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Business Productivity at Its Best Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint
White Paper
Why upgrade to SharePoint 2010?
A scenario-based illustration of how SharePoint 2010 can benefit your business
White Paper
May 2010
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Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 3
Abstract
This paper shows that Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the
enterprise and the Internet. It can deliver business benefits to organizations, by enabling IT to achieve
three main objectives:
Deliver the best productivity experience
Cut costs through a unified infrastructure
Rapidly respond to business needs
In the current economic climate, it is essential for organizations to enable their people to achieve higher
level of productivity and to extract more value from their IT infrastructure. Organizations need to harness
the collaborative power of the both of these, to deliver a flexible and agile business model, where solution
and platform deployment, development, and management integrate to provide an easy to use, easy to
own business environment.
SharePoint 2010 builds on the capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to deliver leadership
in each of these areas. This paper looks at the enhanced capabilities and functionality offered by
SharePoint 2010 by outlining a series of common business scenarios that show how deployment of
SharePoint 2010 can lead to direct benefits for users, administrators, and developers, which, of course,
means bottom-line benefits for the whole organization.
This paper highlights some of the main investment areas decision makers need to be aware of when
evaluating SharePoint 2010. It is not a comprehensive review of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 or
a comparison to earlier releases or to alternative products. This paper also describes key areas where
SharePoint 2010 extends the capabilities business users have already enjoyed with Office SharePoint
Server 2007.
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Contents
Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5
Deliver the Best Productivity Experience ........................................................................ 7
Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure ........................................................................ 13
Rapidly Respond to Business Needs .............................................................................. 20
So What Is Your Next Step? ............................................................................................ 26
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 5
Introduction
SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform that enables you to deliver the best productivity
experience through a user interface that is very similar to Microsoft Office and so I familiar to most
business users. Productivity is further enhanced by SharePoint 2010 through formal and informal business
communities, within the enterprise and beyond. SharePoint 2010 also delivers the ability to manage
content for enterprise businesses, from creation to disposition and throughout the information life-cycle.
Whether deployed on-premise or as hosted services, these integrated capabilities are enhanced by Search
technologies and make it possible to rapidly respond to business needs through self-service business
insight and faster solution deployment. The consolidation of business collaboration solutions in
SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to save money through lower training costs, increased IT productivity,
and enterprise-wide management tools, all as part of a governable and platform.
This Magic Quadrant graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner reports are available upon request from Microsoft.
In the 2009 Gartner reviews, Microsoft is placed in the leader quadrant in Gartner Magic Quadrant1 reports for Enterprise Content Management, Horizontal Portals, Information Access, Unified Communications, and Social Software platforms.
1 The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a
marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology…
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 6
This Magic Quadrant graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner reports are available upon request from Microsoft.
Microsoft has upgraded the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform to extend the platform’s capabilities,
to deliver greater functionality to its customers. It might seem easy to say, ―We are already using the
market leader, so why upgrade?‖ but the most effective and profitable businesses know that it is essential
to always move forward; just as Microsoft has done by delivering additional functionality in the SharePoint
2010 platform.
The focus of this paper is to highlight how SharePoint 2010 builds on a position of market leadership and
strength that you have already recognized, to enable you to further develop your organization. In addition
to this, SharePoint 2010 enables you to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your IT services,
through enhanced management tools and flexible deployment options.
…users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant
to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 7
Deliver the Best Productivity Experience
The current economic climate means that it is more important than ever for companies to invest in
business solutions that enable staff to become more productive, quickly. For IT, this means delivering new,
but familiar, user platforms that enable users to collaborate and communicate with colleagues in a way
that fits seamlessly with the way that they work; whether that is in an office, at home, or on the road.
Effective IT solutions need to go beyond basic communication. It is essential to empower users, so that
they can complete their work more efficiently, without the need to involve IT staff to complete business
tasks. These requirements sound tough to deliver, but SharePoint 2010 provides a unique blend of high-
function technology and ease of use that enables you to deliver the best productivity experience to your
staff, so that they can deliver business benefit, while maintaining the governance and compliance of your
platform.
Scenario
Help people be more productive, while accelerating technology adoption and innovation.
Let’s have a look at some day-to-day business situations where the productivity features of SharePoint
2010 can really deliver value. In the first scenario a project manager, Chris, needs to pull together a project
team fast. She has a new project on gears, which has short timescales and, to hit the first milestone, she
knows that she will need to draw on expertise and experience from across the company; that means
across the world.
Chris prioritizes the tasks that she needs to complete. First she needs a site where she can put the project
information and where her team – once she has one – will be able to collaborate on getting the
documentation they need.
Delivering project sites quickly
As a project manager, Chris has the authority to create sites on SharePoint 2010. She can use the Ribbon user
interface to manage site permissions, rather than having to go to an administrator. This means that the site is
up and running quickly, and without taking up valuable IT resources.
The Ribbon User Interface, now part of each SharePoint 2010 site, provides users with a familiar and rich user
experience that maximizes productivity and minimizes training. This means that Chris can start to edit her site
without having to get specialist help or even open a manual.
Just like the Ribbon on Chris’ copy of Office 2010, the SharePoint Ribbon is contextual and only shows as
active actions she can perform.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 8
Delivering project sites quickly
The site is usable straight away, so
Chris can start populating it with
project documents and even insert rich
media, replacing the default graphic
with some relevant video footage, to
introduce the project and help her
team become productive more
quickly.
Wiki-style editing makes creating and
updating SharePoint sites easier and
more efficient. Chris has got used to
the Wikis that are available in Office
SharePoint Server 2007, but now she
can edit the look and feel of any page with the same ease.
The new Ribbon Edit menu, together with
the ability to edit a team site using wiki-
style editing, makes it easy and intuitive
to share data with colleagues in a clear
and visual manner. Once the data is in
place, Chris can apply a theme to the
team site that uses either the company’s
PowerPoint template or the company’s
branding colors.
Within a fraction of the time it would
have taken otherwise, and by using
functionality that is both easy and
intuitive, Chris has a team site that is
ready-to-go, so she can mobilize her new
team quickly and effectively. She has
achieved all of this without the need to involve the IT department, saving IT resources and time. All she needs
to do now is to assemble her project team.
Find the right people for your project
Once the project site is set-up and ready to go, the project manager needs to identify the people in the
company who can help with their expertise on gears and provide advice on the relevant shipping
requirements. The company is structured by disciplines—marketing, engineering, and so forth—and not by
products, so there are people in all of the divisions that could potentially help on this project. Traditionally this
would have meant Chris sending out speculative e-mails to contacts she already knows in the organization, or,
even worse, global e-mails. Results would be slow to gather and good fortune would play a big part in finding
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Find the right people for your project
the right people.
Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 removes the
element of chance from the team
development process. Chris uses the
Expertise Search facility to run a simple
search query using ―gears‖ as the search
criteria, and people who have gears
experience are listed in order of relevance.
She can then refine the result set by
selecting the discipline she’s interested in,
through the context sensitive Refine
Results pane.
When she has a list of potential team
members, such as Tai Lee, she can explore
relevant expertise by entering to the My
Site of each of the people shown on the
results and by viewing content their
recently authored content, relevant blog
posts, and so forth. This link between the
SharePoint Search capabilities and
SharePoint Communities means that Chris
can review up-to-date personal
information in users’ My Sites. The
company encourages users to keep these
personal profiles updated, and also
synchronizes user profile information from a range of external sources automatically through SharePoint User
Profile Synchronization.
By using the SharePoint 2010 Organizational Browser, Chris can review each team member’s reporting
structure. When potential experts are identified, she can use the new Note Board or integrated presence
provided by Office Communications Server to contact the right people and initiate a discussion with them
about her project requirements. No hopeful e-mails and fast, accurate results, which is exactly what Chris
needs at the moment.
Managing content within organizational governance
Now that Chris has her team together she needs to get the right documentation out to them. However, she
knows that there is a currently a hold on some of the documentation by the legal department, as there is an
investigation because of a query by the vendor’s competitors. Normally this would mean a lot of painstaking
research, but Chris knows that she can search for the relevant documents using the metadata-driven
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Managing content within organizational governance
navigation features available to her in Office Word 2010.
By using this she can identify the controlled documents as they are in a single Document Set, which means
that they are associated together. She can declare these documents a record. This activates an associated
Workflow that notifies her team that these documents are currently under hold from the legal team.
Chris decides to keep the teams focused on their work by publishing a chart of the top performers. This will
motivate the both those who are delivering and those who may be falling behind in their work. It is essential
that this is a real-time system, so that team members get immediate feedback on their efforts. She has also
been asked to provide this information to team member line managers for the senior management personnel
reports.
Currently the content development tasks
are captured in a shared Excel workbook,
which all of the team can access through
Excel Services, and an external line-of-
business (LOB) system. She uses the Excel
Web Parts to deploy a team dashboard that
displays a graph of content output against
team members. This does not show the
underlying data, just the graphical analysis,
so that it is clear to each team member
how they are performing against their
targets and the other project members. She
also deploys a Visio Services graphical
representation of data on the LOB platform.
All of this information appears on the
project home page for all team members
when they open the team site.
For the management reports she can
produce both the graphical output and the
granular data represented in each graphic.
She uses PerformancePoint Services, which is now an integral component of the SharePoint 2010 enterprise
license, to develop a dashboard that shows the Excel chart, together with key performance indicators, and a
scorecard. Line managers for each team member can review the performance of their staff, automating
performance reporting and streamlining the flow of business information.
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Managing content within organizational governance
Use of dashboards
visualizes insights into
business information far
more easily than was
previously the case—even
with shared documents.
The team, and their
managers, can readily see
progress, without the need
to generate or request
updated information.
Enabling user access, anywhere, anytime
A sales team receives an RFP from a new customer who is taking bids from multiple vendors. It’s a
competitive account, so it is important to respond quickly and put the company’s best foot forward with a
professional and error free response document. The sales team needs input from the account sales team and
some of Chris’s project team
members. It is not possible to pull
all of these people together to
develop the response, as some are
on-site with customers and others
are located at different offices.
Usually this would mean a series of
e-mails requests, with different
contributors adding content to a
single document—when they can
access it on their laptop computers.
Worse, this could mean that there
are multiple documents that have
to be merged, with contradictory
changes, and a time consuming set
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Enabling user access, anywhere, anytime
of e-mail threads to finally get consensus.
Thanks to the extensive content delivery options in SharePoint 2010, sales staff can access and edit the
response document on a medium that suits them. This saves time as they can collaborate regardless of
whether they’re on the road or at a customer location, where they don’t have access to Internet Explorer or
their Office applications. Users who are travelling can access the RPF and response documents by using
mobile access with SharePoint Mobile. Users who do not have access to their Office Suite applications can use
Office Web Applications, irrespective of which browser they have installed, because SharePoint 2010 supports
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
For users who are
away from the office,
SharePoint 2010
provides SharePoint
Workspaces. With
these users can take
content offline and
synchronized
updates later, so they
can be productive
when they have no
access to their
corporate network.
When everyone has
finished, there’s no
need to spend time
or risk introducing
errors by combining
multiple documents.
The sales executive
can review and polish
the response document with the easy-to-use formatting options that Microsoft Word 2010 provides. Now the
sales team has a professional, complete proposal to deliver to the customer in a flash before the competition!
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 13
Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure
It is always important to get the most out of your IT infrastructure, but in the current economic climate it
is essential for business systems to be flexible and offer efficiencies across a variety of business areas, to
minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Getting the most out of business systems is a common goal across all organization; but how can you unify
your infrastructure without compromising on functionality? There are many core benefits for a business
when it deploys a unified infrastructure; some of the main ones are:
Consolidation of licensing and hardware costs
Streamlined system management including less training and maintenance
Fewer system interfaces business users need to learn and interact with
Visualization of business information through streamlined data integration
Agile, yet secure, content publishing, both inside and outside the organization
For many companies the most expensive part of IT is the ability to integrate diverse systems, so you need
to invest in a business platform that enables users to see their data—irrespective of which database is it
stored in—through familiar applications. You also need this to be easy to do, so you do not compound
the cost of solution provision with the need to employ expensive IT resources to design, deploy, and then
manage your business applications.
Closely associated with this is the need to put publishing into the hands of those who create the
information, but without the need to worry about information sensitivity or governance. For most
businesses information publishing, particularly on to public Web sites, involves employing a professional
designers and developer to take copy, images, and multimedia from the business and transform it into
Web content. Each step of must be managed, because the people who publish the content are not
experts in what the content says.
Some companies feel forced to deploy multiple platforms to deliver intranet, extranet, and Internet
solutions. This may be because they have concerns about security, scalability, or functionality. Each
additional platform increases the TCO of your business infrastructure. Perhaps outsourcing looks like the
right solution, but you may be worried that this is a difficult decision to reverse; once you go to an outside
hosted solution, will you be able to bring your Internet or intranet Web sites back in-house?
Of course, multiple platforms come with intrinsic administration costs, in both management tools and
skills. You want to have the best system management possible, but this can prove expensive to maintain.
You may also need to employ additional support and development resources, and pay to maintain or buy
in specialist knowledge.
Scenario
Deliver end-to-end business productivity by using a single platform.
While Office SharePoint Server 2007 always offered intranet and Internet publishing capabilities,
SharePoint 2010 extends this functionality by updates to line of business integration with Business
Connectivity Services (BCS), which offers easier connectivity integration and read/write capabilities against
external data sources, and even closer compliance with widely used World Wide Web Consortium
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 14
standards for Web page design. This package means that you can minimize support and development
overheads, focusing on core, reusable skills both in your IT department and across your wider business
community. You can develop in-house design, development, and management skills based on a
consistent architecture, minimizing duplication of effort, training, and consultancy costs. For business
users you can provide secure access to business information through familiar business tools, such as Excel,
Visio, and Access. They can interrogate business information repositories by means of predefined
connections, available through BCS.
SharePoint 2010 is also designed for deployment either on-premise or in a hosted, or cloud, environment.
This means that companies can reassess their infrastructure and flexibly deploy SharePoint solutions
across a range of platform tiers, maximizing their IT dollar expenditure. This unified Web collaboration
and publishing environment means that you can streamline your environment without compromising on
functionality.
Let’s see how a unified infrastructure can benefit Contoso, and help Chris with her development of the
Gear project. Teams are often fluid in their make-up, as business changes and new challenges arise. As a
PM, Chris needs to have agile platforms to ensure that her team can perform at maximum efficiency. But
this also has to happen within a budget, so it is essential that Contoso has flexibility that is tightly
integrated with cost management.
Consolidating information access to streamline user productivity
The Gears project team members need to access data from a range of existing LOB systems across the
organization. Some of these are Microsoft platform data sources, such as SQL Server database engines. Others
are datasets managed as part of an SAP implementation. Away from the line of business data access, the team
commonly uses social computing functionality to share their thoughts and discuss ideas informally.
Traditionally this meant Chris, and the team members, would need access to a range of business solutions,
some of which may be browser-based, while others required client applications to access applications and
information.
Rather than have project team members use interfaces specific to each of these data sources, Chris uses the
Business Connectivity Services to surface information in the SharePoint 2010 environment.
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Consolidating information access to streamline user productivity
She can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create the connections and even the page for the Gears site. Just
like SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer has the Ribbon UI, so that she can immediately see which tools and
components are available for use.
Much of this data can be rendered for browsers by using out-of-the-box Web Parts and other services
available with SharePoint 2010, such as PerformancePoint Services and Excel Services. These enable Chris to
deploy common dashboards for users, which she can tailor to render data specific to each of the users in the
team. This centralizes project data and minimizes business costs and inefficiency. Users do not need to train
on new interfaces and Contoso can minimize costs on the purchase, deployment, and support of additional
client software licenses.
The SharePoint Designer development environment provides the right tool to deploy content access pages
without the need to employ developer resources for the project, minimizing costs and providing streamlined
development. In addition to these cost and time savings, this means that users do not need to retrain or be
furnished with additional client software.
The extensible nature of search means that Chris’ team can also search LOB data repositories through the
connections made available through BCS. There is no impact on security, because SharePoint 2010 trims all
search results, so that if a user does not have access to a document or record he or she does not see them
displayed in their search results.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 16
Taking SharePoint to the Internet for easy content publishing
The Gear Project proceeds on schedule, with some documentation and marketing content from Chris’ team
published on a section of the Contoso Internet-facing Web site. The Marketing Director contacts Chris when a
competitor launches a new gear assembly unexpectedly. He says that it is essential that Contoso gets
information about their new product range into the marketplace in order to maintain their competitive edge.
He requests that Chris puts additional pre-launch collateral on to the company Web site.
Because Contoso uses SharePoint for the Internet to publish information on the Web, Chris can quickly create
professional pages that she can populate with information already available on the company intranet, because
she has be granted appropriate permissions to do so by Central IT, as part of her role. The Ribbon UI provides
easy to use options for formatting and populating the new page. She selects lists, so that she can render
product documentation, and the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight video Web Part. SharePoint 2010 supports a
range of metadata options, and Chris enables site users to rate and comment on the movie so that she can
monitor market reaction.
Contoso includes FAST search technology for its internal and Internet users. The enhanced rich user
experience, particularly provision of thumbnail previews for a range of content, including multimedia, has
proved to be very popular with users – both in Contoso and externally.
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Taking SharePoint to the Internet for easy content publishing
She tasks several team members to populate the new site with market ready information. This is easy to do,
because the team members are already familiar with the one-click publishing capabilities of SharePoint 2010
and, of course, they can continue to use their familiar Office 2010 tools to develop content. The team can
select from the gear assembly videos to populate the video Web Part, so that the page is more informative
and engaging for users.
In addition to this she configures a blog so that her team can add new information quickly regarding new
features. Bloggers can publish direct from Word 2010, which streamlines the process, saving time and effort.
She extends this functionality to enable customers to add comments and ask questions by adding a
discussion page. Through this she can gauge customer opinion of the new gear assembly and respond to
questions that arise. The blog and the discussion page are controlled by an approval workflow, so she can be
sure that no information that is not yet ready to be published appears in the public domain.
Chris achieves all of this without the need to involve the IT department. This clearly saves time and cost, and
the unified platform also ensure that IT does not need to expend additional support or development staff for
on unplanned projects, because the project team skills and experience of working on the intranet site are
directly transferable to the Internet site.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 18
Deploying platforms to fit business needs
The project scope widens, as Contoso acquires a new company. This change means that the project needs to
include input from staff from the additional group. Currently, this subsidiary does not have a SharePoint
Products and Technologies platform, so there is no option for direct integration of information. However,
there are several options open to the project manager to make project information available to the new team
members:
• Deploy a new SharePoint 2010 environment in the new division
• Extend access to the new team members by enabling them to work as remote users
• Implement SharePoint On-line in a hosted environment
The IT department of the recent acquisition is fully committed maintaining their current infrastructure, so the
decision is made to implement a hosted SharePoint 2010 environment hosted by Microsoft.
This cloud-based solution addresses the short term requirements, with users able to share information and
work collaboratively. There is also great flexibility, as the project can extend the functionality of the hosted
environment as required, with no additional pressure on the in-house support staff.
This solution may continue into the longer term or the organization can decide to extend the in-house
SharePoint 2010 environment. There are several benefits to this option, beyond the inclusion of remote staff
on the team. The flexible nature of SharePoint 2010 means that there will be no need to retrain staff as
policies change or new business challenges arise. It also limits the danger of islands of technical expertise and
business information across the organization.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 19
Providing enterprise scalable business solutions
The Internet site for the new Gear Project is proving very popular with team members, who are blogging on a
range of issues. New pages, in addition to the discussions forum and blogs are starting to appear, and Chris
wants to be sure that the Web-facing content is appropriate to the market. She can see from the rating tags
that the movie is popular, but she wants some more general details, without having to ask users to rate every
page. She discusses this with one of the SharePoint administrators, Alan, who says he can tell her which pages
take the most hits by reviewing the report logs for the site, which shows which pages are receiving the most
visitors.
The analysis is simple for the administrator, because SharePoint 2010 provides Web Analytics out-of-the-box.
From the review information Chris can see that the social computing features of the Gear pages are proving
very popular. Browsers seem to enjoy adding discussion points and questions to the forum, and the team
blog consistently gets lots of hits; consumers seem to enjoy having access to the project team. She decides
that she should extend the social computing capabilities of the site. She approaches the product team, who
are designing the gear assembly and other Contoso products, and suggests that they should also start to blog
on the site. The product team also uses SharePoint 2010 to manage their development documentation on the
intranet. They have a team wiki where they maintain a central resource for product design and maintenance
documentation, so it is easy for them to start blogging on the Contoso Internet site.
It is also clear that
page with the
Silverlight movie she
included for the
Marketing Director
has proved very
popular with Contoso
customers. This
feedback means that
she can ensure that
the site provides the
most engaging
content, based on
metrics for user page
hits, rather than
speculation.
She asks the site
administrator to provide reports on changes to the site activity, so that she can continue to monitor customer
usage, which will help to indicate when it would be beneficial to encourage design and functionality changes
across the Contoso Internet site. Because Contoso uses a single platform it is easy and quick to assess the
popularity of pages across the site. Chris also expresses her concern that as the number of hits increase and
the content becomes more complex there may be degradation in performance. Alan assures her that he is
already monitoring the health of the site, through the integral SharePoint 2010 analysis reports.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 20
Providing enterprise scalable business solutions
These reports preempt problems by warning him of potential issues in areas such as security, performance,
and configuration. Alan explains that he can even define responses to problems that arise, so that SharePoint
2010 will take remedial actions automatically.
Rapidly Respond to Business Needs
Increased pressure on organization to deliver within tighter budgets means that it is even more important
to minimize time-to-market and encourage manageable innovation. SharePoint 2010 enables users—end
users through to professional developers—to build business customization on a single, centrally
administered platform. This means that the people who best understand the business have the tools and
infrastructure to enable them to deploy the right solution—fast. As an example, SharePoint 2010 includes
SharePoint Designer 2010, which makes it possible to develop solutions without the need to program any
code. It works with Business Connectivity Services to provide all users with bi-directional interaction with
line-of-business data. This means faster solutions and minimizes demands on the IT department, by
enabling users to develop solutions that conform to an organization’s governance and compliance
policies.
But how can you provide this responsive, rich development environment for users and professional
development staff? You need to provide an application development platform that provides user tools, as
well as developer tools, that fit within a secure solution strategy.
Scenario
Enable people across the organization to customize the platform to fit their needs.
SharePoint 2010 delivers business agility, by providing tools and functionality that enables information
workers to respond to business challenges. Importantly, this is not done in an improvised fashion.
SharePoint 2010 is built to ensure that organizations can maintain control and governance, while
providing flexibility and performance to their staff. Central to this is the ability of staff to integrate line of
business information into composite solutions. Composite Applications, or composites, enable
information workers to combine business functions, often by using SharePoint Designer, to deliver a
unique business solution that fits their business requirement exactly. When you have ensured that the
solution is robust, you can provision this functionality to others in the organization. This means that
business users can design their own solutions securely, without the need to employ IT developer
resources, who are working on more complex SharePoint 2010 business applications
For more complex tasks, specialist developers can use popular professional tools, such as Visual Studio
2010, to create business solutions. Visual Studio 2010 has SharePoint specific components to streamline
application development. Let’s see how SharePoint 2010 agile solution development can extend the
business impact of the Chris and the Gears project.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 21
Chris and the Gear Project are delivering real business benefits, and they are now working closely with
other parts of the company who are designing and running test manufacturing runs of the gear
assemblies. This often means that Chris and her team have to request information and data from divisions
who use specialist software in their work. Let’s see how SharePoint 2010 enables the team to deliver new
solutions to these business challenges.
Enabling users to create business solutions
The Gear Project needs to maintain close correspondence with the Production and Test Division, which is
working on product manufacture. One of the key elements of this is to maintain awareness of production
issues, such as missing the KPIs for the Mean Time Between Failure targets. It would be time-consuming to
have production staff reporting this data throughout the product development, so Chris proposes that they
should have a workflow that automatically flags exceptions from the production line.
This streamlines information flow, and also means that they can isolate the exact point at which an error
occurs. Chris proposes that they should incorporate the workflow with the existing process flow diagrams that
are available in Microsoft Visio. This enables them to visualize the issues, rather than needing to decipher
technical analysis.
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Enabling users to create business solutions
By using Visio Services Chris integrates her workflow with the production line steps in the development and
testing of the gear assembly. The Visio diagram is exported into SharePoint Designer, where she adds the
business logic that tracks the product development success criteria. She sets triggers that flag test failures
which send alerts to the key team members; so that they can review any problems and initiate appropriate
action.
The workflow development requires no coding, so the new workflow can be built to Chris’ specification by her
and her team, without the need to bring in external development resources.
Integrating Line of Business platforms to deliver business information
Chris wants to extend the current dashboard information to include key performance indicators on the
production process. The manufacture and test information is currently held on an external line of business
platform, for which Chris does not have client access software. She needs to render information on production
volumes and product failures on to her SharePoint 2010 site, so she uses the KPI Web Part, which is available
out-of-the-box.
Because she has sufficient permissions, she can connect to the production system by using Business
Connectivity Services to create an external list that is populated from the production monitoring platform. She
takes the raw production volumes data and the quality analysis information on product failures to calculate a
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) figure. She renders this on to a site Web page by implementing the KPI
Web Part. The MTBF information for each gear assembly model is provided to the team member responsible
for that product, so that her team can quickly react to issues that occur in the manufacturing process.
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Integrating Line of Business platforms to deliver business information
This visibility means that all production MTBF information is presented in a scorecard, so that the team can
analyze trends, rather than just responding to issues. This real-time information makes it possible to pre-empt
minor problems before they become business issues.
Ensuring development productivity and security
Chris and her team have found that there are some issues with the MTBF of a particular gear assembly. While
this is not currently outside the KPI production boundaries, she would like to keep a closer check on the three
manufacturing lines that produce this gearing, so she asks the team’s information architect to customize a
Web Part that queries production information from each of these systems.
The architect customizes the Query Web Part to complete the task and tests it against the development
system. When he is happy he deploys it in a Sandboxed environment.
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Ensuring development productivity and security
In this way he can manage the impact of the Web Part when he deploys it on the production system. With a
Sandboxed Solution he can limit the code CPU time, SQL execution time, and the number of allowable
exception that the Web Part can consume. This practice means that Web Parts developed by non-
development staff do not run the risk of causing problems on production systems.
It is lucky that does this, as the Web Part does not perform as he expected in the production environment; it
starts to consume far more CPU cycles than are allowed in its quota, so the process is terminated.
Chris asks for a developer to come in and with the information architect to identify the problem with the
rogue Web Part. Simon, the developer, uses the Developer Dashboard to analyze the performance of the
individual elements of the Web Part, and notices that it is making an excessive number of read requests to the
LOB database. This is quickly rectified and the Web Part is retested in the Sandbox environment.
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Ensuring development productivity and security
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So What Is Your Next Step?
You have seen, through the Gear Project scenario, how SharePoint 2010 can deliver business benefits to
business organizations that have already chosen to benefit from the Microsoft investment in Office
SharePoint Server 2007. Whether you need to improve your business productivity, reduce infrastructure
TCO, or improve you agility in responding to business change, SharePoint 2010 delivers business
opportunity solutions. So you need to start preparing to leverage these benefits as soon as possible.
Preparing for Your Upgrade
Any platform upgrade is a significant undertaking and often organizations have to balance the business
benefits against the potential pain of the upgrade process. The SharePoint 2010 Product Group has put an
unprecedented amount of effort into ensuring that the upgrade experience is a smooth and fast as
possible. There are a range of upgrade and migration options, which means that organizations can select
the ones that work best for each business area and sites.
This preparation has included early release of hardware requirement specifications and the inclusion of
upgrade preparation tools in the latest Office SharePoint Server 2007 service packs. These tools enable
organization to assess their current environment and prepare sites and content for the upgrade. There is
an entire TechNet SharePoint site dedicated to assisting in the planning and upgrade of content, including
hardware and associated platform software migration. Any organization looking to upgrade to SharePoint
2010 can find insights, best practice, and product information at the following locations.
Additional Resources
General
Product web-site – http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
SharePoint 2010 evaluation guide for decision makers - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727161 A study by Forrester Research about the ecomonic impact of SharePoint 2010 - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730143
IT Administrators
Technet—http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx
SharePoint 2010 evaluation guide for IT professionals - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727162
Developers
MSDN—http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint
SharePoint 2010 evaluation guide for professional developers - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727163