application Development)

The following process diagram is a high level overview of the customization development and
deployment process:


These are steps illustrated in the diagram.

1. Initial requirements are collected and turned into tasks.

2. Developers use Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server or other tools to track the development
progress and store custom source code.

3. Since source code is stored in a centralized location, you can create automated builds for
integration and unit testing purposes. You can also automate testing activities to increase the overall
quality of the customizations.

4. In larger projects, there could also be an additional build verification or user acceptance testing
(UAT) farm, which is used by QA personnel to test and verify the builds in an environment that more
closely resembles the production environment. Typically a build verification farm has multiple servers
to ensure that custom solutions are deployed properly. Figure 2 illustrates a potential model for
relating development integration and testing environments, build verification farms, and production
environments. In this particular model, the pre-production or QA farm and the production farm switch
places after each release. This model minimizes any downtime related to maintaining the
environments.


5. After custom solutions have successfully undergone acceptance testing, you can continue to the
pre-production or quality assurance environment.

6 and 7. The pre-production environment should resemble the production environment as much as
possible. This often means that the pre-production environment has the same patch level and
configurations as the production environment. The objective of this environment is to ensure that your
custom solutions will work in production. The production database can be copied to this environment
occasionally, so that you can imitate the upgrade actions that will be performed in the production
environment.

8 and 9. After the customizations are verified in the pre-production environment, they are deployed
either directly to production or to a production staging environment and then to production.

10. The production environment is used by end users, who give feedback and ideas concerning the
different functionalities. Issues and bugs are reported and tracked through established reporting and
tracking processes.

11. Feedback, bugs, and other issues in the production environment are turned into requirements,
which are prioritized and turned into developer tasks. Figure 3 illustrates how multiple developer
teams can work with and process bug reports and change requests received from end users of the
production environment. The model in this figure also illustrates how development teams might also
coordinate their solution packages. For example, the framework and the functionality development
teams might follow separate versioning models that need to be coordinated as they track bugs and
changes.


Code Development and Deployment

· When deploying features package and deploy common components separately.

· Any dependencies between features and solutions must be document to map dependencies
between features.

· Avoid Referencing the Item Collections directly for files and folders when trying to perform any
type of enumeration or looping functionality.

· Utilize efficient LINQ Queries and SPQuery.

· When utilizing an SPQuery all queries should utilize a RowLimit of up to 2000 items at a time.

· Try utilizing indexed fields when trying SPQueries.

· All SPQueries should include an order by statement to take full advantage of the indexed field
functionality.

· All custom solutions and features should be deployed in the Sandbox for testing features that
will be deployed in Production. The sandbox is a partially-trusted environment in SharePoint 2010
designed to bring greater stability to the SharePoint farm by restricting actions that may cause
performance, security or other problems.


· Avoid the use of Site Definitions.

· Utilize the new feature stapling capabilities instead of Custom Site Definitions.

· All Features should utilize versioning for modifications that are deployed.

Master Pages

One of the big improvements in SharePoint 2010 was the enhancement to the look and feel of a
SharePoint site. This includes features such as the Ribbon, better support for Silverlight, faster
browsing, and cross browser support. One of the items that should be considered is the use of custom
master pages and layouts that are based on a SharePoint 2007 Environment.

This would include the Fabulous 40 templates that were created for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
and Office SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to display SharePoint 2010
master pages as well as the SharePoint 2007 master pages. These pages can still be rendered utilizing
the SharePoint 2010 engine but will not enjoy the benefits of the improved features. This should be
considered from a visual aspect as well as a performance aspect. SharePoint 2010 pages contain fewer
tables and contain compliant XHTML code which improves the load time of SharePoint 2010 page
versus a SharePoint 2007 page.

All master pages that are used in the environments should utilize the SharePoint 2010 master pages
to utilize the additional features provided by SharePoint 2010 Master Pages.

Command Line Administration

SharePoint 2010 now provides two methods of updating the SharePoint environment through the
command line and custom scripts. This is accomplished through the use of the Stsadm tool and
Windows PowerShell scripts. With the shift in technology preferences, PowerShell has risen as the top
performer when performing command-line operations on windows servers. Stsadm has not totally
been removed, but it remains as a part of SharePoint to support compatibility with previous versions
of SharePoint. Several Stsadm commands have been added as well as some have been removed. Even
though Stsadm still exist, it is recommended that the following command line operations be handled
with PowerShell:

· Backup and recovery

· Databases

· Features and solutions

· Import and export

· Logging and events

· Performance

· Security


· Service application

· SharePoint 2010 Search

· Site management

· Timer jobs

· Upgrade and migration

· Workflow management

To get the complete list of SharePoint cmdlets installed on your environment, you can run the
following command from your SharePoint 2010 Management shell.

gcm -pssnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell | select Name, Definition | fl > .filename.txt

Creation of PowerShell Scripts

One of the big advantages of utilizing PowerShell scripts for SharePoint 2010 is because it allows for
the creation of scripts that interact with lists, sites, site collections, and many other components of a
SharePoint environment. PowerShell can be used to create complex or simple automated processes in
your environment. However when you design a SharePoint-specific cmdlets, always do the following:

· Define cmdlet nouns.

· Define cmdlet noun properties.

· Define cmdlet verbs and parameters.

· Define your cmdlet errors, progress, and pipeline.

When you follow this process, the result is a comprehensive definition of the cmdlet set for the
component or feature that you are developing.

Define Cmdlet Nouns

To define Cmdlet Nouns, perform the following:

1. When you define a cmdlet noun, be very clear about what your feature will manage. Think of
nouns as items that a system administrator will manage. These could be SharePoint objects like
SPSite or SPWeb objects, or they could be installed features, such as SPFeature objects, form
templates, or Web Parts.

As a general rule, it is better to have a greater number of nouns that have fewer properties
than to have a small number of nouns that have a great many properties. Any noun that has
more than 15 properties is overburdened.


2. Identify the non-persisted, run-time state information that you want to expose to system
administrators. Also, identify state information that may not be persisted but must nevertheless be
returned to system administrators (for example, the running state of a service).

3. Evaluate whether a newly defined noun should be split into two or more different nouns. Create
separate nouns for items that are semantically distinct. Use feature or component specifications to
identify whether a noun spans multiple concepts or features.

4. If a noun spans multiple data sources (either physical or logical), split the noun along data-
source boundaries. Identify a logically independent subset of properties that is persisted in a single
database or SharePoint object only. In most cases this subset should become a separate noun, but
only if the resulting nouns are logically independent and only if they can be clearly understood as
distinct entities (that is, easily separated) without confusing system administrators.

5. For every persisted data source object that is used by more than one noun, unify these nouns
into a single noun. Also, unify nouns whose primary difference is that they have different lifetimes,
because their creation and deletion can be managed separately.

Define Cmdlet Noun Properties

To define Cmdlet Nouns Properties, perform the following:

1. Define an Identity property. All nouns must have an Identity property whose value is unique
and immutable, such as a GUID.

2. Create a pipebind for the noun. The pipebind should combine all properties that can uniquely
identify the object.

3. Define the complete set of public properties for the noun. Treat the noun definition as though it
were a public API. All related public properties are exposed in the command line when an instance of
the noun is returned.

4. Define a data type for each property. Properties should be strongly typed, so that format
validation code can be attached to the property type rather than to the noun. For example, a property
that represents an e-mail address should be of type email address rather than of type String.

5. Identify atypically large properties. Ensure that unusually large properties (larger than 10 KB)
are split into two or more properties.

6. Identify collections of properties that have a large number of elements (for example, a
collection with more than 100 elements). Remove such large property collections and split the
elements into separate nouns. Then, define the New, Remove, Get, and Set verbs for the new nouns.

For example, consider a scenario in which Users is a property of an SPWeb object, which can
have a large number of elements. To avoid problems, create a separate noun called SPUser
that represents one element in the list, and then add the associated New, Remove, Get, and
Set verbs.


Define Cmdlet Verbs and Parameters

Determine which of the base verbs (Get, Set, New, and Remove) apply to your noun. At a minimum,
system administrators must be able to get settings and to change (or Set) them. Additionally,
administrators may also need to create new instances (New) and delete existing ones (Remove).

1. Define the behavior of your Get cmdlet.

The Get verb must retrieve all instances if no parameters are specified, and it must do so by
writing the instances to the Windows PowerShell pipeline. However, any operation that can
potentially return a very large result set should include a Limit parameter on which a default
limit is specified. Of course, when limiting a result set in this way, you must alert users that
additional results may be excluded from the limited result set.

The Get verb must have an Identity parameter. When specified, the corresponding cmdlet
must return only the instance associated with that identity. If the identity that is specified is
not unique, the cmdlet should return all instances that have the specified identity value.

The Get verb can have additional optional filtering parameters. For example, the cmdlet Get-
SPSite might have a Content Database parameter that restricts the result set to the site
collections that are located in a specified content database. Furthermore, the Get verb must
have a Server parameter if the cmdlet returns local (that is, machine-specific) configuration
information.

2. Define the behavior of the Set cmdlet.

The Set verb must have an Identity parameter to identify the instance that is being changed.
The parameter must be able to take either an identity (for example, a GUID) or a name. If a
name is specified and this name matches more than one instance, the cmdlet must return an
error.

The Identity parameter of the Set cmdlet must accept pipeline input.

The Set verb must expose all writable properties of the noun that are received using the
corresponding Get cmdlet, except those that cause negative effects when set.

The Set verb must have an optional Instance parameter that represents an entire instance of
this noun type. The Instance parameter must accept pipeline input (by value).

3. Define the behavior of the new cmdlet.

The New verb must take a limited subset of the writable properties of the noun as parameters.
The remaining properties should be set to default values. Furthermore, the new cmdlet must
return the newly created instance object to the pipeline so that further cmdlets in the pipeline
may act on the new instance.

4. Define the behavior of the Remove cmdlet.


Your Remove cmdlet must have an Identity parameter that can take either an identity value or
a name. If a name is specified and it matches more than one instance, the cmdlet must return
an error.

The Identity parameter must accept pipeline input. Furthermore, any destructive operation
must support Confirm and WhaIf parameters. This requires little effort, as Windows
PowerShell and base classes of SharePoint Server 2010 provide means for supporting these
parameters.

5. Identify and define additional verbs for the noun.

For example, an SPContentDatabase noun might need a Mount verb to support mounting the
specified database. Use well-tested administrative scenarios and use cases to support
selecting appropriate verbs.

Remember that all additional cmdlets must have an Identity parameter that accepts pipeline
input. The Identity parameter must accept the identity (PipeBind) of the object. Furthermore,
any destructive operation must support Confirm and WhaIf parameters.

6. Identify properties that have potential negative side effects.

Properties that have potential negative side effects may require additional operations to
mitigate the negative effects. These additional mitigating cmdlets must have an Identity
parameter that accepts pipeline input.

7. For each cmdlet that you define, do the following:

1. Identify the list of prerequisites for the cmdlet. For example, in a case where a cmdlet can
be executed only in a certain system state, the cmdlet must verify that all state prerequisites
are met before executing.

2. Identify the list of operations. Specify the complete list of operations that the cmdlet is able
to perform. The cmdlet must perform and then validate these operations. This operation list
comprises the functional breakdown of the cmdlet.

Define Cmdlet Errors, Progress and Pipeline

1. Identify all error conditions and error-state behaviors. That is, list all conditions in which a
cmdlet can error out. Then, for each condition, describe the expected behavior. Your cmdlets must
provide basic error management.

Your cmdlets must clean up partial changes when an error occurs, and they must return a
meaningful (and localized, if appropriate) error message. Furthermore, cmdlets must
determine and reveal how a system administrator can recover from any error condition.

2. Differentiate between terminating and nonterminating errors.


3. Identify long-running operations. If a cmdlet is expected to take longer than about twenty
seconds, on average, to complete an operation, the cmdlet must provide progress information to avoid
the appearance of a suspended operation.

4. Ensure that cmdlets write their return objects directly to the pipeline. Avoid buffering retrieved
objects to an internal array. Writing to the pipeline allows the downstream cmdlets to act upon
preceding objects in the pipeline without delay.

5. Group similar parameters. Limit cmdlets to 16 parameters (not including the Identity and Name
parameters). In cases where object methods are rarely called, and where an object model method
exists, no cmdlet parameter is needed. In cases where a large number of parameters can be grouped,
write a single parameter that accepts the group object.

SharePoint Designer 2010 versus Visual Studio 2010
There are instances where it is beneficial to use one development tool over the other. This section
outlines the major differences for when you should use Visual Studio 2010 or SharePoint Designer
2010 when creating customizations in SharePoint.

· Visual Studio 2010 should be the tool of choice when you want to extend SharePoint
functionality by writing your own custom code.

· Visual Studio should be used more by Developers.

· SharePoint Designer 2010 should mainly be used for presentation and branding of sites for
rebranding the site, customizing the layout, updating CSS, and base designing Master Pages.
However, any final master pages and layouts that will be globally deployed to all Locations should be
eventually created and deployed using Visual Studio 2010 for total reusability.

· SharePoint Designer 2010 is best suitable for a Web Designer.

· If you want to design portable workflows you should use Visual Studio 2010.

· Reusable workflows can be started in SharePoint Designer 2010 and imported into Visual
Studio 2010 for the creation of simple workflows.

· If you want to create event handlers, custom features, site definitions, custom lists or web
parts then you should use Visual Studio 2010.

Packaging and Deployment Technologies

SharePoint Features

Note: The packaging and deployment technologies sections will continue to be updated as the
SharePoint Review Board is established in future phases and as documented in the SharePoint
Roadmap.


SharePoint Features are containers for one or more customizations packaged into a single unit.
Features include a built-in scope attribute that defines where and how wide they can be deployed.
Feature definitions can be installed and then activated by the server administrator against the farm, a
specific Web application, a specific site collection, or a specific Web site. In some cases a feature can
also be exposed to the SharePoint Services Team site collection or site owners so that they can be
properly put into the deployment process. Features can have dependencies to other features and can
be “stapled” to specific site definitions to help automate the deployment of features that are related to
other features or to a site definition.

SharePoint Solutions

SharePoint solutions are containers for one or more customizations Solutions can contain features,
Web Parts, security policy changes, and other files with a detailed guide to allow the automated
deployment to the file system by the deployment mechanisms in SharePoint Products and
Technologies.

Web Part Packages

Web part packages are a legacy packaging and deployment mechanism for Web parts that is still
supported in SharePoint 2010. A Web part package is composed of a .cab file with a manifest
describing the contained files. SharePoint Solutions are now the preferred method of deploying Web
parts due to the additional capabilities to edit safe controls and security policy information.

Installation Types

The previously described packaging and deployment technologies require installation into SharePoint
environment before they can be used. The following installation types are the most commonly used:

Manual Installation

Manual installation refers to documented manual steps required to extract and copy files, perform
assembly registration, or edit configuration and security policy settings. It is the least preferred
method of installation due to the potential lengthiness of installation activities and the potential for
incorrect or incomplete installation.

Scripted Installation

Scripted installation refers to batch file-based installation of customizations to execute the various
steps that would be part of a manual installation. It is a slight improvement over manual installation
but suffers from the disadvantages of requiring multiple files, and usually lacking any handling of
installation failure events.

Automated Installation

Automated installation is a customization installation driven by the Windows installer or a self-
contained executable. The automated installation experience can be as rich as the appropriate team


member want to build. Automated installation normally offers the capability to have rich user dialogs,
which can help tailor the installation and deployment process. One common issue with automated
installation is that the contained files and activities performed are not easily visible to the person who
performs the installation, and therefore harder to evaluate for dangerous activities.

Customization Packaging, Deployment, and Installation

The following packaging and deployment technologies (SharePoint Features and SharePoint Solutions)
are the best practices customization packaging and deployment process.

Packaging and Deployment Technologies

SharePoint Features

Note: The packaging and deployment technologies sections will continue to be updated as the
SharePoint Review Board is established in future phases and as documented in the SharePoint
Roadmap.

SharePoint Features are containers for one or more customizations packaged into a single unit.
Features include a built-in scope attribute that defines where and how wide they can be deployed.
Feature definitions can be installed and then activated by the server administrator against the farm, a
specific Web application, a specific site collection, or a specific Web site. In some cases a feature can
also be exposed to the SharePoint Services Team site collection or site owners so that they can be
properly put into the deployment process. Features can have dependencies to other features and can
be “stapled” to specific site definitions to help automate the deployment of features that are related to
other features or to a site definition.

SharePoint Solutions

SharePoint solutions are containers for one or more customizations Solutions can contain features,
Web Parts, security policy changes, and other files with a detailed guide to allow the automated
deployment to the file system by the deployment mechanisms in SharePoint Products and
Technologies.

Web Part Packages

Web part packages are a legacy packaging and deployment mechanism for Web parts that is still
supported in SharePoint 2010. A Web part package is composed of a .cab file with a manifest
describing the contained files. SharePoint Solutions are now the preferred method of deploying Web
parts due to the additional capabilities to edit safe controls and security policy information.

Code review Process (SharePoint Services Team)

Code review is the key process of stream lining and standardizing the implementation artifacts and
deliverable up to the mark to meet the internal or external SLA.


Pre-Requisites:

· Code Review Process Established in the project team

· Code Review panel or Gate Keeper needs to be identified

· Define the Code Review checklist

· Define the coding guidelines

· Define the Naming conventions across the reference architecture layers components

· Prioritize the Review comments Severity

· Needs to have the Review comments tracking System (Bug tracking system can be
used)

Types of Code Review Activity

Desk Review /Informal Review

1. As a Senior Developer/ team lead / Project lead can sit with developer in his machine
and check the complex component implementation

2. Review the naming convention, number of lines per method or class and for loop, if else
ladder, Map or List or array usage and review the developer business logic understanding and
implementation

3. Provide the on the fly review comments to the developer to focus on the key
implementation skeleton

Peer Review

1. As part of any logical component implementation completion, the developer can call for
the Peer Review

2. Peer will be identified with in his track/team and the code artifacts needs to be
submitted to the peer by the developer

3. Identified peer will review the code artifacts against the coding checklist as well with
the help of coding guidelines

4. Peer will provide the review comments to the appropriate developer and Keep the Team
Lead/Project lead in the communication loop

Panel Review

1. Panel will be identified with in the project


2. Panel consists of Architect, SME, Lead, and Senior Developers (max 5- 8 people)

3. End of Specific Service or Functionality formal component implementation completion,
the code or deliverable will be submitted to the Panel by the respective track or team lead

4. Panel member will do the offline review on the code/artifacts thoroughly

5. Panel needs to check the Implementation strategy, design pattern, reusability, QoS and
the functional logic implementation

6. Panel will gather in the Meeting room and the team lead /code owner will present the
code to panel and walkthrough the artifacts

7. Panel will raise the concern or identified gap in the meeting and the panel member will
discuss the gaps

8. Finally the panel will recommend the refactoring or approve the code for baseline

9. All the review comments will be prioritized under one of the following criteria such as
Development change/refactoring, bug, design issue, requirement missing, Change Request
etc.

Client Review

1. After the panel review, the code will be given to the Client Technical panel (if your
project structure has this?) and receive their inputs for further beautification in your client
deliverables

2. Finally your project manager will take the summary of the code review metrics from the
tool and use that for code quality metrics/ SLA Base line

Installation Types

The previously described packaging and deployment technologies require installation into SharePoint
environment before they can be used. The following installation types are the most commonly used:

Manual Installation

Manual installation refers to documented manual steps required to extract and copy files, perform
assembly registration, or edit configuration and security policy settings. It is the least preferred
method of installation due to the potential lengthiness of installation activities and the potential for
incorrect or incomplete installation.

Scripted Installation

Scripted installation refers to batch file-based installation of customizations to execute the various
steps that would be part of a manual installation. It is a slight improvement over manual installation


but suffers from the disadvantages of requiring multiple files, and usually lacking any handling of
installation failure events.

Automated Installation

Automated installation is a customization installation driven by the Windows installer or a self-
contained executable. The automated installation experience can be as rich as the appropriate team
member want to build. Automated installation normally offers the capability to have rich user dialogs,
which can help tailor the installation and deployment process. One common issue with automated
installation is that the contained files and activities performed are not easily visible to the person who
performs the installation, and therefore harder to evaluate for dangerous activities.

Upgrade Strategy
The following section outlines a few things to consider during the before, during, and after the
upgrade process.

Things to consider

· Update your servers to Service Pack 2 (SP2) of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or
later.
Your environment must be updated to Service Pack 2 of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to run the
upgrade process, either for an in-place or databases attach upgrade.

· (Optional) It is recommended that you install the October 2009 Cumulative Update because it
includes improvements to the pre-upgrade checker tool.

· Ensure that the environment is fully functioning before you perform an upgrade.
An upgrade does not solve any problems that might already exist in your environment. Therefore,
ensure that the environment is fully functioning before you perform an upgrade. For example, if you
have web applications that are no longer being used, unextend them before you upgrade. If you want
to delete a web application in Internet Information Services (IIS), unextend the web application before
you delete it; otherwise, SharePoint Server 2010 will try to upgrade the web application even though
it does not exist, and the upgrade will fail. If you find and solve problems beforehand, you are more
likely to meet the upgrade schedule that you have estimated.

· Before you try an in-place upgrade, migrate to 64-bit servers. Upgrade your operating system
to a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2 (SP2). If
you are using SQL Server, upgrade or migrate to a 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2,
SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Cumulative Update 2, or SQL Server 2005 with SP3
and Cumulative Update
Do not try to combine these operations with your upgrade process. You cannot perform an in-place
upgrade unless your system already runs on a supported operating system and platform.

· Run the pre-upgrade checker to look for potential issues. The pre-upgrade checker reports
missing customizations and issues with orphaned sites, and more, so that you can address these
issues before you perform your upgrade.


· Run the Test-SPContent against the Database if you plan to do the attach; then, detach
method for upgrading. This will produce additional issues that may occur when you try to run the
actual upgrade process.

· Perform a trial upgrade on a test farm first. Back up the live farm, restore to test servers, and
then perform the upgrade. Examine the results to set expectations for what the live upgraded sites
will look like, to determine how much post-upgrade customization will have to be done, and to
estimate how long the upgrade will take. Make sure you try a full search indexing crawl to ensure that
the search results are indexed properly.

· Plan for capacity. Ensure that you have disk, processor, and memory capacity sufficient to
handle upgrade requirements.

· Back up your environment. Perform a full backup of your environment before upgrading. That
way, you can recover your environment if you must roll back from an upgrade.

· Optimize your environment before upgrade. A few key limits have changed in SharePoint
Server 2010, such as query throttling on large lists and lower limits on the number of site collections
allowed per content database (from 5,000 warni2ng and 15,000 limit to 2,000 warning and 5,000
limit). Be sure to optimize your Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment to meet these limits or
restrictions before upgrade to mitigate errors during the upgrade process or broken lists or sites after
upgrade.

· (Optional) If you are using the database attach upgrade method, set the original databases to
read-only.
If you expect a long outage window while you perform a database attach upgrade, you can set the
databases in the original environment to be read-only so that users can continue to access their data
without changing it.

· Do not add any servers to your server farm after you begin the upgrade process. Running the
SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard upgrades the configuration database. The configuration
database contains the list of servers in the farm. Servers added to the farm after the configuration
wizard has been run are not included in the database. Therefore, servers added after the wizard runs
do not appear in the upgraded version topology. If you need to add servers to your farm, do so either
before you start the upgrade or after you have completed the upgrade process.

· After upgrade, review the Upgrade Status page and upgrade logs to determine whether there
are issues that must be addressed. Then review the upgraded sites. The Upgrade Status page reports
on the upgrade progress, and the upgrade logs list any errors or warnings that occurred during the
upgrade process. You should verify all of the sites and test them before you consider the upgrade
complete.

Site Usage
The following is a list of high level best practices provided to support an implementation of SharePoint
2010:


Administrative

· Regularly review the list of site users and their respective permission levels for your site, as
well as audit that list for associates who changed jobs or roles.

· Consider using Active Directory groups for adding members to a site; these are especially
applicable for department sites to keep active/inactive site members current. If AD groups are not
used, Site Owners can assign rights through the use of SharePoint Groups.

· Assigning specific rights to specific individuals should be used as a last option when
determining how to assign permissions.

· As access and permission rights are assigned, Site Owners must understand their obligations
from an audit perspective for assigning individuals appropriate rights within SharePoint, and must
carefully review and manage access and permissions.

· Site members should ensure that the files they upload are appropriate for viewing by the
audience with access to the site.

· Set up alerts to let you know when content on your SharePoint site has changed.

· Assign users the lowest level of permission they will need for site access.

· Make sure your site has clearly defined ownership by designating both a primary and secondary
Site Owner.

· Avoid using special characters in a URL as much as possible when creating a site.

Quotas and Limitations (Examples)

· SharePoint usage must comply with existing company policies and standards.

· Site Owners receive alerts when storage is at 90% of quota.

· Any type of document may be uploaded into the SharePoint system which is not in the
exclusion list defined in the Web Application.

· Documents must be no larger than 100MB. Larger files require approval by Tier 2 Support.

· Preservation and Disposal of sites to ensure stale sites are removed and data storage is
reclaimed is part of the provisioning obsolescence plan which includes:

o Alert to the business owner and admin for renewal, short term preservation (AKA
archival) or deletion when the declared expiration date is reached.

o If a preserved (AKA archived) site has reached 5 years of existence, alert the site
owner and delete if no answer.


o When a site has been idle for 2 years (no update), alert the site owner and site
collection administrator for renewal, short term preservation (AKA archival) or
deletion. If there are no owners, preservation the site until an owner can be defined. If
no owner can be defined, the site will be archived and then deleted after one year.

· SharePoint maintains version control and previous versions of documents can be restored by
document owners. Items that have been deleted within SharePoint can be recovered from the
SharePoint Recycle Bin by site owners and users. Full system backups are done according to current
Enterprise Standards as defined in the IT Standards for User.

· Any item emptied from the Recycle Bin will not be restored without appropriate approvals and
cost recovery.

· An unlimited number of documents and document versions may be stored in SharePoint for as
long as necessary within site quota limits. However, site owners and users must actively monitor and
maintain their sites and remove unneeded documents and document versions in order to preserve
storage space.

Creating Site Pages

· Maintain the default Standard site template layouts as much as possible to ensure consistency
and ease of use across multiple sites.

· Keep announcements, blogs, and other text concise so users can quickly scan the page to
gather relevant information.

· As you add content to your site, the primary emphasis should be on “what” you want to
communicate rather than on “how” content is formatted.

· Use the web-based tools built in to SharePoint to edit your site pages. However this ability
should be limited based on the permission set up in the SharePoint site.

· SharePoint Designer access to the environments should be minimized based on the roles
defined at the Farm

Working with Documents

· “Working” documents used during a collaboration effort should be stored in document libraries
that have been created for each site.

· Use different views of your document library to tailor how and what information is displayed.
While the content of the document library does not change, creating different views allows you to
organize and filter the documents in order to make them easy to browse. Views can be created to
show documents in a different layout, within a specific date range, by author, filtered by keywords,
etc.

· Send links to documents that are located in SharePoint sites rather than sending attachments
in e-mail messages. This helps avoid having multiple copies of the original in circulation.


· As much as possible, refrain from renaming or moving a file or its location, as this will cause
links to become invalid.

· Avoid incorporating version numbers in file names. SharePoint has built-in versioning tools that
automatically save older copies of your file.

File and Document Limitations

The Following chart outlines the limitations for files and document in SharePoint 2010.

Limit
Limit Maximum value Notes
Type

File size 2 GB Boundary The default maximum file size is 100 MB
(Note: This can differ and can change based
on external BLOB storage and other factors).
This can be increased up to 2 GB; however a
large volume of very large files can affect
farm performance.

Documents 30,000,000 per Supported You can create very large document libraries
library by nesting folders, or using standard views
and site hierarchy. This value may vary
depending on how documents and folders are
organized, and by the type and size of
documents stored.

Major versions 400,000 Supported If you exceed this limit, basic file operations—
such as file open or save, delete, and viewing
the version history— may not succeed.


File Naming Tips

· Use descriptive and meaningful file names. Avoid using the following characters in file names:!
@ # $ % & # : ? * < > % / | " ~.

· Since SharePoint automatically tracks Created by, [Last] Modified by, Created Date, and [Last]
Modified Date, try to avoid using these descriptors in the file name. If name or date values are key to
the file description, agree to common conventions (yyyy-mm-dd or Last name-First Name) in advance.

· All users should use the standard approach for naming files based on the company’s standards.
File naming rules, examples, and reminders can be posted in the document library’s General Settings
Description field.

· When naming files, use spaces between names, as spaces improve readability.


18 SharePoint Best Practice and In-Depth Methodologies - EPC Group

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