‘TAMING THE BEAST’ TO BUILD BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

SHAREPOINT 2013

GUIDELINES

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author team: The author team for this Guideline comprises of Gabriel Karawani (Director and Co-Founder, ClearPeople), Blair Hainsworth (Senior SharePoint Consultant, ClearPeople), James Callaghan (Senior SharePoint Consultant, ClearPeople) and Eneko Vallecillo (SharePoint Practice Team Manager, ClearPeople); and with Andrew Roberts (Marketing Manager, ClearPeople) supporting the team with statistics and background information.

Established in 2003, ClearPeople (www.clearpeople.com) is one of the UK’s most experienced SharePoint consulting and development houses. ClearPeople has delivered business solutions on SharePoint ranging from Intranet Portals, Extranets and Document Management Systems to Workflow Systems and Business Intelligence - both on-premises and in the cloud.

ClearPeople’s primary focus is to engage with clients where value can be gained through innovative technical solutions that help boost efficiency, and productivity.

ClearPeople is a Microsoft Gold Competency and Cloud Accelerate partner; and is one of only three initial UK System Integrator Partners hand-picked by Microsoft for the new Business-Critical SharePoint program, launched in 2012. ClearPeople’s experience with SharePoint and the Microsoft product suite is proven and strengthened by inclusion in the many of Microsoft’s early adoption, incubation and evidence programs.

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SharePoint is the fastest growing product in Microsoft's history, with 20,000 new users added daily between 2006 and 2011. Today, well over half of all businesses use SharePoint in one form or another, including 78% of Fortune 500 companies, with around 125 million users worldwide.

Despite this, many organisations and users still struggle to understand exactly what SharePoint does and can deliver. As a result, many SharePoint implementations have suffered significant problems.

Against this backdrop, the latest version of the product, SharePoint 2013, offers many new features and potential benefits to organisations.

This Guideline explains what SharePoint 2013 does and what it provides in the core application areas of:

• Document management and document collaboration.

• Team collaboration/communities of practice.

• Enterprise search.

• Social features.

• Workflows.

• Integration with line-of-business systems.

• Mobile access.

• Business Intelligence.

• Sharing calendars and tasks.

The Guideline looks at the different editions of SharePoint 2013 available (including on-premises and cloud-based) and advises on how to choose the best option for your organisation.

It includes some key advice and core principles and covers how to keep control of SharePoint projects and how to align the product with your overall business and IT strategy. It looks at the practical implementation issues when introducing SharePoint, and ends with a 10-point action plan, together with a glossary of SharePoint terms and sources of further information.

The aim is to provide a comprehensive guide to understanding and making best use of SharePoint 2013, one of the most important and intricate enterprise software products.

SUMMARY OF GUIDELINES

INTRODUCTION

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SharePoint’s roots date back to mid-to-late 1990’s when Site Server was first released with content and product catalogue management capabilities. The first official version of SharePoint was then released in 2001, when it was positioned as a portal product to assist businesses aggregate information.

Champions of the earlier versions of SharePoint were however mainly technical enthusiasts. Business users only started experiencing the product with the release of SharePoint 2007 (officially known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or MOSS 2007); with over 100 million licenses sold to more than 17,000 business customers in addition to the free WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) edition.

Whilst sales numbers were impressive, SharePoint 2007 received mixed reviews from users, where the main weaknesses were identified as the user interface and that it required high levels of customisation to do what you wanted.

However, with SharePoint 2010 (released in 2010) and SharePoint 2013 (released in 2012), SharePoint underwent considerable changes on a number of different fronts. It has evolved into a mature and stable platform delivering a large range of features and functionalities for a wide variety of business uses. Usability has been a major focal point in the recent versions, as well as improvements made to integration with Microsoft’s own suite of Office and server products.

These improvements, and the expanding knowledge base of SharePoint developers, which in 2011 numbered over 700,000, SharePoint’s acceptance and popularity grew rapidly - so much so that it was, and still is, the fastest growing product in Microsoft’s history, with 20,000 new SharePoint users added every day between 2006 and 2011.

Today, more than half of all businesses utilise SharePoint in one form or another, including 78% of Fortune 500 companies, with some 125 million users world-wide. In a recent Gartner report, SharePoint was described as “the most widely used document- and collaboration-centred platform” and has overtaken Oracle and IBM in that space, becoming the clear market leader.

Microsoft’s release of SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 (SharePoint Online) in early 2013 was a significant milestone which is already having a big impact on the market place. Less than half a year after its release, a major paradigm shift has emerged, whereby certain SharePoint features and updates are now being continuously released to SharePoint Online, before being made available as upgrades for on-premise SharePoint 2013 installations; giving the market a clear sign of how SharePoint will be delivered going forward. An example of this is how Microsoft is releasing the Yammer Social Enterprise features as part of the SharePoint platform features. From autumn 2013, SharePoint Online customers receive Yammer features integrated as the default option for Social Enterprise functionality.

In addition to the above, Microsoft’s heavy investments into cloud technology (Windows Azure or Cloud OS) provides SharePoint architects with another option for deploying small or large SharePoint farms into a resilient, scalable and/or cost-effective infrastructure.

Whilst SharePoint is now a very mature enterprise portal product, its appeal and price point reaches out to organisations of any size allowing them to choose between a range of options and editions to match budget, infrastructure preference and business requirements.

THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF SHAREPOINT

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Even for regular users of SharePoint, understanding or explaining the scope of the product can be a daunting task.

WHAT IS SHAREPOINT?

In our experience, it is not uncommon to spend significant time with senior business and technical stakeholders to provide an introduction to the topic, to ensure everyone involved in strategic planning or analysis of requirements has a common understanding of “What is SharePoint?”.

With the wide range of features and functionality available, it is difficult to define exactly what SharePoint does. For some it is simply ‘the intranet’. For others it can be a repository, a shared calendar, a Line-of-Business (LOB) application, a help desk, or many other important business uses.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, describes SharePoint as “general purpose platform for connecting people with information”; which is essentially what it is.

However, our preferred one-liner to describe SharePoint: “SharePoint is a common platform technology that can be utilised to deliver functional and business specific portals”.

“SharePoint may very well be the most baffling product Microsoft has ever created. While SharePoint has been around for more than a decade, IT pros are often unable to agree on what it really is. To some it’s a content-management system; to others, it’s a development framework. Still others rely on SharePoint as a collaboration tool.”

Redmond Magazine, 24 April 2013

Extract from Microsoft Training Material:

“SharePoint is the place to share ideas, content and the vision of your company. It’s scalable enough to organise and manage all your information assets but it’s also designed to organize and store documents to enable personal productivity, keep teams’ in sync, and projects on track”

“…SharePoint 2013 has been built to handle almost anything our customers can throw at it so IT Pros can spend more time managing information, delivering innovation and manage their time effectively”

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The most common uses of SharePoint include intranet portals, enterprise content and document management, extranets as well as internet sites.

Below is a quick summary of the main features of SharePoint:

• Document Management and Document Collaboration. SharePoint supports enterprise content types and shared metadata so that attributes and structures can be maintained in one place as well as vastly improve search results. SharePoint 2013 has several user experience improvements including ‘drag and drop’ ability to upload documents to SharePoint libraries.

• Team collaboration or communities of practice has always been a key feature of SharePoint but this has now been greatly enhanced to focus on conversations and make access/joining easier to manage. There are also gamification options to encourage participation.

• Powerful enterprise search capabilities with new features such as remembering what you have previously searched. Users are not limited to simply searching the data within SharePoint, but can also search data from network drives, Microsoft Exchange as well as other portals.

• People finder provides a single place to connect with experts across the organisation. Staff profiles can easily be populated from Active Directory, updated and searched. In 2013, you can also ‘follow’ people based on what they are publishing.

• Social features for creating conversations and sharing knowledge has greatly improved in SharePoint 2013. Each user has a newsfeed similar to Facebook, activity posts can be saved and more.

• Workflows can be created for any data or document, allowing the automation of business processes such as holiday requests and expense re-imbursement. 2013 includes significant enhancements including new ways to create and visualise workflows.

• Integrate with Line-of-Business (LOB) systems such as CRM.

• Mobile access - SharePoint 2013 has been optimised for mobile browser experience and accommodates different smart phone and tablet device types.

• Business Intelligence enabling users to view certain kinds of dashboard content. This includes PerformancePoint reports and scorecards as well as Excel Service reports on iPad and other devices.

• Share calendars and tasks, which can also be connected directly to Outlook.

• Edit Office documents online and offline, allowing users to create and edit their business software without downloading to their desktops.

• Secure - Active Directory integration allows a seamless secure experience for your users.

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SHAREPOINT IN THE MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM

SharePoint’s co-existence with other Microsoft products has often been subject of much criticism. Although it was improved from version to version, it has certainly been surprising how limited the integration has been between products up to, and including, SharePoint 2010. While some integration points, such as seamless integration with Outlook, are still missing, it is clear that SharePoint 2013 has raised the bar significantly higher in terms of Office integration.

This does however have a bearing on your choices in terms of versions and editions in order to maximise on the benefits from product integration and unification. Please see ‘4.1 SharePoint options and ecosystem’ for further details on these considerations. The additional upside to this is that by understanding where Microsoft have made integration and unification investments, you can leverage the additional functionality that can be achieved without having to invest in costly integration or customisation projects.

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In a competitive market place, leaders face business challenges all the time; such as: staying ahead; staying competitive; increasing output; reducing cost; increasing profit; and so forth.

For the CIO/CTO the approaches on how to deal with these challenges are tightly linked to the business applications and the IT systems they manage and the resulting adoption and productivity of their users.

Most initiatives that senior management embark on should really boil down to those that meet the follow objectives:

• Add Value

• Reduce Risk

• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

In relation to SharePoint, today it is rarely a question of whether to invest in SharePoint licenses or not, as most organisations have already made this investment or committed to the on-going investment. It is however a question of how to take better advantage of this investment and also how SharePoint can be used to leverage your investments in other IT systems. In particular, by providing your users with consistent and user-friendly access to data residing in Line-Of-Business (LOB) systems.

SharePoint Usage:

• 65,000 business customers

• 78% of Fortune 500 companies using SharePoint

• 125,000,000 individual users

• 20,000 users added daily between 2006-2011

• 62% of SharePoint users use it daily

• 700,000 developers

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

KEY BUSINESS ANDMANAGEMENT ISSUES

USE

RS

PROCESSES

CONTEXT

SYSTEMS

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Historically speaking, many SharePoint projects have failed on all three objectives mentioned above. Why is that?

There is obviously no easy answer and certainly sometimes it comes down to general project or management failure that can affect any type of technology implementation. For instance, the lack of preparing users for change is a common cause for low adoption.

In our experience a very common scenario is however caused by allowing SharePoint to “mushroom” out-of-control, which is entirely possible due to the flexible nature of the platform. Take the following example from a large global financial services organisation as a case in point:

SharePoint was deployed without a clear plan or an overall strategy, simply because someone in IT or with enough influence over IT had decided that it might be a good idea in order to address an immediate tactical requirement.

While tactically SharePoint might very well have been a perfect choice, what then followed was a ‘free for all’ situation where individuals, teams or whole departments where able to gain access and create areas within SharePoint as they saw fit. This was led by a few technology enthusiasts, effectively leaving a large number of users out of the loop.

There was no consultation on requirements with users; there was no guidance or training for users; and governance of the use and its applications was not even considered.

After a while, a fairly predictable result emerged. SharePoint sites had mushroomed, resulting in an array of SharePoint sites of varying quality and design. Sites, lists and libraries were used for varied and often unknown purposes and with different level of success. A large number of users had been disengaged and there was no ownership by management.

To make matters worse, these eager enthusiasts had added a third party tools to some of the sites, and some had even commissioned SharePoint developers to provide some customised functionality.

The CTO/CIO was left with the resulting nightmare, which started to materialise when a diligent member of staff asked about the backup policy for a significant amount of business critical content which happened to be held and used within a number of SharePoint sites.

It now became clear that the SharePoint deployment, which was originally deployed as a small point-solution, was not designed or planned for production purposes. It was not part of any Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plans, and certainly was not designed or deployed to be scalable for company-wide use. This is a common and a high risk scenario.

As a result maintenance costs started to go up, mainly due to poor initial system and application design, which in turn caused both performance and usability issues. The latter naturally also lead to increased support costs.

Finally the cost of upgrading the farm had become complex and unpredictable due to various 3rd party add-ons and customisations. In the meantime, only little - if any - real value was added to the business.

The above is just one example, but it is representative of what we see in the market place.

AVOIDING FAILURE

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To avoid the most coming failings, we give this rather simple advice: treat SharePoint as any other piece of business critical and core infrastructure.

As a consequence, you should include SharePoint as a first class citizen in your IT strategy; architect its deployment with scalability, security and stability in mind; and govern its applications and use tightly.

We are confident that CTO/CIOs that follow this simple advice will have far more success in achieving all three objectives above.

• 38% of respondents indicated that ‘improving performance/efficiency’ was the key driver for implementing SharePoint.

• 29% suggested that employee collaboration was their main driver.

• 75% of respondents state that their corporate ‘intranet’ is their main use of SharePoint.

• 64% Document Management.

• 61% Collaboration.

• 53% of organisations indicated that they currently do not have a corporate information strategy that covers content and document management.

• This is quite worrying as a large percentage of companies said that they expected SharePoint to be the main/only repository for all corporate content.

• 47% of respondents stated that it was the IT director/manager who initiated the need for SharePoint.

• Just 21% said it was down to the board, CEO or CIO.

• This is a key reason why SharePoint projects can run into trouble - there needs be a clear business requirement.

• Successful SharePoint implementations are business-led, aligned to organisational objectives and meet a well-defined need.

Source: NCC Guidelines [Volume 1 – Number 4] - SharePoint: Do We Have a Problem? (2011)

A customer once expressed his strategy for providing both a flexible and reliable enterprise wide SharePoint solution as follows: We will give our users the sense of freedom within a tightly governed framework.

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SharePoint provides you with an underlying application/portal infrastructure to deploy lasting business solutions.

Many organisations are spotting opportunities to replace legacy systems (small and large) with applications and portals in SharePoint. Others are seeing opportunities to also use SharePoint as a hub for users to get access to information stuck in siloed systems.

In our opinion, solutions in SharePoint can be built to last, by following a key principle: “Limit customisation!”

This is a principle that we have been recommending for a number of years, combined with two qualifying statements:

1) Be clear on when you will accept a customisation. For instance, you may want to accept a custom feature if there is a clear business justification that provides a significant long-term Return-On-Investment (ROI) or competitive advantage that could not otherwise be achieved.

2) Be clear on what is an acceptable customisation. The acceptance criteria we recommend for many customisations is that you can remove the customisation at a later date and the associated structure and content remains accessible and usable.

GDF Suez business requirements made a clear case for extending SharePoint’s capabilities

One of the world largest energy companies, GDF Suez, uses SharePoint for a variety of purposes across the organisation. Their local legal teams in Bangkok and Dubai were provided with a SharePoint EDMS (electronic document management system) solution which primarily relied on an effective Information Architecture and highly configured out-of-the-box SharePoint features.

A solution built on SharePoint relying on out-of-the-box features and functionality, but configured for purpose, is far more cost-effective and will be far easier to maintain and upgrade over time.

This does require a deep understanding of SharePoint’s embedded feature capabilities and how to take best advantage of them. If you combine configuration with well-governed and well-supported third party add-ons then you are on to a winner.

BIG OPPORTUNITY FOR BUILDING LASTING BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

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However, one 3rd party component and one customisation were considered and approved for two key business requirements:

• Increase productivity with ability to consistently work with documents across MS Office and Outlook, including drag & drop of emails into the EDMS.

• Ensure consistent structure, with ability to centrally provision, govern and list legal project areas, with complex template sub-structures, depending on project types.

For both requirements, the implemented features met the following criteria:

• They did not alter core functionality of SharePoint.

• They can be removed without impacting any of the solutions underlying capabilities. The only impact would be reduced productivity (in other words, users can functionally achieve the same result but by following a series of manual steps).

• The custom solution must be deployed using standard SharePoint packaging methods and best practices.

The benefits were clear:

• Higher productivity.

• Consistent creation of filing areas (including complex project filing structures).

• Lower chance of misfiling.

• Reduced training and documentation requirements.

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When aligning SharePoint with your overall business strategy and underlying IT strategy, it is useful to consider the applications and workloads that can be leveraged. We have provided overview below of those that we consider the ‘bread and butter’ of SharePoint and where you are most likely to achieve the core objectives faster and more efficiently.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM): SharePoint 2013 delivers excellent capabilities for Document Management (DM), Records Management, and similar solutions to manage organisational information. Since SharePoint 2010, the platform has given traditional solutions a run for their money; and combined with add-ons for effective email management, we now recommend SharePoint 2013 as a best of class ECM platform. Read more about the practical implementation of SharePoint DM in 5.2 Document Management and Document Collaboration.

Web Content Management (WCM): For many organisations, the starting point for SharePoint implementations has been the intranet. This often takes advantage of SharePoint’s publishing features, which can also be considered for extranets and general information portals. Read more about this in 5.1 Intranet and Knowledge Portals.

When considering a technology choice for public facing web sites, there are of course a wide range of highly specialised products that include value-added modules such as digital marketing features and email campaign management. While SharePoint does not offer such features out-of-the-box, for organisations that wish to rely on a single portal technology, SharePoint can deliver public facing websites.

Social & Collaboration: SharePoint 2013 delivers an extensive amount of collaboration features through its ECM and WCM features (document co-authoring, document sharing and commenting for example). When your IT strategy requires specific focus on collaboration, features such as SharePoint’s Team Sites, Communities and shared Notebooks provide significant value. A trend entering into many business and IT strategy is a shift towards social collaborative features, with users expecting easier access to shared knowledge, ability to rank/comment/like content and the ability to follow activity. SharePoint 2013 is able to deliver on these expectations with out-of-the-box social features, mainly delivered under the headline of the SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed. Organisations can also look to leverage the cloud based Yammer social network service with SharePoint or SharePoint Online.

Search: Microsoft’s strategy on search was a bit hard to follow for a while. With the acquisition of the FAST enterprise search product (in 2008), it became clear that Microsoft was aiming high in the Enterprise search space. However, what was a positive surprise for many was how rapidly Microsoft has rolled in FAST as a native feature within SharePoint 2013. In short, the SharePoint search engine is now in effect what was previously known as FAST Search for SharePoint, with some technical and functional differences. So whether your IT strategy includes search or enterprise search, SharePoint’s search engine is likely to be able to deliver on the requirements. It is an incredibly extensible search platform, allowing for 3rd party vendors and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to provide connectors to a large array of external systems. Read more in 5.4 Search and Enterprise Search.

Bespoke and Line-of-Business (LOB): Your IT strategy is very likely to include requirements for business specific functionality and for better integration of systems. These requirements can often be addressed with SharePoint, either as bespoke applications (see recommendations in 3.3 Big Opportunity for Building Lasting Business Solutions) or by SharePoint orchestrating an integration.

When considering SharePoint for the delivery of business solutions, take into account the tremendous amount of investment the product has received to support businesses in exactly these types of scenarios. You will in effect be building on top of a great foundation, instead of building and rebuilding from scratch.

SHAREPOINT WORKLOADS WITHIN YOUR IT STRATEGY

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For instance, you are required to deliver a bespoke case management system for complaints, integrated with your CRM system. Building on top of SharePoint allows you to take advantage of: Issue Tracking features for capturing the complaints; Workflow to ensure issues get escalated when they are not actioned; Views to slice and dice information; Search to search for any information logged in a complaint or in attached documents; Alerts to inform relevant staff of new or updated complaints; and so forth. Some customisations might need to be added depending on the actual requirements, but you are certain to cover a large percentage of requirements with out-of-the-box SharePoint features.

Business Intelligence (BI): BI is one of those buzzwords that have been around for a while, but has either failed to deliver or been inaccessible for many businesses. Often the reasons are a lack of willingness to invest in what is required to deliver (BI platforms traditional come with a huge price tag) as well as a lack of accessible tools that integrate with other business systems. In addition, BI projects have traditionally been lengthy and complex projects that seem to deliver too little benefit.

In the context of SharePoint, businesses get a familiar platform through which to deliver BI capabilities. The combination of SharePoint with Reporting Services, Excel Services as well as Power BI tools (such as Power Pivot and Power View) provides business with excellent value, when investments have already been made into Microsoft SharePoint and SQL technologies.

Included within the BI toolset is also PerformancePoint Services. PerformancePoint Server was integrated into SharePoint 2010 as a service application and offers a framework for delivering dashboards that consume various data sources and more. While there are clear benefits of using PerformancePoint, the roadmap for this service does seem uncertain, with only minor improvements and changes in SharePoint 2013. This may be a natural consequence of the significant investments that Microsoft has put into SQL Server and Power BI.

What makes Microsoft’s BI roadmap and capabilities interesting is how you as a CTO/CIO can deliver BI in incremental chunks. This will de-risk the project and allow you to focus and adjust your budget as you go. Your focus should continuously be on ensuring that the subset of mission and business critical reports are identified and delivered through a set of corporate approved reports or dashboards. So rather than focusing on delivering against a massive BI project scope, focus on delivering the initial set of reports to the business that provide real value. As you build out the data marts and data warehouses, you can give your power users access to the range of Power BI self-service tools that are available allowing them to produce ad-hoc reports as and when needed. This will drive data awareness and will also produce more realistic requirements of what are the actual high-priority reports and dashboards, which you can then deliver in the next iteration.

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This section focuses on providing you with an overview of the technical considerations to make in relation to SharePoint, such as which version is best for your organisation? What version is suitable for the job? And what other server or client products in the eco-system are required or relevant?

The intention here is to give you a better grasp of the various options that are available to you, while possibly also revealing a few solutions you may not have considered.

TECHNOLOGYCONSIDERATIONS

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Many organisations invested in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 as soon as they could due to the many benefits of this release compared to older releases. Organisations now face a similar situation with the release of SharePoint 2013. Our team are often asked what makes a SharePoint 2013 upgrade worthwhile and what are the main differences are between the platform versions?

Here we have highlighted a few of the functions and features which are noticeable changes from a user’s perspec-tive and which also can provide business value depending on your requirements.

• User interface and device compatibility improvements, including

• Wider desktop browser support

• Improved mobile support

• Search

• Type ahead

• Preview

• Unified search

• Jump links

• Web Content Management (publishing sites)

• Image renditions (one image, different size renderings)

• Clean URLs

• Video embedding

• Metadata navigation (manage navigation through the Term Store)

• Social and Sharing

• Activity streams

• Mobile apps

• Ability to follow documents, people, sites and tags

• Communities

SharePoint 2010 vs. SharePoint 2013

SHAREPOINT OPTIONS AND ECOSYSTEM

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• Productivity

• Drag & Drop support for a number of scenarios

• My Tasks, rolled up from various tasks lists and unified with your Outlook tasks

• Improved Outlook integration with site mailbox

• Content roll-up

• Improvements to projects / tasks

• Improved sharing capabilities

• Licensing model – assign different user CALs to users in the same farm

SharePoint comes in a number of editions. Feature by feature comparison is too extensive for these guidelines (please see the referenced Microsoft Technet link for full feature comparison). In short however, there are three ways of consuming SharePoint: SharePoint Online with Office 365; SharePoint Online Standalone plans; and SharePoint On-Premises. Each of these has their own plans or editions, so it is not a surprise that this is a topic which confuses the majority of IT Professionals.

SharePoint 2013 Editions

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SharePoint Online with Office 365 Subscription Plans:

Office 365 Education A2

Office 365 Education A3

Office 365 Education A4

Office 365 Enterprise E1

Office 365 Enterprise E3

Office 365 Enterprise E4

Office 365 Enterprise K1

Office 365 Government G1

Office 365 Government G3

Office 365 Government G4

Office 365 Government K1

Office 365 Midsize Business

Office 365 Small Business

Office 365 Small Business Premium

SharePoint Online Enterprise External Users

SharePoint Online standalone plans Subscription Plans:

SharePoint Online Plan 1

SharePoint Online Plan 2

SharePoint On-Premises Editions:

SharePoint Foundation

SharePoint Server 2013 Standard CAL

SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise CAL

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SharePoint’s Server Extensions

P r o d u c t What role does it play in relation to SharePoint?

Microsoft Office Web Applications

Office Web Apps are touch device friendly web applications that let you create, edit and share your Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote files from any browser. It allows sharing and simultaneously working on documents with multiple users.

Microsoft Project Server Project Server 2013 (and Project Online) is built on SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Online to deliver project portfolio management solutions.

Microsoft Workflow Manager

Workflow Manager 1.0 is a new server which introduces new capabilities for authoring, hosting and managing workflows. It allows running at high scale and density. The service builds on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) introduced in .NET Framework 4.

Social, Email and Unified Communication

P r o d u c t What role does it play in relation to SharePoint?

Microsoft Yammer Yammer replaces and enhances the SharePoint enterprise social features, including the Newsfeed, conversation groups, and much more, while now being integrated with core SharePoint features such as search.

Microsoft Exchange 2013 Exchange provide a number of backbone features when integrated with SharePoint, mainly allowing SharePoint to provide:

• Email alerts

• Dealing with incoming mail routing directly to SharePoint

• Site Mailboxes

Microsoft Lync 2013 Lync provides the following three key features in a SharePoint context:

• Online presence indicator wherever a user’s name appears within SharePoint.

• Assist in providing colleague suggestions.

• Provide access to SharePoint people and skills search from Lync including names and skills and a link to the user’s profile.

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Naturally whatever you choose needs to take long term infrastructure strategy into account, as well as the overall direction of IT within the organisation.

While the traditional on-premises approach (effectively meaning an environment controlled by you) to deploying server infrastructures such as SharePoint is still a very valid approach and often a strong contender, CIO/CTO’s today have a wider set of options, but also a more complex set of choices to make with regards to the preferred infrastructure.

Where previously SharePoint was an on-premises solution only, Microsoft has aligned its SharePoint offering to fit businesses of all types and sizes. SharePoint can now be deployed on-premises; in Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Cloud OS); SharePoint Online (Microsoft Office 365); or in hybrids variations of those.

In previous versions of SharePoint, the commitment for smaller organisations to infrastructure would at times prevent SharePoint from being a first choice technology. With the availability of Microsoft Azure (Cloud OS) and SharePoint Online hosting options, this concern has been vastly reduced for small to medium sized organisations and provides opportunities for organisations of any size.

A Forrester Research Inc. survey of IT decision makers shows 62% plan to deploy SharePoint 2013 on-premises, while only 8% will do so in a Microsoft datacentre, presumably via Office 365. Only 4% will run SharePoint in the datacentre of a Microsoft partner, while 26% will deploy SharePoint in a hybrid mode, both on-premises and online.

In the sections below we share our thoughts on the four main options: On-Premises; Microsoft Azure (Cloud OS); SharePoint Online; and Hybrid deployments.

On-Premises

The approach most organisations have followed to date has been the traditional on-premises approach. SharePoint is deployed into a data centre infrastructure where you control most, if not all, elements from connectivity to the hardware. This approach for implementing a SharePoint 2013 farm is just as viable as ever. In fact, SharePoint 2013 has brought in a number of features and new functionality to help improve scalability and performance within your on-premises environment(s).

The basic architecture of an on-premises deployment has remained fairly consistent in the new version. Standing on top of Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint Servers are deployed for running applications services and for the users to navigate to. The ability to add new servers to a SharePoint farm, or to remove and replace servers as needed, is part and parcel of the recommended topologies which provide scalability. With an appropriate topology, the roles and the services associated to each server within the farm can also be adjusted – providing an additional level of flexibility and resilience.

The main differences from previous versions of SharePoint are related to some services and features that have been decoupled from a SharePoint 2013 farm deployment.

Two such examples are Office Web Applications and Workflow Manager:

Where Office Web Apps were previously installed directly to the SharePoint server farm, now it is runs independently of SharePoint in its own installation. This provides advantages such as independence from upgrade and maintenance scenarios and the ability for multiple farms to use a shared Office Web Apps instance. In addition, it provides the ability to scale Office Web Apps or SharePoint independently of each other.

SHAREPOINT AND YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE

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With SharePoint 2013 Workflows it is a similar principle. Please note that as part of a default installation you do still get the SharePoint 2010 workflows enabled. SharePoint 2013 Workflows are however now based on Windows Workflow Foundation components of the .NET Framework 4.5, and require a new feature called Workflow Manager. This is configured separately and connects to the SharePoint farm.

Workflow manager is required to deliver more complex workflows and also to provide increased scalability by creating a “workflow farm”. Please do note that such workflow farms are either made up of one single server or three servers. No other topologies exist for workflow farms.

SharePoint Deployed to Microsoft Windows Azure (aka Cloud OS)

Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform (Azure or also known as Cloud OS) has been a massive gamble and investment from Microsoft. Their approach has been different to that of their competitors, and while at times Microsoft seemed a bit slow to catch on, Azure is probably the most enterprise friendly and ready option. For Microsoft developers and ISVs the wealth of tools and integration that allows deep support for Azure features also means that products are becoming more optimised for execution in cloud environments.

There are many – and very interesting - aspects to Azure, but as a summary in these guidelines, it is important to understand that Microsoft operates with a number of service concepts in the cloud, mainly:

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): the provision of infrastructure which can be used to primarily deploy networks, virtual machines and storage.

• PaaS (Platform as a Service): the provision of a platform service for customers to run a specific application on. For example SQL in Azure, requiring you only to load a database. Or Azure Website, requiring you only to load the associate files required to run a specific type of site.

• Cloud Services: specific discreet services such as notification or authentication services that run as a service.

When considering SharePoint deployed to Azure, the primary service concept is IaaS for deployment of VMs along with virtual network services and storage services. At this point, there is no PaaS for SharePoint.

Therefore, Azure is simply providing an alternative to the remote data centre, and so once you have the network, VMs and storage configured, the SharePoint deployment is not much different compared to an on-premises deployment.

The main topics to take into account are: Location of your deployed VMs and Storage (you can force your deployments and data to remain within Northern Europe for instance) for regulatory/compliance purposes; Back-up and restore scenarios; Accessibility (ability to access environment from your offices); Speed and reliability of connection.

However, beyond production environments, consider the fact that with the right scripts and processes in place, new fully configured environments can be provisioned within minutes for development and UAT purposes. These can be shut-down outside of working hours and thus carry minimal cost during idle time.

Also you should consider the benefits provided by cloud technology such as Azure / Cloud OS for disaster recovery and business contingency planning.

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SharePoint Online in Office 365 is now available through a tiered subscription model for businesses to consume SharePoint 2013 features, along with other Microsoft applications such as Office, Lync and Exchange.

What is extremely interesting is the combination of price, features and ease of management. With SharePoint Online, you only need to be concerned about which Site Collections to provision and their settings, as well as the functionality and content within each Site Collection.

Clearly, there are downsides. These include lack of control of the infrastructure; no ability to improve performance or speed (you get what you get); and limited scope for customisations.

However, if you are following the “Limit Customisations” principle and can get away with a solution that is based only on out-of-the-box features then the upside is massive. All aspects of SharePoint infrastructure, deployment, application service management and so forth is managed as part of the SharePoint Online Services offering from Microsoft. Your costs for maintaining and supporting the SharePoint infrastructure are in effect zero, over and above the cost of the subscription. Upgrades, patches and general maintenance is part and parcel of this. Your focus can be entirely on building the business application.

SharePoint Online (within Office 365)

Hybrid Deployments

When planning for SharePoint implementations, or even when laying out general IT roadmaps, many organisations find that they are driven to make specific technical choices due to business, legislative, risk or similar constraining factors. And so, despite the best intentions to simplify and future-proof their IT infrastructure they have to continue to deploy into traditional data centres or to invest further in internal IT infrastructure.

In the past few years we have however seen a clear trend for online “team, sharing or collaboration” workspaces, rather than the traditional “extranet”. This typically involves the provision of direct interaction and collaboration between the parties, such as a law firm and their corporate client.

This obviously presents a challenge to many organisations, mainly because they do not want to open up their internal network to the outside world. And they are typically not ready to move their systems completely to a more accessible hosted or cloud environment.

It is not uncommon to see organisations, as a consequence of the above, deploying document or enterprise content systems management internally, and then a second system to function as an extranet facing outside the business. Often these setups can consist of two totally different technologies, on two totally different sets of infrastructures. The obvious consequence is creation of support and maintenance overhead, which is exactly what many organisations are looking to reduce.

Using a SharePoint hybrid model is a possibly solution. It is however not trivial. Complexities such as user identity management and authentication, location of content (and syncing), and possibly using services such as Search and/or BCS all make up the fabric of a hybrid solution, but each are complex in their own right.

At the point of writing this, there are two main scenarios that are supported out-of-the-box:

• Search

• Business Connectivity Services from SharePoint Online to SharePoint on-premises

Hybrid scenarios that go beyond that will therefore require significant thought and planning but depending on the scenario and your governance and compliance policies it may very well be worth it.

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SharePoint is obviously heavily reliant on MS SQL Server, and requires one of the following MS SQL Server editions:

• The 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

• The 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

Please note, if you plan to use SQL Server Business Intelligence components in a SharePoint Server 2013 farm you must use SQL Server 2012 with Service Pack 1 (SP1).

The best/optimal performance for SharePoint farm operations, require that SQL Server is running on a dedicated server that does not run other farm roles and does not host databases for other applications. Obviously, this does not apply to a deployment of SharePoint Server 2013 on a stand-alone server, but this is on the other hand not recommended for most production environments.

It is also generally a recommendation to carry out a range of pre-SharePoint-installation steps, before setting up the SharePoint farm, including, but not limited to:

• Configure specific SQL Server settings

• Harden the database server

• Configure database servers for performance and availability

• Design storage for optimal throughput and manageability

• Proactively manage the growth of data and log files.

The above are all part of Microsoft’s best practices for SQL Server in a SharePoint Server farm.

In our experience, the most likely cause of SharePoint performance issues, especially those that occur after a period of acceptable operation, are related to poor performance of MS SQL Server. Of those issues we come across, disk and storage system related issues are the most common.

It is generally recommended that data is separated and prioritised among the drives on the database server. Ideally, you should place the various databases (such as tempdb database, content databases, usage database and search databases) and transaction logs on separate physical hard disks. More details can be found in the referenced best practice guide.

DATABASE INFRASTRUCTURE

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A question that consultants often need to deal with in early exploration is that of boundaries and limits. This section is a brief summary on the topic.

In SharePoint there are three capacity limits to take into account:

• Boundaries: Static limits that cannot be exceeded by design

• Thresholds: Configurable limits that can be exceeded to accommodate specific requirements

• Supported limits: Configurable limits that have been set by default to a tested value

The few boundaries that we have highlighted here have been selected due to the frequency they get questioned by our customers (note especially the content database size, which is the most frequently queried limit):

Limit Maximum value Limit type

Number of content databases 500 per farm Supported

Content database size (general usage scenarios)

200 GB per content database Supported

Content database size (all usage scenarios)

4 TB per content database Supported

Content database size (document archive scenario)

No explicit content database limit Supported

Content database items 60 million items including documents and list items Supported

Site collections per farm 750,000 (500,000 Personal Sites and 250,000 other sites per farm)

Supported

Web site 250,000 per site collection Supported

Site collection size Maximum size of the content database Supported

File size 2 GB Boundary

Documents/Items 30,000,000 per library/list Supported

Co-authoring in Word and PowerPoint

10 concurrent editors per document Threshold

BOUNDARIES AND LIMITS

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The implementation of SharePoint presents one of the most unique combinations of IT challenges and opportunities that many businesses face. As a platform, SharePoint delivers an extremely large amount of diverse functionality out-of-the-box. While this does provide businesses with a fantastic opportunity to change or improve the way they work, it has historically proved to be a real challenge. As detailed in 3.2 Avoiding failure SharePoint is often deployed to an organisation with no specific direction, or adoption processes to support it.

It is not enough to say “We will use SharePoint for document management, social and team collaboration” install it, create some team sites, turn on document versioning and hope that it works.

Instead businesses should focus on the core objectives, high level business requirements, and align the features and functionality of the SharePoint design to these.

In other words, design, develop and implement smaller discreet pieces, which in turn will contribute to the total solution roadmap.

The section below describes some of the common high level requirements and scenarios that we in our experience find that organisations look to achieve through SharePoint.

PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION

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Possibly the most common we – and other developers and consultancies – get involved with are intranet or information portals. They tend to have similar fundamental objectives, and similar range of key business requirements.

The traditional key objectives typically include:

• A central repository for information;

• A central hub for access to information in and outside of portal;

• Ability to publish and distribute information.

Information workers in collaborative and knowledge based workplaces, generally require more modern portals leading to objectives such as:

• Ability to share and collaborate on knowledge and best practice, including co-authoring;

• A two way channel of communication between employees and the organisation;

• Personalisation and content targeting.

As the CTO/CIO it is important to understand the expectations from your user community. Intranets are not just web pages published by the internal communications team. Adding a discussion board does not guarantee collaboration.

Instead, aligned with your overall objectives, build a design that takes advantage of features contained within the entire SharePoint platform and ecosystem, and how to integrate them in a seamless manner.

Below is a list of key features that are commonly used in Intranet or Portal Projects:

Publishing Site: The backbone of SharePoint Web Content Management. Publishing Sites and pages provide a rich text editing experience, versioning, check in and out and publishing features for content creators.

Team and Community Sites: Team Sites, like the classic sites from previous SharePoint versions provide the ability for members of a site to have shared Document Libraries, Calendars, Lists, Discussion boards along with many other types of functionality. Community sites extend of the discussion board functionality of 2013, with features like member listings, discussion categories, badges & reputation earning and a richer interface, while still offering all the other base SharePoint functionality.

Social Collaboration: Social features within SharePoint have been enhanced and are more integrated in the last two editions of SharePoint, presenting the user with a more unified experience. Improvement of the News Feed to provide things such as posting of pictures, tagging, mentions and “likes” have all provided benefit, however it is the integration with other SharePoint functionality that makes 2013’s social features standout. For example, many companies may already have a document management system and are now looking for an “Enterprise Social” solution. By considering two separate solutions, this reinforces the isolation of the solutions, limits the value, or creates the need for costly integration projects. Instead with SharePoint, users can follow sites or documents directly from the document management solution using out-of-the-box features within the platform.

Beyond these base features, many other features support the creation of rich collaborative intranets and knowledge portals, such as audience targeting, blogs, wikis and discussion forums.

INTRANET AND KNOWLEDGE PORTALS

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Document Management with SharePoint has come a long way in the last few versions and the position of SharePoint in the DM landscape between 2007 and 2013 is probably one of the most tangible changes in the product.

Whereas in MOSS 2007, SharePoint did have lots of good basic features for Document Management, it did not deliver refined document management functionality compared to the other products in the marketplace.

MOSS 2007 was able to deliver on functionality such as the creation of Sites or “Workspaces”, Document Libraries, Document (Content) Types, Versioning and document history and similar. Even in 2007 and 2008 organisations keen to adopt SharePoint proved that it provided a flexible and effective platform for document management.

With the introduction of SharePoint 2010, new key features changed the competitive landscape and saw SharePoint entering into a market leading position for Document Management. These features included amongst others:

• The “Managed Metadata Service” to store and utilise a shared enterprise taxonomy or folksonomy for an organisation;

• The implementation of the Content Type Hub to enable the central creation and distribution of Content Types, Document Retention Policies and Schedules; and

• Tighter integration with search making SharePoint a much more viable Enterprise Document Management Solution.

SharePoint 2013 has solidified many of these features as well as extended the capabilities. With both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, capacity concerns (such as the infamous 2000 item limit) are long gone. In SharePoint 2010, each library can contain 30 million document items. While this may not be an elegant design, limitation is certainly not a concern to most.

International Law Firm deploys SharePoint DM in record time

Extract from ClearPeople Linklaters/Kinstellar Case Study

Linklaters Central Easter Europe was spun off as Kinstellar, an independent legal firm, in November 2008. The IT team had just six weeks to deploy a new document management system prior to the firm’s launch and chose to implement a solution based on Microsoft SharePoint. The system was rolled out on time, equipping Kinstellar employees with the tools and resources to collaborate effectively and comply with legal regulations easily.

“We wanted to equip Kinstellar users with the sophisticated document management features required for legal work, such as document comparison and version history…”

“…we built a system [on SharePoint] that runs smoothly, helping users to work with documents effectively. It’s also easy for the IT department to maintain.”

Simon Gilhooly, Global Core Infrastructure and Engineering Manager, Linklaters

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT AND DOCUMENT COLLABORATION

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Other capacity constraints still exist, such as the maximum database size per content database, although much increased and in fact unlimited in some scenarios. With SharePoint 2010, options were introduced to allow for scale through use of RBS (Remote Blob Storage) technology. Most of the capacity concerns can now be addressed through upfront planning of the system and information architecture design. The importance and the effort for planning – and the resulting benefits - should therefore not be underestimated.

From a user’s point of view, advances to search and navigation such as document previewing, deep linking, sharing, and simultaneous co-authoring of office documents through either Office clients or Office Web Applications has improved dramatically.

A massive gap still exists however, and that is consistent UI for filing and retrieval across the client applications and in particular within Outlook. As an example, while Outlook can be connected to SharePoint in a variety of ways, there is still no way to drag & drop emails or attachments straight to SharePoint, nor is there an easy way of adding attachments to an email.

In our experience, when designing an effective DM system, we generally recommend adding a third party add-on to address a few of these gaps.

The key to success is however, as mentioned above, the planning of the system. One principle is used by our consultants more than any other when designing a SharePoint DM system:

Design for feeling!

The underlying rationale is that a system that is “designed for filing” makes it easier to file into, is more likely to be used by its users and is hence far more valuable than a system were users find it hard or cumbersome to use (i.e. they will quickly find ways to avoid filing into the DM).

Cumbersome systems that are not designed for filing are those where the user has to a) fill in numerous forms or fields when filing; b) they have to navigate a complex structure to locate the correct filing area; and c) the system does not reuse default values or preferences.

To design for filing, you must invest time at the beginning of the project, developing a strong Information Architecture (IA) based on the needs of the users, combined with the goals of the organisation. This needs to cover structure, content types, columns, term-store/taxonomy at minimum. It needs to use “structure” as a way to “set context” for setting default meta-data on the filed items, while limiting the requirement for users to enter data into several fields of mandatory data.

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Caption: High level view of IA diagram

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One of the most common requirements that you will face is delivering a search tool that meets your users’

expectations. Frequently one comes across a search solution that technical speaking works but is not returning the

search results users expect. Often this is caused by lack of quality content (rubbish in - rubbish out) but is also often

caused by the mismatch of expectations.

With SharePoint, you have the opportunity to deliver advanced search with relatively little extra investment and effort.

Enterprise Search goes beyond “normal search” in that it is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise

sources (often on different technical platforms) available for searching to the business through a single search

interface.

Microsoft response to the growing demand for enterprise search was reengineering and integrating the FAST search

engine (acquired by Microsoft in 2008) into SharePoint 2013. This gives organisations a number of considerable

advantages, including:

• Tight integration with other products within the Microsoft stack (Lync, Exchange etc.)

• Native integration with solutions deployed within SharePoint.

• Unified interface among all products (SharePoint, Search, Office, Outlook, etc)

• Configuration, branding and customization efforts within SharePoint can be leveraged by Search

The key to a successful search solution is strong metadata management and planning. Being sure you have the

correct data is crucial to ensuring that your search indexing produces quality search results.

Three activities will get you well on the way to implementing a great search solution:

• Master Data Management and Planning

• Create a taxonomy (in the Term Store) to manage the tagging of content and the search driven applications

• Deliver search-driven application pages using Content by Search (CBS) web part

SEARCH AND ENTERPRISE SEARCH

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With workforces more mobile than ever, being able to access documents offline is a key requirement of many businesses. SharePoint has historically met this challenge with SharePoint 2010 Workspaces, which allowed users to Sync libraries and lists to their computer.

With SharePoint 2013 this has been replaced with SkyDrive Pro, which primarily enables users to sync files from their personal site (previously known as a My Site and now known as your SkyDrive site). As with the consumer version of SkyDrive there is a utility that needs to be installed to provide the synchronisation between SharePoint and the device. Such devices can include a range of mobile devices, including Windows Phones, iOS and Android devices.

This same utility can be used to sync other document libraries by clicking the Sync button located at the top-right of standard SharePoint pages.

WORKING OFFLINE

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A common requirement is to be able to share content with external parties. This typically involves a significant amount of red-tape and an IT administrator would be required to create additional user accounts. The accounts need the correct permissions in order for the external parties to gain access to content, and this will naturally need to be managed well after the initial request and use.

A feature in SharePoint 2013 - that is only available through SharePoint Online – and which looks to attract many new customers is the new external sharing functionality.

This feature allows (depending on the SharePoint Online / Office 365 plan) up to 10,000 external users to be invited to access content. Members of a SharePoint site can through an improved interface, share documents, lists, libraries and even whole sites with external users just by inviting external users with their email addresses.

The user is then sent an email with a link to the content. When the users access the content they are required to sign-in. Microsoft handles the registration and sign-in process as they associate a Microsoft Live ID with the user’s email address. This whole process removes a huge amount of administration for IT and SharePoint administrators and empowers the business owners responsible for the sites and content.

If there is a requirement to disable the sharing functionality, then an administrator can disable it across a Site Collection or across the whole farm.

As mentioned, this sharing functionality is not available to SharePoint installed On-Premises. We expect that this will encourage hybrid type solutions with SharePoint Online being considered by business owners wishing to implement extranets and collaboration sites.

Sharing and Collaboration through Office 365/SharePoint Online

Some sharing scenarios have, in the past, been covered with Outlook or Microsoft SharePoint Workspace for cross boundary team collaboration.

SharePoint 2013 now makes use of Skydrive Pro and Site Mailboxes for collaboration.

Skydrive Pro is an application that synchronises documents from your Skydrive Pro document library (My Site document library) and other libraries that you decide to synchronise without needing to go through the various steps to download documents through the web browser. This entire process is similar to the consumer-based products such as Dropbox or Skydrive. Importantly, the documents are not stored in the public cloud but instead stored in SharePoint.

Another feature with SharePoint 2013 is Site Mailbox (which does require Exchange 2013).

Sharing and Collaboration using SkyDrive Pro and Site Mailboxes

SHARING AND COLLABORATION

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When activated at the site level, the Site Mailbox is automatically provisioned in Exchange for the site and all users in the Site Members group get access to the mailbox. Users are then able to receive email using this site mailbox, which has an email address similar to the site name of the site. Users are also presented with the site mailbox in Outlook.

Users can see documents that are stored in the Team Site document library and even drag documents into the library. This is an attractive way for users to collaborate, however does come at a cost due to the need for Exchange 2013.

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With SharePoint 2010 and even more so with SharePoint 2013, the platform now caters for Enterprise Search, Document Management System, LoB applications, Social hub, Business Intelligence and more.

As SharePoint usage has increased drastically more data is been managed within or by SharePoint, and therefore organisations are facing a challenge of large amounts amount of data within SharePoint.

What exactly constitutes “Big data” is up for grabs. For some organisations one terabyte may seem like a lot – and they will classify that as “big”, while others define it more in petabytes, or focus more on the number of rows (typically in a BI scenario). There is no hard and fast rule to it.

The author team agree that typically the term Big Data is relevant when the size of the data (whether rows, documents, items, or other) becomes hard to manage, process or analyse with the infrastructure, platforms or tools available.

So, in a SharePoint context, there are really two aspects to this: the data that is managed within SharePoint; and the data that is consumed by SharePoint (or by related applications such as BI components).

The majority of data managed within SharePoint is exposed via structured lists or libraries. Document Libraries or Asset Libraries naturally also include the binary objects (documents or media files). When talking about Big Data in this context, we are really talking about SharePoint portals containing many millions of items and/or with data that will bloat databases to a size that is unmanageable in “general usage” scenarios.

Examples of this would be large repositories for media file archiving, large scale filing systems, portals with for many thousands of Site Collections, each with thousands of sites and many lists within these.

Focusing on large filing repositories, the challenge is two-fold:

• There are too many libraries and documents in libraries to create sensible and usable navigation.

• The size of the content databases grows well beyond “general usage” scenarios and the size becomes unmanageable in most infrastructures.

The Crown Estate: SharePoint hub to collect, manage and distribute over one petabyte of data

Extract from Microsoft & ClearPeople BCSP Case Study

The Crown Estate, which is responsible for managing the U.K. seabed, faced the challenge of managing up to one petabyte (and possibly more) of data originating from various sources. Via a Business-Critical SharePoint solution, ClearPeople connected Microsoft SharePoint with Windows Azure to share and exchange Big Data with marine renewable energy developers and the public. The processes of managing, releasing, exposing and delivering data have been greatly optimised, with SharePoint acting as the hub orchestrating these processes, saving The Crown Estate over 7,500 hours per year in compared to the process otherwise required to process these files.

“The combination of a strong SharePoint Data Management tool and Windows Azure infrastructure allows The Crown Estate to scale up easily to meet demand.”

Nigel Spencer, Head of Information Services, The Crown Estate

BIG DATA

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Traditionally SharePoint stores all the data within SQL Server, including the files or binary objects (also known as Binary Large Objects, or Blobs) that are stored in special columns.

While SQL Server is a highly scalable database server which copes well with large amounts of data, it is not the cheapest or most efficient way to store Blobs. Further to this, the backup and restore processes of large databases is incredibly cumbersome when a granular restore is required.

In SharePoint 2013, a new feature known as Shredded Storage, has been introduced to assist keeping the total size of data down, which in summary stores only one full version of a file, and for each version only stores the differences. The benefits of this technology include:

• Reduction of the amount of data saved in the SQL Server content database;

• Decrease in the amount of network traffic between the SharePoint WFE servers and SQL servers ;

• Allowing for faster back up of large content databases.

Importantly, SharePoint has since the 2010 version supported Remote Blob Storage (RBS) to bring Blob objects out of the SQL server database to another storage system. Out-of-the-box, Microsoft offers the option to outsource the Blobs to a file system using the Filestream provider.

The out-of-the-box approach is an acceptable solution for simple scenarios but we strongly believe that for enterprise grade scenarios it is not an adequate solution. In a large scale SharePoint implementation you not only want to outsource the Blobs, you also need a solution that allows you to control and manage the RBS scenarios. Third party tools provide such added features, including:

• Management Interface: provide tools to manage the Blob repositories. It should provide options to create a granular outsource strategies where the administrator can outsource the blobs based on specific rules (such as document properties or location)

• Storage tier management: Allows the administrator to move content to different storages tiers. For example, putting rules in place to move a document that has not been used in the last 6 months to Tier-2 storage system or to cloud storage within Azure or other cloud storage providers

• Storage providers: The solution should provide different storage system providers, including File system, Cloud (Azure, Amazon), NAS, SNN, and CAS

• Security: Options for encrypting data stored on the storage systems

• Orphan items: The solution should be able to report on orphaned items and remove them when necessary.

One of the additional challenges that we often face is with files larger than 2 Gb. This is still a challenge in SharePoint 2013, as the limitation stems from the underlying SQL Server limitations. There are third party solutions that will overcome this by storing the files outside SharePoint and creating a SharePoint interface to manage these files. However, this generally has a large negative impact on performance.

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The implementation of large amounts of IT systems, such as LOB Systems, Practice Management Systems, Opportunity Management / Customer Relationship, Resource Management, Timesheet and expense tracking systems has created large amounts of silo data stores within many businesses.

MICROSOFT WHITE PAPER EXTRACT: Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint and Line-of-Business Data (www.sharepoint.com/bcsp)

In the world of narrow profit margins, seemingly small efforts can make or break a company’s competitive edge, such as improving productivity by making better use of their existing systems. Microsoft offers a formula to help companies increase their competitive advantage without major investments and, in fact, the possibility to achieve savings in the 80-90% range: Connect your existing LOB systems with SharePoint, creating Business-Critical SharePoint solutions.

Companies that have adopted this model can achieve first year return on investment (ROI).

The result of this is that many organisations are starting to see opportunities where they can leverage their existing system and data to deliver business value, but many are struggling to determine how this can be achieved. This is an area where SharePoint can act as a cornerstone in terms of providing a better way for people to work.

Let’s take a simple example where you have a SharePoint Document Management System, and within that system you create “Project Workspaces” for employees to store all documents relating to the specific project, matter, engagement, etc. that you are undertaking with a client. Like all Document Management Systems you can create and close project workspaces as required.

However, considering everything that SharePoint can deliver, this is quite a limited project workspace.

What if you instead considered an “Integrated Project Workspace” that is capable of providing:

• Easily administrable membership, where you could view the profile of each team member

• Discussion forums and community areas

• Project calendars and dynamic project timelines that automatically update as things change

• Tasks that can be managed centrally as well as pushed to the assigned user’s task list in Outlook

• Integrated with CRM and finance system to display basic project and client details

• Connected to timesheet systems to track hours and expenses against projects

• And more…

Just consider the fact that simple-to-implement processes such as task tracking, reminders, notifications and data capture can be automated, greatly reducing the chance of manual errors, rework, or redundant effort.

USING SHAREPOINT TO SOLVE MANY PROBLEMS (AS A COMMON ENTRY POINT / HUB FOR LOB SYSTEMS)

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MICROSOFT WHITE PAPER EXTRACT: Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint and Line-of-Business Data (www.sharepoint.com/bcsp)

According to The Hackett Group’s research, the average $1 billion company maintains 48 disparate financial systems and 2.7 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. You don’t have to be part of a $1 billion enterprise to have experienced the proliferation of line-of-business (LOB) systems. Companies have been implementing best-of-breed systems for each organizational function, such as the best finance application for finance and the best human resources (HR) system for HR.

How many line-of-business (LOB) systems does your company run? Do your teams use different information systems that are disconnected? Is there a way to improve productivity when multiple teams are working together?

As BCSP solutions are extending and automating important business processes, the result is a flow of “connected value” by increasing user productivity and efficiency, enabling cross-team collaboration, improving business processes, and positively affecting the business in substantive ways. Based on BCSP ROI research, customers found that with BCSP solutions 50-80% shorter cycle times or up to 90% fewer errors can be realised.

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So now the question you may be asking yourself is where do you start with SharePoint? Basically you start from the top to ensure that whatever you do, that it meets the three main objectives stated in “3.1 Business Challenges”.

You must identify business issues and requirements and deliver against these with your objectives in mind. Consider this a tool to prioritise what comes first.

• Step 1 – Identify any obvious business challenges or issues you need to address.

• Step 2 – Review your IT strategy – does it line up with the corporate strategy – and where can a common portal platform technology support you in achieving this (we use a “system model” to identify this). Use this to formulate a SharePoint strategy and implementation of a roadmap.

• Step 3 – Build a high level business requirements catalogue.

• Step 4 – Benchmark your “current state”. For instance, if an identified business issue has been expressed as “users spend too much time looking for documents which impact productivity”, then benchmark the time it takes to locate documents. Use the benchmark to set goals and estimate your ROI.

• Step 5 – Review legislative, regulatory and compliance constraints that may impact your options and choices.

• Step 6 – Identify the SharePoint components and features that are needed to deliver on your SharePoint Strategy and business requirements.

• Step 7 - Decide on your deployment approach based on your Corporate, IT and SharePoint strategy, along with your business requirements.

• Step 8 – Plan, design, build and deploy the SharePoint portal(s).

• Step 9 – Engage your users, take on-board feedback, tweak, adapt, engage again and drive adoption.

• Step 10 – Measure ROI against benchmark.

NOTES:

• Do not ignore internal communication and consultation

• Do not ignore internal change management

• Do not ignore an adoption plan

ACTION PLAN

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SHAREPOINT LINGO

App for SharePoint A cloud-enabled app that integrates rich, scenario-focused content and services into a SharePoint environment.

Azure Microsoft’s cloud-based platform that enables you to develop and test applications faster, at reduced cost and with the flexibility to deploy in the cloud or on-premises.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

A feature that enables users to interact with back-end (LOB) data from within the Office Suite and SharePoint.

Business Data Catalogue (BDC)

In SharePoint 2010 and later versions, this is now known as BCS.

Central Administration site

A special SharePoint site where an administrator can manage all sites and servers in a farm that is running Microsoft® SharePoint® Products and Technologies.

Content Type Often used to logically group content into classes. Such as documents into “Contracts”, “Project Documents”, “Correspondence” or similar. Various SharePoint functionality can then be tied to each content type; such as how to profile the content or what retention policy may be required.

Farm A SharePoint farm is a collection of SharePoint servers or SQL servers that work in concert to provide a set of basic SharePoint services that support a single site. OR

Installation of one or more load-balanced Web servers, and back-end servers, with a configuration database.

List Container in which SharePoint stores data. Common examples of these are task list, contact list, issues list.

Library A special type of “List” which acts as a container for holding documents, images, etc.

Managed Metadata / Managed Metadata Service

Metadata is information about information or about an information resource. Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define and then use as attributes for items in SharePoint.

MySite A single page portal that contains the user’s personal sites, links, etc.

This is now known as the Newsfeed and SkyDrive in SharePoint 2013.

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Office 365 Refers to Microsoft’s online services and subscription plans that include access to Office applications, plus other productivity tools that are enabled over the Internet (delivered as “Software as a Service” or “SaaS”); such as Lync, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online amongst others.

SharePoint Online SharePoint Online is part of the Office 365 suite of cloud-based service offerings that helps organisations create sites to share documents and insights with colleagues, partners, and customers.

Site Container for pages, child sites and content such as lists and document libraries.

Site Collection A Site Collection is the container for sites and sub-sites to be stored in. A Site Col-lection contains a top-level site and optional sub-sites. It is the root unit of ownership, security and recoverability.

Site Definition A grouping of lists, features, settings, style sheets, themes master pages and other items that define a site. An example of a site definition would be Team Site, Publishing Site with Workflow, or Blank Site. You need to choose a site definition when you create a new Site Collection or a new Site.

SkyDrive Microsoft’s cloud storage service, comparable to Apple’s Dropbox or Google Drive.

NOTE: As of July 2013, Microsoft settled a legal court case with BSkyB to change the name of SkyDrive after a transition period. The new name is currently unknown.

SkyDrive Pro SkyDrive Pro is your professional library—the place to keep your work documents and other files. You can think of SkyDrive Pro as your SkyDrive for business.

Term and Term Sets

A term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item in SharePoint. A term set is a collection of related terms. You can specify that a column must contain a term from a specific term set

Term Store You can use the Term Store (Term Store Management Tool) to create term sets and terms. The Term Store is part of the SharePoint “Managed metadata” features in and provide support for the implementation of formal taxonomies through managed terms. In other words, the collection of term sets and terms is often referred to as the tax-onomy.

User Profile Service

The User Profile service application stores information about users in a central loca-tion. Social computing features use this information to enable productive interactions so that users can collaborate efficiently. In order to provision My Sites, enable social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and create and distribute profiles across multiple sites and farms, you must enable the User Profile service ap-plication. The User Profile Synchronisation Service Application ( SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 ) uses the FIM to get data from Active Directory to fill profiles.

Web Part Components that are used to display content on a page and are the primary means for users to customise pages.

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LIST OF REFERENCES

SharePoint 2013 workflow fundamentals http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163181.aspx

Business-Critical SharePoint Whitepapers

ROI Benefits of BCSP Solutions: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redir/XT104091806.aspx

Delivering BCSP solutions with SharePoint and LOB data: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redir/XT104091807.aspx

The Crown Estate Case Study ClearPeople: www.clearpeople.com/uk/about-us/news/2013/tce-case-study

Microsoft BCSP: www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-SharePoint-Server-2010/The-Crown-Estate/The-Crown-Estate-Shares-Big-Data-to-support-Research-in-the-Marine-Environment/710000002895

Microsoft Azure: www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Windows-Azure/The-Crown-Estate/Crown-Estate-Uses-Scalable-Cloud-Solution-to-Share-Energy-Data-with-the-Public/710000001522

SEGA Business Intelligence Case Study www.clearpeople.com/uk/about-us/news/2013/sega-bi-case-study

Orbis SharePoint Document Management Case Study

Complete the form here and request the Orbis Case Study once it is released: www.clearpeople.com/uk/about-us/contact-us

Workflow Manager Farms for SharePoint 2013 Part One: Core Concepts, High Availability, Certificate and SharePoint considerations

http://www.harbar.net/archive/2013/07/26/wfm1.aspx

Workflow in SharePoint 2013 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/jj556245.aspx

Get Your Head in the Cloud: Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2013/Office 365

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/04/16/get-your-head-in-the-cloud-hybrid-for-sharepoint-2013-office.aspx

SharePoint 2013, Cloud vs. On-Premises: What You Need To Know

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/04/01/key-piece.aspx

Best practices for SQL Server in a SharePoint Server farm

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh292622.aspx

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SharePoint Online Service Description http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx

SharePoint 2013

Building a Search-Driven Content Site

BA Insight: www.BAinsight.com

Integrating Lync, SharePoint and Exchange for Value-Add Solutions

http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2013/07/03/integrating-lync-sharepoint-and-exchange-for-value-add-solutions.aspx

Software boundaries and limits for SharePoint 2013

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

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