Best Practices - Is your share point really healthy?

Is Your Sharepointreallyhealthy?
What’s the rightprescription?
Presented By: Richard Harbridge
#BPC11 @RHarbridge

Who am I?
I

Why does this topic matter?
We find the issues in SharePoint typically when SharePoint upgrades, new third party components, new solutions and significant changes are made to SharePoint.
This results in high costs and greater delays than if many of those issues had been discovered earlier.

What we will be talking about…
What is a SharePoint Prescription?
SharePoint Preventative Care
SharePoint Palliative Care
SharePoint CurativeCare
SharePoint Incident Reporting
SharePoint Health Assessments

Our Goal Today…
From Here To Here

Why do you need a Prescription?

What is a Prescription?
It’s a health-care program implemented by a physician that governs the plan of care for a patient.
It typically contains orders to be performed by patients, caretakers, nurses, pharmacists or othertherapists.
It indicates that the prescriber takes responsibility for the clinical care of the patient and in particular for monitoring efficacy and safety.

What is a SharePointPrescription?
It’s a health-care program implemented by a physician that governs the plan of care for a patient.
It’s a technology-care program implemented by an expert that governs the plan of care for a SharePoint implementation.
It typically contains orders to be performed by patients, caretakers, nurses, pharmacists or othertherapists.
It typically contains orders to be performed by system, administrators, developers, architects or other experts.
It indicates that the prescriber takes responsibility for the clinical care of the system and in particular for monitoring efficacy and safety.
It indicates that the prescriber takes responsibility for the clinical care of the patient and in particular for monitoring efficacy and safety.

The Outcome
An effective and personalized prescription is what we really want.

What to watch out for…
Even with an effective prescription you must follow it in order for it to be effective.

What is Preventative Care?
Measures taken to prevent diseases (or injuries) rather than curing them or treating their symptoms.
In SharePoint Terms?
The pro-active actions you plan for, schedule and execute to mitigate or prevent issues from occurring in your SharePoint implementation.

Analytics for Management
Do you know what people are doing in your SharePoint implementation?
What content is the most popular and where are people going/coming from?
What are people searching for and what are they not able to find?
How fast are your sites growing? How big are they getting?

Analytics for Management
Are you monitoring all the things you should be?
What are your slowest pages?
What lists or sites are becoming very large?
Two Key SharePoint 2007 Tips:
Look at the reports available in SharePoint Designer.
Explore “_layouts/usagedetails.aspx”

Resource Monitoring and Throttling
Wait a second… I have SharePoint 2007 (or 2003)!
Large list views and lists with many lookup columns (MM and User/Group are also lookups) lead to performance challenges.
If you are upgrading to SharePoint 2010 this is also important to understand as the default throttling limits may impact user experience.
SQL Scripts (Read Only) and API calls can help identify what lists you do have over the default throttle settings, and which have a larger lookup count.
Preventative Measures: Selectively indexing large list columns can help for add/delete ops, building smarter more efficient views (1st filter), CAML/Search alternatives etc…
Are there performance problems with large lists or queries?
What are the realistic limits for list views and lookup columns to protect server performance and user experience?
What are the dangers of DDoS and DoS attacks and/or your servers running out of resources based on existing jobs and PUT/POST requests?

SharePoint Designer Management
Are you aware of who is building and using SharePoint workflows?
Do you know how many SharePoint Designer Workflows you have in your environment?
Do you know how complex the SharePoint Designer workflows are in your environment?
Have you mitigated the impact to end users from a poorly designed workflow?

Health Analyzer
Are there problems in your server farm?
What are the current problems?
Where are the problems?
What are the solutions for these problems?
Awesome Tip?
Turn on alerts for this list (especially if you ignore red warning bars).

Timer Jobs for IT Pro’s
What is going on in our SharePoint server?
What Timer Jobs are Scheduled (w/ Definitions)?
What Timer Jobs are Running?
What Timer Jobs have Run Successfully or Failed?
Server
Web App
Duration
Status

SharePoint Diagnostics
How do you determine how well different aspects of your environment are performing?
How do you quickly identify, isolate and resolve an issue?
How do you keep Environments within SLAs?
How do you reduce downtime?
How do you validate and benchmark code
Download the Latest SharePoint Admin Toolkit

SPDisposeCheck

Deployment Processes

Database Growth Example
A site collections content database is 60GB in total size.
Preventative Action: Set alert to warn if the content database goes beyond 80GB in size and schedule reports on storage space and database growth.

The Outcome
You are able to prevent many potential SharePoint issues through careful planning.

No one wants to do preventative care or pay for it. “It won’t happen to me.”

What is Palliative Care?
Any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than striving to halt, delay, or reverse progression of the disease itself.
Targeting and fixing symptom like issues within your SharePoint implementation without targeting or solving the root cause.

When to use Palliative Care
When curing the symptoms of an issue is all you can do.
You are unable to make sense of the underlying issue (don’t know what it is).
You are under artificial constraints that make the potential solutions for the underlying issue infeasible until a later time.
Budget/Time/Scope
Awaiting Technology Improvements (Upgrade)
Cynefin (Dave Snowden Explains)

SharePoint Example
The content database grows quickly to 100GB in total size. The warnings have been sent out. Palliative care would be to either split the content database up or to adjust processes so that the content DB can continue to grow beyond 100GB.

The Outcome
Symptoms of an underlying SharePoint issue are resolved to decrease the impact of the underlying SharePoint issue.

When a symptom is treated it doesn’t cure the underlying issue.

SharePoint Curative Care

What is CurativeCare?
Actions that seek to cure the existing disease or medical condition.
Solve the underlying issue/problem so that it no longer exists in your implementation.

There is no magic pill.

Simple Example
In a Publishing SharePoint Site the default.aspx page that sits directly under the root does not store it’s version history or work with our page layouts.
This was because the site was built using the team site template with publishing turned on after it was already created.
The “Cure” or Solution:
Create a new page in the “Pages” library that contains the current default.aspx pages content.
Adjust the site’s welcome page setting as well as all existing links that reference to the old default.aspx page location.

SharePoint Example
The content database actually went from 60GB to 100GB in the course of one day. Through investigation it is determined that a workflow was causing the issue. Extra versions of all documents ina library were created on an infinite loop (until the server automatically stopped the process).
Curative care would be to remove the workflow and perform corrective Governance adjustments (adjust Sharepoint Designer permissions, adjust Quota policies, and to train the SharePoint Designer workflow developer).
The content database grows quickly to 100GB in total size. The warnings have been sent out. Palliative care would be to either split the content database up or to adjust processes so that the content DB can continue to grow beyond 100GB.

Complex Example
Information in SharePoint people profiles is not consistent with information in other systems. In some cases it is more up to date, in some cases it is less up to date. Key Examples: Extension number inconsistencies, department or title details out of date.
The “Cure” or Solution:
Selective fields can write back from SharePoint to Active Directory so that when users update key SharePoint profile data it is distributed back to AD to be used in other applications.
Effort needs to be taken to determine an automated synchronization solution for the HR Employee Directory and Active Directory data or one of the systems for managing employee information should be retired so that it can be contained and managed from one source identity/profile.
This is because some people are updating user profiles in SharePoint. Some are contacting help desk or HR to get their information updated when addresses or phone numbers change.
There are several known challenges.
When a user updates their information in SharePoint it does not update Active Directory resulting in updates to the contact information in Exchange.
When Help Desk updates user information they do it in Active Directory.
When HR updates user information they do it in the HR Employee Directory (Custom/Not Active Directory).

Do I Need To?
Before you go through a medical procedure the doctor would explain the procedure and the risks, options and alternativesallowing the patient to make an informed decision about whether the risk was worth it.
We must do the same with SharePoint solutions – the risk is theirs to take, not ours.
Not if there are no known or identified issues.

SharePoint Lobotomy?
Is there a way to cause a severe ‘personality’ change in your organizations perception of SharePoint?
Eliminating alternatives can force users to utilize SharePoint or develop their own workarounds.
Eliminate and rebuild your implementation. (2007 to 2010 upgrades provide an opportunity to accomplish this with less user resistance since things are changing anyways.)

The Outcome
Through careful focus and identification we can ‘cure’ many SharePoint issues.

We cannot cure something if we don’t know enough about it.

When to Assess
When not scheduled it’s still important to perform assessments after any “curative” action is performed.
“It indicates that the prescriber takes responsibility for the clinical care of the system and in particular for monitoring efficacy and safety.”
Additionally it may be best to perform one after significant palliative or preventative measures are taken.

Incident Reports
An incident report or accident report is a form that is filled out in order to record details of an unusual event that occurs at the facility, such as an injury to a patient. The purpose of the incident report is to document the exact details of the occurrence while they are fresh in the minds of those who witnessed the event.
Some iatrogenic artifacts are clearly defined and easily recognized, such as a complication following a surgical procedure. Some less obvious ones can require significant investigation to identify, such as complex drug interactions.
If something unusual happens as a result of ‘preventative’, ‘curative’, or ‘palliative’ measures being taken it must be documented with as much detail as possible while it’s still fresh in the minds of those who were participants or effected.

Mental or Physical?
Physical health without mental health is not ‘healthy’.
In a SharePoint Implementation:
Physical Health = Technical Health
Mental Health = Business or Non-Technical Health
If you have business or non-technical issues you do not have a healthy SharePoint implementation.

Assessment Approach

Phase the Assessments

Whyare we using SharePoint within our Enterprise?
What are we currentlyusing SharePoint for within our Enterprise?
What are the future uses for SharePoint within our Enterprise?
How is SharePoint helping us achieve our business goals?
What are our SharePoint objectives and their priority?
What are our SharePoint initiatives and their priority?
How do our SharePoint initiatives align with our SharePoint objectives?
What are ways we can reduce inefficiencies and duplication?
What groups are doing similar initiatives and how can we help?
What are the related systems, applications and services we have within our enterprise?
How is the business prioritizing SharePoint initiatives?
Who are the people or key areas of the business involved in setting the strategic direction for our SharePoint implementation?
What areas of the business offer the most opportunity for growth?
How are you communicating strategic changes or initiatives related to SharePoint in your organization?
How are you allocating costs?
BusinessStrategy Assessments
What are we currently using SharePoint for within our Enterprise?
It is important to understand the vision, direction, objectives, and priorities of any SharePoint implementation or solution.
Are we using it as our primary document management platform?
Are we using it to meet external web content management needs?
Are we using it as an application delivery platform?

Technical Strategy Assessments
What are the known current SharePoint Initiatives?
What are the known future SharePoint initiatives?
Am I using all the features our organization is paying for?
Are we using any of the features incorrectly?
What are the related business applicationsandservices?
Do any contain duplicate features/functionality?
Are any being retired/eliminated in the future?
What are the technical objectives for SharePoint within the organization?
How are these technical objectives prioritized?
What are our current and future licensing plans with SharePoint?
Do you have a communication plan?
When do communications occur?
What must the communications contain?
Who are the contacts for key responsibilities?
Am I using all the features our organization is paying for?

Governance Assessments
Do you have clearly defined Governance teams, committees or boards?
Are the roles and responsibilities of the membership clearly defined?
Is all of the membership engaged?
Does the membership rotate?
How often are your members getting together?
What are the reasons your Governance teams, committees or boards get together?
Are the outcomes of these meetings actionable?
Do you have a Governance Site (and Governance Plan)?
What is within your GovernanceSite?

Who is responsible for what when it comes to SharePoint infrastructure?
Do they have a backup?
Do they have the knowledge and training they need?
Have you ever deviatedfrom the default settings? Why and when?
How are you monitoring SharePoint?
Do you know when a content DB’s size is approaching it’s recommended limit?
Do you know when the site count of a site collection is approaching it’s recommended limit?
Do you know when the site collection count in a content database is approaching it’s recommended limit?
What quotashave you configured for SharePoint?
How do you handle requests for a larger quota?
What is the maximum quota?
Do you have errors in your event logs?
Do you have errors in your SharePoint logs?
Have you changed the default settings for storing logs?
Do you have errors in your SQL logs?
How much space to grow do each of your logs have?
InfrastructureAssessments
Have you ever deviatedfrom the default settings? Why and when?
What quotas have you configured for SharePoint?
How do you handle requests for larger quotas?
What is the maximum quota?

How many servers do you have in your farm? (and possibly how many farms?)
How many web applications do you have in your farm?
How many site collections do you have?
How many databases do you have?
How large are your databases?
How many SQL Server Instances do you have?
How many users are using your SharePoint site collections?
How many requests per second are you seeing?
How many sites do you have?
How many documents do you have?
What is the highest document size?
What is the average document size?
What are your resource throttling settings?
What other technologies are you using with SharePoint?
Are you using ISA or Forefront?
Are your users using Micrsoft Groove or SharePoint Workspace?
What is the current version of Microsoft Office you are using?
Are you using Office Communication Server or Lync?
Are you using Microsoft System Center products? Which ones?

Backup and Recovery Assessments
What is your Disaster Recovery plan for your SharePoint implementation?
Do you perform a fire drills based on your plan? When was the last one and how often do you do them?
How do you provide single file recovery? (version control, recycling bin, DPM, etc)
How do you provide single or multiplesite recovery?
How do you provide server recovery?
How do you provide data center recovery?
Are you storing excess or unnecessary (unused) data in your SharePoint farm?
What are the costs of this storage?
Why is it being stored?

Performance Assessments
How is SharePoint performance?
What are the bandwidth costs associated with SharePoint?
What are the costs associated with transferring redundant data around your farm?
What are my slowest performing pages?
How heavy are my SharePoint pages?
Are you using caching in your SharePoint implementation?
Are you using Output Caching?
Are you using Disk Based Caching?
Are you using Object Caching?
Are you using IIS compression?
Are you monitoring SQL Server Latency?
Is your latency 10 milliseconds or less for the Temp Database?
Is your latency 10 milliseconds or less for the Search Database?
Is your latency 20 milliseconds or less for the Database Log File?
Do you have pre-negotiated SLAs for first time load of a site, subsequent loads of a site, and performance at remote locations?

Security Assessments
How secure is your SharePoint environment?
Do you have PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in your environment? Is it secured and audited?
How well are permissions managed in your SharePoint environment?
Have you ever deviated from SharePoint’s default security levels?
In what site collections?
What was the reasoning/need behind creating your own security levels?
How can security be improved in your SharePoint environment?
How can you more effectively monitor, manage, and maintain security in your SharePoint environment?
Do you have separate/specific site collections or web applications for confidential data which are more tightly controlled, audited, and managed?

Do you have clearly defined Development Standards?
What third party products are we using in our SharePoint environment?
Where are they available? Who can use them?
What is the status of these non-Microsoft products?
Are there newer versions available?
How is custom code performing within our SharePoint environment?
Are you disposing of SharePoint objects correctly?
Are you using best practices when querying or working with SharePoint objects?
Do you know how many workflows have been created within your SharePoint environment?
Do you know what they do?
Do you know who owns them?
Do you know what they were developed using? (SharePoint Designer? Visual Studio? Third Party Product?)
Who is using SharePoint Designer?
How do you test your SharePoint environment when an update is made to it?
When new code is added or a third party product?
How are you storing older versions of configurations, code and compiled components?
Development Assessments

What kind of SharePoint support do you currently provide?
Do you provide help material such as Manuals, Course Guidebooks, Workbooks, How To, Tutorials, or Demonstrations?
How do you train users on SharePoint?
How do you currently provision your sites?
How do you determine where each site should live?
Who owns the site and who supports the site?
How do you communicate new features, initiatives, or changes to SharePoint to your users?
How many SharePoint support requests do you currently get?
How are these categorized?
How are these assigned and escalated?
How many are effectively responded to?
How many are closed with success?
Do you leverage/contribute to an internal knowledgebase for SharePoint support?
Do you have clearly defined SLAs for support and problem resolution?
Do you offer face to face learning or unstructured/semi-structured environments for learning? (Lunch and learns, after hours discussions, communities etc)
Support Assessments

Taxonomy Assessments
Do you have a site mapthat represents the current site structures?
Does this clearly indicate recommended containment hierarchy?
Do you have a site map that defines future site structures?
Are you using Content Types?
Are you using metadata to help make content easier to organize and find?
Are you using site columns?
Are you using and managing Term Sets?
Do you have tagging guidelines?
Are you managing keywords?
Are you using and managing Site Directories?
Do you have classifications based on type of use?
Communications based (publishing) portal/sites/collections?
Team based collaboration sites/collections?
Application/services based sites/collections?
Are you checking for dead links?
How well is your site structured?
Can people find what they are looking for?

Integration Assessments
Is your SharePoint implementation part of an overall enterprisetechnology plan?
What are the current systems and applications in place?
What are the application and system lifecycles?
Is there duplicated content that is contained in other systems or applications and not just within SharePoint?
How is this content kept synchronized when updates are made to it?
Can data stored in other systems provide additional value to your SharePoint business solutions?
Can it give added context to SharePoint content?
What are already integrated?
How are they integrated?
What are not integrated?
Why haven’t they been integrated?
Are there ways to reduce user disruption by providing more single sign on opportunities?

How do you share the benefit of existing SharePoint solutions in your organization?
Does this include user built SharePoint solutions?
What is the SharePoint skill level of your users?
Do you have user stories on how people are currently using SharePoint successfully?
Have you performed interviews or surveys to help understand how people are using SharePoint or how specific SharePoint solutions can be improved?
How many people are using your SharePoint implementation?
Are you reviewing SharePoint Usage Statistics on a Regular Basis?
How many are using a specific site?
How many are using specific documents?
What times of the week are they using specific sites or documents?
Are there patterns that can be identified to help in determining the best time for updates or additions?
Is your SharePoint accessible externally or via mobile devices?
Usage and Adoption Assessments

How usable are your SharePoint solutions or implementation?
Have you performed usability assessments?
How has your SharePoint implementation been branded?
Does it have a unique name for referencing?
What are your theme and styling guidelines?
How does your SharePoint implementation work across browsers?
What about upcoming browsers?
What are the accessibility concerns in your current SharePoint implementation?
How can this be improved?
Do you have usage policies defined?
Have your users signed off or acknowledged these policies?
Do you enforce these policies?
How often are these usage policies assessed and updated?
Usage and Adoption Assessments

Usability Assessments
Have you identified and defined user personas?
Is your SharePoint accessible externally?
Is your SharePoint being used on mobile devices?
How is the user experience?
How has your SharePoint implementation been branded?
What are your theme and styling guidelines?
How does your SharePoint implementation work across browsers?
What about upcoming browsers?
What are the accessibility concerns in your current SharePoint implementation?
How can this be improved?
How do you make navigation changes in your SharePoint implementation?
Is your current navigation effective?
Have you performed card sorting exercises?
Have you performed the ‘blind’ test?

Search Assessments
Are you using custom search scopes?
Are you using people search?
Are you checking what queries resulted in failure (no click through or 0 results)?
Are you using best bets?
Have you defined synonyms?
Do you allow users to search non SharePoint data from within SharePoint? If so what data?
Are you using hit highlighting?
Have you made organizational enhancements to the noise words file and/or the thesaurus file?
Have you defragmented your search database(s)?

SEO Assessments
Are you using keywords, key phrases, and a description that reflects each pages content?
Are you using Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt)?
Are you placing your content higher up in the page (to improve search engine processing).
Are you ensuring alt and titletags are always filled on things like images?
Are you using descriptive text in your hyperlinks?
Are you using descriptive page titles?
Are you automatically updating the sitemap (helps search engines crawl or discover pages on the site).
Are you adjusting the Search Visibility for sites or pages you don’t want crawled?

Assessment Breakdown

Tools That Help Answer Questions
Microsoft ProductsSystem Center Operations Manager
Microsoft/Community ToolsSharePoint Diagnostics (2007, 2010), ULS Viewer, SharePoint DocGen, Log Parser etc.
Third Party ProductsControlPoint, DocAve, Nintex, CardioLog, MAPILab, etc.

4 Things Every Organization Should Ask For In Any Assessment
Can I have my results?In a way that helps me understand where we are healthy, where we could improve, and where we are at risk.
What does this mean?Brief non jargon filled explanation of what each result means.
What are my options?What can I do to improve this? What can I do to control this? With clear explanations.
What’s next?

The Diagnosis
Diagnosis is used to help determine the causes of symptoms, mitigations for problems, and solutions to issues.

“Prescription without Diagnosis is Malpractice.”
“Prescription of a SharePoint Tool/Solution/Implementation without Diagnosis is Malpractice.”
Please Share This!

What we talked about…
The Plan of Care for SharePoint
PreventativeCare is critical and cost effective.
Palliative Care targets side effects and is expensive.
Curative Care is difficult without clear diagnosis.
Record and Learn from Results
Assess Often, Target Assessments, Act on Results
SharePoint Curative Care

Get Well SoonThanks to Organizers, Sponsors andYoufor Making this Possible.
Questions? Ideas? Feedback? Contact me:
Twitter: @rharbridge
Blog: www.rharbridge.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rharbridge
Email me at: richard@rharbridge.com
My company: www.Allin.com
Assessments: http://www.sharepointdiagnostics.com

Best Practices - Is your share point really healthy?

by Richard Harbridge on Mar 24, 2011

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Best Practices - Is your share point really healthy? Presentation Transcript