Being a Good SharePoint Parent
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Presented at the 2013 SharePoint Best Practices Conference
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Being a Good SharePoint Parent
- 1. Being a Good SharePoint Parent How limits, focus, and the right people can ease SharePoint growing pains
- 2. Matt Linxwiler • Manager, Intranet Technology at ALSAC/St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital • 18+ years in web development • 4 years with SharePoint
- 3. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Founded by entertainer Danny Thomas No child should die in the dawn of life
- 4. What makes St. Jude unique? St. Jude combines pioneering research and exceptional care.
- 5. What makes St. Jude unique? One child saved at St. Jude means thousands more saved worldwide.
- 6. What makes St. Jude unique? No family ever pays St. Jude for anything.
- 7. ALSAC • The fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital • Provides 75% of the hospital’s funding o Hospital’s daily operating costs are $1.8 million • In FY12, ALSAC raised $814 million
- 8. ALSAC’s SharePoint Environment • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition o Project Server 2010 o Several third-party add-ons • 75-80 Site Collections • Site owners for each • 3 dedicated SharePoint staff
- 9. Why SharePoint? • 1200+ employees o Memphis Headquarters (~700 staff) o 30+ field offices across the U.S. • We needed a way to o Share documents o Collaborate on projects o Build online forms quickly • Already invested in Microsoft technology o Windows, Office, SQL Server, etc. o Had already been installed as a rogue environment
- 11. What is this quote from? I wear the chain I forged in life! I made it link by link and yard by yard! I gartered it on of my own free will and by my own free will, I wore it! – Jacob Marley’s Guide to SharePoint Administration
- 12. Site Owner Capabilities • ALSAC site owners are responsible for o Creating libraries, lists, and calendars o Managing content o Access to content o First-level support for their users • None of our site owners are Site Collection Administrators • Many are not even default Site Owners
- 13. Site Owner Capabilities We create a custom permission level and remove the following permissions: o Manage Permissions o Create Subsites o Manage Websites o Apply Themes and Borders o Apply StyleSheets o Create Groups The reduced permission level allows us to o Maintain look and feel o Contain sprawl o Keep permissions from getting out of hand
- 14. Clean Up After Yourself • Whenever possible, clean things up o Delete unused/test sites, libraries, lists o Especially before migrating or moving file shares • Digital clutter comes at a price o Additional storage o Wasted migration effort o Wasted time determining if you still need to keep something
- 15. Clean Up After Yourself For sites with messy permissions o Create a new site with default permissions o Copy content from old site o Let users who need access request it again
- 16. No Code • We wanted to avoid the complexity that custom coding adds to support and future upgrades • Configuration vs Customization • SharePoint does a lot out of the box o Some people jump straight to Visual Studio without understanding what SharePoint can do natively.
- 17. No Code • Alternatives o Use “page hacks” using a web part and JavaScript (such as JQuery) o Third-party tools are available for many common issues • Requires you to view work through a SharePoint lens
- 18. Train People • Don’t assume SharePoint is easy • Lack of training can lead to o An unruly farm o Underused features o Low adoption • The goal is to empower users so that they can “do for themselves” without creating a mess
- 19. Hire People • SharePoint’s #1 system requirement is people o Right number o Right roles (administrator, analyst, architect, developer) • SharePoint ownership is not “other duties as assigned” (duh!)
- 20. And Have Fun!
- 21. My Favorite Business Requirement Ever Me: “Is this always the case?” Answer: “It is, (from the Legal dept) except when it isn’t.”
- 22. Keep It Simple • Don’t give users more than they can handle • Let users graduate to more advanced solutions • You can always enhance the solution later
- 23. Deliver Small • Don’t try to boil the ocean o What is the smallest, functional thing you can deliver? o What is the smallest audience you can start with? • Give your users something useful and let them tell you what else they need • You can always enhance the solution later
- 24. Consider This • If you can deliver 80% of what your users want in a much shorter timeframe, is that good enough? • In many cases the answer is “Yes”, and… • …they’ll never ask for any additional enhancements.
Editor's Notes
- This is our campus in Memphis, TN.There are three main things that make St. Jude unique:
- St. Jude has played a pivotal role in pushing U.S. childhood cancer survival rates from 20 percent when we opened in 1962 to 80 percent today. In the case of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer, our therapy increased the survival rate from 4 percent in 1962 to 94 percent today.
- At St. Jude, we speed our research discoveries from our labs to patients and doctors everywhere. We freely share our discoveries with the world.The picture here is from the inside of one of our research facilities. The flags represent the home country of every researcher at St. Jude.
- Thanks to the generosity of our donors, no family ever pays St. Jude for anything. Care, housing, transportation, meals—the list of services we provide to our families is unequalled.
- We were using a lot of email to share documents with our field offices.SharePoint was a natural fit for us.
- We are going to discuss some best practices that have worked for ALSAC.
- Lesson Learned: We initially gave site owners too many capabilities which resulted in sites that had several levels of subsites and many custom permissions, and many terrible color schemes.
- Digital assets are notoriously not kept clean. Users will save copies of copies of copies of files, and they rarely want to take the time to delete anything.
- At least for now, we are a “no code” environment. We have had a history of taking perfectly good applications and butchering them to the point where upgrades are multi-month endeavors.The 2013 App Model may reduce some complexity
- But then you have to write your own security model, page header and footer, what will your code break.No you cannot query the SP databases. Things may take a little longer to be done via SharePoint configuration – but they keep your farm “cleaner”.
- Lesson Learned: We made this mistake initially. It’s not intuitive to everyone. And if users think SharePointis for “documents only”, that’s all they will ever do with it. For example, they’ll never know about the benefits of the SharePoint List feature.Repeat of earlier Lesson Learned: Giving too many capabilities without training can lead to sprawling sites (too many subsites with many custom permissions)
- SharePoint is often considered an add-on to Windows administration (because it is mislabeled as a “document repository” – like network file shares). It is NOT server administration only. SharePoint isn’t just a server or just an application – SharePoint is a platform. And because of that, it needs more focused care.
- From our 2012 Halloween party
- Sometimes the simplest solution works best. Don’t overbuild solutionsLesson Learned: I tend to want to use more features to make a good solution better. It is not always worth it to invest the time in those features when something simple like the SharePoint List feature will greatly improve the existing process. Too many bells and whistles may overwhelm users.
- Beware of multi-month projects. They can result in constantly changing requirements. Many times, defining the process will take longer than building the solution.Lesson Learned: We had a project that kept dragging on and on due to a poorly defined process and too many competing users who wanted different things from the system. We finally got something launched by focusing on simple management of data using SharePoint lists (no workflows) and reducing the audience to the two keys users. Additional users and their needs are being addressed in a later phase.
- There are times when I can deliver 80% of what a user wants in an afternoon. This is what I love about SharePoint.