We regularly see SharePoint introduced by IT then thrust upon unsuspecting users as (for example) a replacement for file shares or a cure-all collaboration tool. But several important questions get missed: What are the business problems we’re trying to solve by rolling out SharePoint? What are the short- and long-term objectives around introducing or upgrading SharePoint in a particular organization? How exactly do we go about spec’ing and sizing SharePoint farms? What factors will ultimately drive not only the initial go-live state of your SharePoint farm, but also map out its growth strategy? Finally, what’s the best way to proceed if we don’t have (or can’t easily get) the answers to all these questions yet?

1. Developing a Business
Requirements Strategy for
SharePoint Infrastructure
Brian Lalancette
Navantis Inc.
March 9, 2015

3. Clickbait Title!
They Thought They Were Ready
To Install SharePoint. What
Happened Next Left Them
Shocked And Speechless!

4. Gold Sponsor
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5. #CollabCon
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6. Who Am I?
 Consultant at www.navantis.com
 SharePoint infrastructure specialist
 PowerShell nerd
 AutoSPInstaller
 AutoSPSourceBuilder
 Lazy admin
 Even lazier blogger
 *New*! Stroke survivor!

7. Audience Poll
 Quick poll
 Business Users
 Power Users
 Admins
 Developers
 Executives
*It’s OK to vote more than once
(i.e. admit to being more than one) 

8. Background
Background

9. Business, Schmusiness!
 Why gather requirements?
 Build something that actually fits *
 Save money; spend wisely on areas that count
 Focus on purpose
 Opens the conversation between stakeholders and IT

10. First Things Last
 “Where does it hurt?”
 What business problem are we trying to solve?
 What gap are we trying to fill?
 Learn a bit about the nature of the business *

11. Common Pitfalls
 Where does I.T. hurt?
 But tech is cool! Implement it for its own sake!
 “We’d rather not involve the business” *
‒ (Customer have actually told me this)
 Cart before the proverbial horse
‒ IT department makes the call on what tools to use
 Who’s serving whom?
‒ Business users feel the pain of either:
 Bleeding edge technology
 Legacy, out-of-date platforms

12. Sample
Questionnaire

13. Sample Questionnaire
Overall approach
 Gauge your audience
‒ Technical?
‒ Decision Makers?
‒ Power Users
‒ End Users (wait, what?)
 “Zoom in/out” as required *
 Ultimately geared toward helping to make infrastructure decisions
 Assumes this is on-premises

14. Sample Questionnaire
Questions
 Type of site (Intra/Extra/Inter)
 Number of employees
‒ Number of SharePoint users (& growth rate!)
‒ Concurrency rate (more on this later)
 Where are your employees/users? *
 Employee/user privilege model
‒ Open by default vs. closed by default
 Will they be working with large files? *
 Usage patterns:
‒ Collaboration / Consumption / Mix (ratio)

15. Sample Questionnaire (continued)
More questions
 Services & service apps for SharePoint *
‒ Business Data Connectivity
‒ Managed Metadata
‒ Office Web Apps
‒ Visio Graphics Service
‒ “We want it all”  Oh really now…
 My Sites / Personal Sites
‒ Fear & Confusion
 Governance
 Capacity Planning
 State of Active Directory?
 Who gets personal sites?

16. Sample Questionnaire (continued)
 Even more questions
 Uptime & Availability
‒ How long can business tolerate a service outage?
‒ At what times (if at all) can they tolerate outages?
‒ Can they stand to lose any data? How many hours’ worth? *
 BUT
‒ As downtime approaches zero, cost approaches infinity 
‒ Therefore balance a reasonable expectation of uptime with customer’s budget

17. Sample Questionnaire (continued)
 “Great, but we’re just upgrading…”
 Not “just” upgrading *
 Take this opportunity to review prior requirements (if
they had even been identified/considered)
 DB attach, or manual/automated migration?
 Size of databases
 Custom and/or non-upgradeable solutions
 Move your clutter vs. opportunity to start fresh(er)

18. Sample Questionnaire (continued)
 Broader organizational concerns
 Risk Tolerance
 Desire for Innovation / Platform Currency
 Data Retention Requirements

19. Additional
Considerations

20. Thoughts on Concurrency
 Concurrency is everything!
 MS likes to use “total number of users”
‒ However it’s kind of meaningless as-is… *
‒ Concurrency is usually expressed as a percentage
• Average number of user sessions at a particular time
‒ 10% as a rule of thumb (Intranets)
‒ Internet (public-facing) concurrency much tougher to nail down
‒ Do we anticipate peak periods of abnormally high concurrency?

21. Farm Sizing
 Farm size & capacity
 Implications of a farm that’s too small
‒ Poor performance
‒ Running out of space
‒ Lots of warnings in CA that tend to be ignored
 Implications of a farm that’s too big
‒ Staff required to operate and monitor
‒ Patching (downtime, costs, overtime) x number of servers
‒ Complexity outweights benefits

22. Mitigation Strategy
 But what if…
 IT has already made some of the decisions (prior to your
involvement)?
 Corporate culture or policy makes it unfeasible to interview business
representatives?
 You’ve exhausted all avenues?

23. Mitigation Strategy (continued)
 Plan for:
 Future growth
‒ Monitor performance & load proactively
 Scalability
‒ Virtualization
‒ Storage capacity (SANs, dynamically-expanding VHDX etc.)
‒ Farm topologies
‒ Be ready with tools, scripts etc. that will allow you to scale out the farm
 Staff readiness
‒ Training *
‒ Leave-behind materials

24. Summary
 Summary
 Business is the reason we’re in business
 If you can’t think of a business case for implementing x, why are you
doing it?
 Think about the goals & purpose behind SharePoint farm size &
design (and cost)

25. Final Thoughts
 Don’t…

26. Q & A
 Questions?

27. Contact Links & References
 More reading & contact info
 Twitter: @brianlala
 Blog: http://spinsiders.com/brianlala
 Blog: http://blog.navantis.com/author/brianlalancette
 Some guest posts:
‒ http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2014/02/01/weekend-
scripter-using-autospinstaller-and-autospsourcebuilder.aspx
‒ http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2010/03/23/hey-
scripting-guy-march-23-2010.aspx

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