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SharePoint Online

Learn How FirstGroup Will Use the Cloud-Based Service

to Collaborate & Share Across Five Divisions

Agenda

• Who is Perficient

• Benefits & challenges of working with SharePoint Online

• Deployment & development best practices

• Patterns for common challenges

• Yammer and integration into SharePoint

• How FirstGroup is aligning 5 divisions with SharePoint Online

• Questions & answers

Perficient is a leading information technology consulting firm serving clients throughout

North America.

We help clients implement business-driven technology solutions that integrate business

processes, improve worker productivity, increase customer loyalty and create a more agile

enterprise to better respond to new business opportunities.

About Perficient

• Founded in 1997

• Public, NASDAQ: PRFT

• 2013 revenue ~$373 million

• Major market locations throughout North America

• Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus,

Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fairfax, Houston, Indianapolis, Los

Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York City,

Northern California, Philadelphia, Southern California, St.

Louis, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

• Global delivery centers in China, Europe and India

• >2,100 colleagues

• Dedicated solution practices

• ~85% repeat business rate

• Alliance partnerships with major technology vendors

• Multiple vendor/industry technology and growth awards

Perficient Profile

BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

Business Intelligence

Business Process Management

Customer Experience and CRM

Enterprise Performance Management

Enterprise Resource Planning

Experience Design (XD)

Management Consulting

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Business Integration/SOA

Cloud Services

Commerce

Content Management

Custom Application Development

Education

Information Management

Mobile Platforms

Platform Integration

Portal & Social

Our Solutions Expertise

Our Microsoft Practice

Girish Balsavar | VP - Employee Channel - Center of Excellence, FirstGroup America

• Over the last five years, he has held multiple senior leadership positions within FirstGroup’s IT department

• In his current role, he is responsible for the establishment of Employee Channel COE

• Key objective of creating a global platform to enable employee productivity through increased collaboration and sharing of best practices across divisions

Our Speakers

Chris Hines| Senior Solutions Architect, Microsoft Modern Apps, Perficient

• More than fourteen years of IT experience, he has worked with SharePoint since 2003

• He has led many successful SharePoint projects over the years, and is now focused on delivering SharePoint Online & SharePoint Search solutions to global organizations

• Certified SCRUM Master and an expert in understanding & leading SCRUM projects

Benefits of SharePoint Online

• Create a globally scalable SharePoint instance in minutes!

• Deploy minimal viable product quickly, reduce risk

• Upgrades are managed by the service ‘Evergreen’

• Improved update cadence, smaller changes

• Focus on solving business problems

Challenges with SharePoint Online

There are restrictions, but it’s often just a case

of thinking about the problem in a different way.

• No farm solutions

• User profile synchronization is limited to set fields

• No vanity URLs, need to work with <name>.sharepoint.com

• Cannot edit search content sources nor schedule crawls

• Probably need to deploy ADFS + DirSync or FIM

This list used to be longer but

the service is constantly improving:

e.g. Content by Search WebPart,

1TB site collections

Development & Deployment

MSDN Tenant

Developer Scripted DeploymentDevelopment

All Developers

TeamFoundation

Server

Scripted DeploymentRefinement

Scripted Deployment

Scripted Deployment

TenantAdmin

Periodic Content Replication

Product OwnerStakeholders

Test Users

End Users

Review

Test

UseTenantAdmin

Can it be scripted?Document exceptions.

Development(Integration)

Tenant

QA Tenant

Production Tenant

Development & Deployment

• Scripted Deployment

– Highly repeatable

– Helps new developers onboard very easily

– Document exceptions

– Could also be used on-premises

• Separation of Environments

– Shared services/features not compromised during development

– No developers in QA or production

– Preserves tenant administrators in production

– Sign-up for ‘first release’ in development

• Leverage Cloud Accounts for Development and QA

– Very easy to setup, easy to manage for external users

• Federated Identities

– A test domain could also be federated to QA

– Needed to test single sign-on experience

Scripted Deployment

• PowerShell Library with XML Configuration

• SharePoint Server 2013 Client Components SDK (v16)

• Scripted Deployment For E.G.

– Content types (avoid content type hub)

– Deploying display templates and layouts

– Populating term store

• Client Object Model Does Not Support E.G.

– Setting managed properties

– Configuring search navigation

• Temporary (Unsupported) Work-Arounds

– Use .Net assembly browser on server code

– HTTP remote operations (Vesa "vesku" Juvonen)

*Credit to Roydon Gyles-Bedford and David Palfery at Perficient

Building Apps for SharePoint Online

• App Model Samples

– SharePoint Community effort

– http://officeams.codeplex.com

– Contributors include:

• Richard diZerega

• Vesa Juvonen

• Pattern Highlights:

– Remote site & site collection provisioning

– Remote event receivers

– User profile updates and picture uploads

– Personal site (e.g. OneDrive) customization/branding

Remote Site Provisioning

• App Model ‘App’

• Site or Site Collection

• Custom Form

• Collect Site Metadata

• Associated Workflow

• Execute Provisioning

Scripts

Hybrid Search

Hybrid Search

• Propagates search-based patterns and will most

likely fit with patterns adopted already e.g. result

sources, display templates, etc.

• Hybrid is a powerful pattern when we need to

augment SharePoint Online with on-premises content

• Can be used to solve the user profile synchronization

challenge

• Requires on-premises (or Azure with VPN)

SharePoint 2013

SharePoint Online Developer’s Toolkit

• Search Query Tool

– Build your queries for search-based design patterns

– http://sp2013searchtool.codeplex.com

• Client Object Browser

– Debug script-deployed content types and site columns

– Inspect OOTB content types and site columns

– https://spcb.codeplex.com

• Color Tool

– Brand by theme

– Give it to your visual designers!

– http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38182

Yammer Integration

• Integration of Yammer is evolving rapidly

• Switch from SharePoint Social to Yammer

• Unified Groups: SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer

• Yammer App Parts and Yammer Embed

• Yammer Search and the Office Graph

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MEC/2014/USX202

FirstGroup – Employee Portal

FirstGroup plcKeeping people moving and communities prospering

First Student : The largest provider of student transportation in North America –

over twice the size of the next largest competitor

First Transit : One of the largest private sector providers of public transit

management and contracting in North America

Greyhound : The only national operator of scheduled intercity coach

transportation services in the US and Canada, serving 48 US States and ten

Canadian Provinces and Territories

UK Bus : One of the largest bus operators in the UK, with around a fifth of the

deregulated market

UK Rail : UK’s largest rail operator with almost a quarter of the UK’s passenger

rail network, carrying more than 330 million passengers per year

Our services help to create strong, vibrant and sustainable local economies.

Each day, every one of our 117,000 employees works hard to deliver vitally

important services for our passengers. During the last year around 2.5 billion

people relied on us to get to work, to education, to visit family and friends and

much more.

Employee Portal – Office365 Implementation

• Provide an authenticated single point of contact

• Provide a single directory of employees and contact

information

• Enhance ability to communicate group messages

• Standardize document storage for policies, procedures

and forms across divisions

• Enhance search (people, documents)

• Simplify access for device/location

FirstGroup – Employee Portal

Why SharePoint in the cloud

• Focus on collaboration and communication vs servers

and datacenters

• Focus on getting to information vs. VPNs and network

access

• Reach the right people when needed vs. which device

do I use

• Focus on increased integrated capabilities vs. working

on technical projects connecting best of breed products

• Opportunity to increase collaboration and communication

across the countries and divisions

What doesn’t change for successful

implementation (Cloud or no Cloud)

• Executive sponsorship

• Business partner engagement

• Skilled resources to implement

• Keeping it simple – right architecture and guidelines

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