To point and click our way through a SharePoint installation is relatively easy, but what about all the other 'stuff' that we might not have considered? These slides are from Andy Talbot's MetaVis webinar for a detailed discussion on building SharePoint platforms fit for enterprise customers. In this webinar, Andy talked about some of the common challenges that can take some enterprises by surprise, factors that we should have planned for, and common failure points. Attendees should have benefited from this discussion regardless if they were starting out with their deployment, or already in production.

1. Off the Beaten Path....
Building SharePoint Enterprise Platforms
with Andy Talbot

2. Who?
Andy Talbot
SharePoint Architect | #SUGUK IOM Leader |
MCSE: SharePoint | Isle of Man & UK Nomadic |
Coauthoring ‘SharePoint Survivors Guide’
/AndyTalbot
@SharePointAndy
SharePointAndy.com

4. Shocker!
We won’t talk about Azure today,
as I’m going to cover this as a new
dedicated session (sorry!)

5. Content Covered
This session includes:
• Pain points
• Lessons learnt
• Sensible questions
• Common sense thoughts
…you decide what applies to you!

6. SharePoint On-Prem IS ALIVE!
“When it comes to the cloud, we’re “all
in,” but we’re also realistic. We have a
large on-premises installed base that’s
important to us, and we’re committed to
future releases of the server.”
– Jared Spataro, Senior Director,
Microsoft Office Division, “Yammer and
Enterprise Social Roadmap Update”
March 2013
Ref:
http://www.collabshow.com/2013/10/21/sharepointstill-not-dead-and-even-on-prem-is-not-dead/

7. Understand your Vision

8. Product Capabilities
• Do you understand what you
are trying to achieve?
• Will you have service
separation?
• What is the purpose/s of the
platform?
• Understand different capability
behaviours e.g. Collaboration
apps will be read/write
intensive VS WCM read
intensive

9. Governance
Governance is SERIOUS stuff and
you can’t afford to not think about it.
“SharePoint Governance is a
guideline of rules within your
organisation, including what, why,
when, where and how
#SPGovManifesto” – Andy Talbot
The SharePoint Governance
Manifesto’ http://bit.ly/AmazonSPGovManifesto

10. Governance Axis
There are multiple governance axis,
but from a platform perspective, at a
minimum you should have considered :
• Organisational
• Informational
• Operational
Part of the story:
http://blog.aditi.com/enterprise_social/
sharepoint-governance-an-inside-outperspective-part-2/

11. Good Governance
• Consensus Orientated
• Participatory
• Follows the rule of law
• Effective and Efficient
• Accountable
• Transparent
• Responsive
• Equitable and Inclusive

12. Quality Assurance
• Can you afford not too?
• Enforces quality
• What’s more expensive; testing or
loss of service?
• It should be baked into
deployments and configuration
change/s

13. Understand test types
• Understand what to test AND when
• Update test plans when you change
something:
- Platform changes
- New developments
• Don’t undervalue your QA team
REF:
http://www.sharethepoint.com/Learn/Blog/Lists/P
osts/Post.aspx?ID=122

14. Go a little deeper
Understand what each type of
test area means

15. RACI
R
RESPONSIBLE:
• Who is/will be doing this task?
• Who is assigned to work on this task?
A
ACCOUNTABLE:
• Who’s head will roll if this goes wrong?
• Who has the authority to take decision?
C
CONSULTED:
• Anyone who can tell me more about this
task?
• Any stakeholders already identified?
I
INFORMED:
• Anyone whose work depends on this task?
• Who has to be kept updated about the
progress?

16. RACI Example
Choose a
recipe
Grocery
Shopping
Pre-heat the
oven
Prepare
ingredients
Bake dinner in
oven
DAD
C
MOM
A/R
SON
C
R
R
A
A/R
R
DAUGHTER
C

17. Roles & Responsibilities
Introduce clear separation of duties e.g.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
SharePoint Architect
Configuration Manager
Platform SMEs
Functional SMEs
Support SMEs
Trainers
Testers
Product Managers
Requirement Gatherers

18. Roles & Responsibilities
Different each role comes a mix of
responsibilities. e.g.
• Leadership
• Support
• Management
• Planning
• Performance
• Strategy
Understand who is responsible for
what in your organisation

19. Release Management
Typical responsibilities:
• Deployment Management
• Environments Management
• Release Process Management
• Build Management
• Configuration Management
• Change Management

20. Be careful....
Sometimes we overlook things
(shocking!). Maybe we didn’t
stop to consider:
• When will product support
stop?
• Base or Project cost?
• How long can I keep my
resources?

21. Staying Current
It’s important:
• Understand vendor product and
strategy developments
• Helps you to plan ahead for
change
• Underpins personal
development planning (right?)

22. Documentation
It’s important:
• To be current
• Stored in an appropriate place
(e.g. don’t store SharePoint DR
docs in SharePoint!)
• Version controlled
• Maintained

23. Typical Documentation
At a minimum the following
should be documented:
• On boarding process
• Build & Configuration
• DR plan
• Development HLD’s & LLD’s
• Test plans

24. Successive Layers of Defence
• Project Governance
• Architecture Governance
• Information Governance
• Release Management
• Quality Assurance

25. Shared Platforms
• Solution delivery aligns to
platform capacity
• Changes are communicated to
all platform stakeholders
• Peer review opportunities
(DWG?)
• Switching on features may
affect others (e.g. Auditing)

26. SharePoint Centre of Excellence
See Andrew Woodward’s deck
from SPC12:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events
/SharePointConference/2012/SPC214

27. Resources & People
• Often we ask for more system
resource, but don’t plan for
more human resources
• Do we on-board people
properly, or are they left
guessing on your standards,
processes, etc.

28. Embracing Talent
Ask yourself:
• Do you encourage and foster learning
and development?
• Do you recognise emerging talent?
• Shouldn’t each capability have a base
achievement standard? E.g.
Certification, internal standards, etc.
• Does training align with product
roadmap?
Technology is nothing without people

29. Capturing User Feedback
Ask yourself:
• Do we really LISTEN?
• Is it EASY for users to feedback?
• Do we REVIEW feedback?
• Do we MEASURE THE VALUE of
delivery against customer
feedback?
• Do we let GOOD IDEAS DIE?

30. Realignment
Sometimes we need to realign for
various different reasons, e.g.
•
•
•
•
•
Mergers & acquisitions
Improve efficiency and effectiveness
Senior management changes
Market response
Change of strategy
Have we thought about how we would
approach this the need arose?

31. Who makes the Decisions?
Carefully consider who should AND
shouldn’t be making different types
of decisions. Worryingly it’s not
always the right people, e.g.
• Project Managers making technical
decisions (tick boxing?)
• Techies making business decisions
• Power Brokers (you know the type!)
Do decisions support the vision? “To
Steer…. Governance….”

32. Communication
It’s important to:
• Have a communication plan
• Get across the intended value
• Set expectation
• Use it to promote cultural
change
• Show that you listened
• Promote recent successes
• Warn about service disruption
INTEGRATE,
Commitment
INFORM,
Awareness
INVOLVE,
Engagement

33. Guiding Principles
• Set an internal expectation
• Encourage commitment and
quality
• Encourage early warning of
issues
• Enjoy what you do!

34. Support Framework
• Establish triage process
• Understand your estate
• Identify trends, update training and FAQs
• Encourage community feedback, possibly
with Gamification techniques

35. Capacity Planning
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Recertification process?
Monitor growth
Storage reduction opportunities
Plan for Site Quotas & Content
Databases
Understand boundaries, limits and
thresholds, and respect them!
Migrations
Site creation control
Auditing
Service Separation
Storage Tiers / IOPS
Does existing
hardware
meet
company’s
needs
Implement
Capacity
Planning
Determine if
existing
infrastructure
can support
anticipated
growth
Determine the
company’s
future needs
Identify
opportunities
to consolidate

36. Load Planning
• Profile expected traffic patterns
(account for time differences in
different countries)
• Understand usage age patterns of
each web app – determine the
best architectures to fit (e.g
Collaboration – large read / write)
• Understand caching options and
what they do (which can impact
platform capacity)
• Office Web Apps (SP2010)

37. Get the Balance right
• What will come first, Load or
Capacity?
• Do you understand your points
of failure?
• Have you planned for the
future?

38. Architecture / Topologies
• Properly planned?
• Physical & Logical design
Documented?
• Use it to understand how to
change your farm/s
• Traditional vs Streamlined
topologies
Technical diagrams for SharePoint
2013:
http://technet.microsoft.com/enus/library/cc263199.aspx

39. Scaling
• Understand the difference
between scaling UP and scaling
OUT
• Plan Content Databases
(quotas, thresholds, warnings,
migration process)
• Understand caches (e.g. Blob,
distributed, object, page)

40. Monitoring
• System Logs
• Performance
• Growth
• Usage
• Functional Requests
• Support Issues
….are you being PROACTIVE or REACTIVE?

41. Hardware Considerations
• Do you understand your hardware
refresh cycle?
• If on a managed platform, do you
understand your suppliers refresh
cycle and limitations? Understand
exit strategies too
• Will purchase restrictions prevent
changes in topology
• Does your company have a cloud
strategy for the future?
• Do you know what to do if you
introduce new hardware (e.g. update
SQL Alias, web.config, etc.)

42. 3 rd Party Tools
• Upgrade ready?
• Infrastructure requirements
understood?
• Training
• Support model
• Understand your procurement
framework
• Licencing, perpetual or annual?
Have with planned for growth
e.g. enough seats

43. vNext Ready?
• Understand your corporate
roadmap
• Be as upgrade ready as possible
• Understand deprecated features
• Learn architectural changes, both
logical and physical
• Microsoft Product Line
Architecture (PLA)
"How would Microsoft deploy this
technology?" or "how would Microsoft
do it?" It was from this simple question
that the PLA was born.

44. Outsourced Functions
Typical for support and
development capabilities.
Take time to:
• Understand the ‘Continuum of
Cultural Characteristics’
• Agree on standards
• Agree communication methods
• Understand the QA process
• Major public holidays (different
from country to country)

45. Patching
• 99.9% uptime really means ‘x’
downtime allowance
• Understand why you’re making a
change.
• SP’s, CU’s, PU’s, COD, etc.
Understand the differences http://bit.ly/JUBWLi
• READ THE RELEASE NOTES! It
might fix one thing and break
another

46. What Availability Uptime Really Means
Availability %
Downtime per year
Downtime per month*
Downtime per week
90% ("one nine")
36.5 days
72 hours
16.8 hours
95%
18.25 days
36 hours
8.4 hours
97%
10.96 days
21.6 hours
5.04 hours
98%
7.30 days
14.4 hours
3.36 hours
99% ("two nines")
3.65 days
7.20 hours
1.68 hours
99.5%
1.83 days
3.60 hours
50.4 minutes
99.8%
17.52 hours
86.23 minutes
20.16 minutes
99.9% ("three nines")
8.76 hours
43.8 minutes
10.1 minutes
99.95%
4.38 hours
21.56 minutes
5.04 minutes
99.99% ("four nines")
52.56 minutes
4.32 minutes
1.01 minutes
99.999% ("five nines")
5.26 minutes
25.9 seconds
6.05 seconds
99.9999% ("six nines")
31.5 seconds
2.59 seconds
0.605 seconds
99.99999% ("seven nines")
3.15 seconds
0.259 seconds
0.0605 seconds

47. Backup & DR
• You’ve planned for it, right?
• Test annually
• RPO’s/RTO’s still correct?
• Have you over engineered? e.g.
If no point in time recovery,
why are you SQL full logging?
• Understand what dependent
applications and process maybe
affected
Facilities &
Infrastructure
Operational
BC / DR
Plan
Processes &
Procedures

48. You cannot know it all.....
• SharePoint Centre of Excellence
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Developers
BA’s
Trainers
Product Owners
SMEs
Design Working Group
Information Governance (SPIG )
• Steering Committees…

49. Reasons for Failure

50. The ‘C’ Word – CHANGE!
“Changing behaviours at work requires
changing the environment that
surrounds people when they’re at
work” Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc)
Is it time for gamification as an
approach to facilitating changing
behaviours?

51. Questions?
“Questions are guaranteed
in life; answers aren't”

52. Bye For Now!
Andy Talbot
SharePoint Architect | #SUGUK IOM Leader |
MCSE: SharePoint | Isle of Man & UK Nomadic |
Coauthoring ‘SharePoint Survivors Guide’
/AndyTalbot
@SharePointAndy
SharePointAndy.com