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SHAREPOINTPRACTICAL IT STRATEGIES FOR ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION /// AUGUST 2011

STRATEGY

Three Steps to Creating aSharePoint 2010 Deployment PlanThese best practices for developing a comprehensive enterpriseSharePoint strategy have proven a winning formula for manyorganizations. BY BRIEN M. POSEY

IMPLEMENTATION

SharePoint Adoption: If YouDeploy it, Will Your Users Come?Making sure SharePoint is adopted throughout the enterpriseto its best advantage takes a clear strategic plan and anawareness of the pitfalls. BY MARK CLARKSON

MANAGEMENT

SharePoint PerformanceManagement Load Gets HeavierSharePoint 2010’s increased capabilities, and complexity,require administrators to be more vigilant in maintaining theirserver farms to ensure best performance. BY SHAWN SHELL

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AS MORE AND more organizations learn about the potential benefits of MicrosoftSharePoint 2010 and investigate using the updated collaboration software plat-form, SearchContentManagement.com will continue its own study and offerreaders ongoing discussions of SharePoint strategy, implementation and man-agement issues. In this edition of our quarterly SharePoint e-zine, you’ll findexpert advice on setting up a successful SharePoint 2010 program, avoidinguser-adoption problems and using the latest administrative features to wranglegood performance—and the best return on investment—from a SharePoint farm.First, Brien M. Posey presents a detailed formula for developing a comprehen-

sive SharePoint 2010 strategy and deployment plan and explains why doing sois a critical best practice for large organizations. His look at strategy matterslays out the basics for setting up a successful enterprise-wide SharePoint 2010program.Then Mark Clarkson takes on matters of implementing SharePoint in his look

at enabling organization-wide adoption of the collaboration software. His articleexamines “adoption risk” and the pitfalls involved in ad hoc use of SharePoint.Finally, Shawn Shell describes why SharePoint 2010’s increased management

complexity puts the onus on program administrators to be more vigilant aboutperformance issues.If there’s a specific SharePoint topic you’d like to learn about,

let us know—send me an email. �

JONATHAN GOURLAY

Site and News Editor, SearchContentManagement.com

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Clear Strategy, Careful AdminPoint theWay to SuccessBY JONATHAN GOURLAY

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4 SharePoint August 2011

SMALLER ORGANIZATIONS launchingSharePoint 2010 often take a verycasual approach to the deploymentprocess. They purchase some licensesand install SharePoint without anyreal plan for its long-term use, lettingthe deployment evolve over time.While that might work fine for a smallcompany, such a laissez-faire attitudetoward SharePoint 2010 deploymentcan have severe long-term conse-quences in an enterprise environ-ment. To avoid trouble, enterprise-class organizations would be well-advised to develop a comprehensivestrategy long before the first Share-Point license is purchased.To make sure SharePoint is used

successfully, it makes sense to take astructured approach to consideringthe issues that inform a deploymentstrategy. What follows are tips onhow to do that, along with key ques-

tions to ask within an organizationabout a planned deployment.

FORMALIZE YOUR VISIONIf you’re considering deploying Share-Point, then you probably already havesome idea of the types of things thatyou want the project to accomplish.However, a good first step in the plan-ning process is to create a formaldocument outlining how the Share-Point platform will be used. This isimportant because the way that theorganization plans to use SharePointwill have a direct impact on the hard-ware and software it will need to pur-chase. Your long-term plan for Share-Point 2010 deployment can also havean effect on things such as service-level agreements (SLAs) and disasterrecovery requirements.As you document your vision for

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how SharePoint will be used, considerthe following questions:

� Will SharePoint be accessible solelyfrom the internal network (as anintranet), or will it be accessiblefrom the outside world as well?

� Who will have access to SharePoint?Will it be solely for employees? Are

you going to form business-to-business relationships with yoursuppliers or strategic partners viaSharePoint?Will you have a Share-Point site that is accessible to thegeneral public?

� Are you planning to develop anycustom SharePoint applications?Will any applications that you are

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The Politics of Developinga SharePoint StrategyA TREMENDOUS AMOUNT of work goes into developing a comprehensive Share-Point deployment strategy for an enterprise-class organization. And over theyears, there have been various examples of an IT department’s exhaustiveplanning and strategy building efforts being derailed by office politics.To avoid those situations when someone in middle management throws a

monkey wrench into your plans, work with upper management as you startto create your SharePoint vision and governance documents. By gettingupper management involved from the very beginning, you enlist their sup-port for using SharePoint. Having upper management on your side can be abig benefit when internal politics rears its ugly head. It also gives seniorexecutives the chance to voice concerns early on in the planning process—soby the time you’re ready to deploy SharePoint, the management team will bewell aware of the project plan and you should already have answered theirquestions about it.There’s another advantage to having corporate executives in on the plan-

ning process: budget signoff. In many organizations, the executive team hasto approve spending on large-scale IT projects. If they’re involved, they’llcome to understand the proposed scope and expected benefits of yourSharePoint deployment project, and that should make it easier to get theirblessing—and the funding you need. �

currently using be ported to Share-Point? (Some organizations useSharePoint to replace their existingcustomer relationship management,help desk or expense reporting soft-ware.)

� Will SharePoint replace your fileservers?What about your Exchangepublic folder servers?

DEVELOP A GOVERNANCE PLANIf left unchecked, SharePoint canquickly spiral out of control. To avoidthat, it is critical to establish a solidSharePoint governance plan prior todeployment. A governance plan out-lines how the SharePoint system is tobe used as well as the various permis-sions, responsibilities and policiesthat will be in effect.Entire books have been written on

SharePoint governance, but here are afew important questions that shouldhelp inform your governance plan:

� Will you be building a centralizedor a decentralized system? (The ITdepartment generally controls acentralized deployment, while adecentralized deployment involvesthe creation of multiple, independ-ent SharePoint 2010 farms, each ofwhich will likely be run by a differentdepartment.)

� Who will be allowed to create new

SharePoint sites?Will all users beallowed to create sites at will, or doyou want to limit site creation rightsto supervisors or managers?

� Will those who create sites incurchargebacks? If so, how will thechargebacks be enforced and atwhat rate?

� How will lifecycle managementwork for sites?

� Who will be responsible for manag-ing and maintaining SharePoint?

� Will the SharePoint administratoralso manage the underlying SQLServer database, or will that respon-sibility fall to a separate databaseadministrator?

� What will the policy be for datarecovery?

� What types of auditing will beused?

� What kind of system availabilitywill be required by your SLA?

DEFINE THE LOGISTICALREQUIREMENTSOnce your organization has outlinedits vision for SharePoint and drafted aSharePoint governance plan, the nextstep in the process of developing a

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comprehensive deployment strategyis to begin defining the logisticalrequirements that will enable theorganization to meet the proposedgoals defined by the vision and gover-nance documents.Begin this process by defining the

capabilities that need to be put inplace. For example, if your SLArequires “five nines” of availability, or99.999% system uptime, you mightdetermine that the best way to meetthat requirement is by buildingfailover clustering support into yourservers. In that case, failover cluster-ing would be a logistical requirementthat would have to be met when youmove on to the next step: designingthe actual SharePoint architecture.A final set of targeted questions

will help focus your requirementsdefinition efforts:

� Howmuch future system growthdo you anticipate? (Your logisticalrequirements must address bothscalability and capacity planning.)

� How do you plan to manage theSharePoint deployment? (Organiza-tions with large-scale SharePointdeployments almost always haveto budget for third-party manage-ment tools.)

� How do you plan to back up andrecover SharePoint data? (The back-

up and recovery software that youuse must address the requirementsthat have been set forth in your gov-ernance document.)

� If you are going to use SharePointas a replacement for a file server,public folder server or applicationserver, how will you migrate thedata to SharePoint and how longwill the migration process take?Will you need any special tools toassist with the migration?

Organizations often will usemethodologies similar to the onedescribed above to plan for and even-tually design the architecture for theirSharePoint deployments. Sometimes,the resulting plan turns out to be cost-prohibitive. In such situations, it mightbe possible to spread out the costs bydoing a multi-tiered deployment, inwhich the various aspects of the planare implemented over time instead ofall at once. At least you’ll have acomprehensive, long-term SharePointstrategy mapped out. Being casualhas its time and place—but not whenit comes to the enterprise SharePointdeployment process. �

BrienM. Posey is a seven-time Microsoft MVPwith two decades of IT experience. Before becom-ing a freelance technical writer, Posey worked asCIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities and as a network administrator forinsurance companies and for the Department ofDefense.

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SHAREPOINT’S SUCCESS in the marketcan be attributed largely to its ease ofuse, according to Richard Harbridge,senior SharePoint evangelist at AllinCorp., a Pittsburgh-based consultingand IT services firm.With SharePoint, business workers

“can build stuff really quickly—it’s al-most like a work-around for IT,” Har-bridge said. “End users have the abilityto manage their documents, to buildtheir own sites, to manage their ownpermissions. It’s very empowering. Iteven integrates with Microsoft Office.It seems like a no-brainer [to use].”What could possibly go wrong?

Well, actually getting your end usersto use the software, for one thing.“The biggest risk we run into is

adoption risk: You build it, but nobodycomes,” said Rob Koplowitz, a vicepresident and principal analyst atForrester Research Inc. in Cambridge,

Mass. He added that SharePointadoption problems stem partly from“muscle memory,” or the tendencyof users to keep doing what they’vealways done.Koplowitz said IT and collaboration

programmanagers often hear thissort of thing from business workersabout using SharePoint: “I understandthat you see these broad organiza-tional benefits—that’s great. But rightnow, somebody’s waiting at my door.I have to get this document to some-one before I can go to lunch, andbesides, I can’t remember how to logon to SharePoint. So I’m going to sendan email.”

DEMONSTRATING VALUE IS KEYIn fact, almost everything you cando in SharePoint, you can do in email,Koplowitz acknowledged. You just

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shouldn’t, in his opinion. “It’s riskier,”he said of using email for collabora-tive purposes. “I don’t like content be-ing stored there. It’s a horrible docu-ment management system. It’s ahorrible project management system.”To break the muscle memory of

users, you have to show them Share-Point’s potential value, Koplowitz

said: “Knowledge worker technolo-gies tend to be opt-in. If people don’tsee the value in it, they don’t opt in.Once people get in and use it, thoseadoption issues tend to go away.” Forexample, users begin to appreciatethe value of knowing the current sta-tus of projects, or they see the logicin not having multiple versions of the

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Accidental CRM: Illustratinga SharePoint DangerSHAREPOINT’S EASE of use and development can sometimes lead to trouble.For example, perhaps a sales director needs a way to manage contacts, soIT builds him a contact list in SharePoint. He comes back a week later andrequests an extra column that shows whether a contact is an existingaccount, a lead or an opportunity. IT not only adds the column but teacheshim how to do it himself. They also give him owner rights to the application,in case he has more ideas.He’s back within an hour, requesting another list with the addresses of the

headquarters for all of his contacts, because the addresses on the first listaren’t necessarily for the main offices of organizations.“From the sales director’s point of view, he’s talking to IT and getting a

solution built within an hour. He’s seeing a level of communication and pro-ductivity that he’s never seen before,” said Richard Harbridge, senior Share-Point evangelist at Allin Corp. “The danger in this scenario—and this is a truestory—is that he’s trying to build an entire CRM [system] inside of Share-Point.” That’s really outside the scope of SharePoint and better handled byother software, according to Harbridge.“SharePoint is an amazing rapid prototyping and process automation

tool,” he said. “We can take simple things and automate or improve orenhance them—up to a certain point. And then there should be a line in thesand.” �

same document floating around thecompany’s systems.But companies have to invest

money and resources in leading usersto that point—and it can get expen-sive, Koplowitz said. IT must developclose relationships with other depart-ments to understand their operatingprocesses and document workflows.That requires “doing models, con-ducting training [and] working to gettheir people on board,” he noted.

POTENTIAL PROBLEMSIn fact, IT departments often end upwith all the ownership of a SharePointimplementation. They deploy thesoftware; they maintain it; theyengage, support and train the busi-ness on using it. If not managed prop-erly, Harbridge said, this can lead toanother problem that might affectSharePoint adoption: outsized expec-tations on the part of business users.“If IT doesn’t recognize—preferably

before they implement SharePoint—that they need to charge the business[for SharePoint-related work],” hesaid, “business expectations will con-tinue to increase. IT can’t control ormanage those expectations, and ifthey grow too high, the business losesconfidence in both SharePoint and IT.”Harbridge suggested the IT depart-ment treat other departments as sep-arate entities “buying” its services inthese instances.

The problem, he added, is thatmany organizations implementSharePoint without a clear strategicplan—often, ironically, as a directresult of SharePoint’s perceived lowcost. A rollout of another type of soft-

ware platform that has, say, a $1 mil-lion price tag likely will be plannedand managed carefully, with directionfrom on high. SharePoint implementa-tions, on the other hand, tend tooccur willy-nilly as this line of busi-ness or that one adopts the softwarefor its own particular use.Consider “Joe,” a SharePoint user

and site owner in human resourceswho doesn’t understand permissions.Every time he has a permissions issuewith the software, he calls IT or sub-mits a help-desk ticket. IT realizesthat Joe needs some training, butHarbridge said it’s hard for IT to tellhim, “Joe, you need to create a fundedproject for us so we can train you.”The lesson is that despite its ease

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Many organizationsimplement SharePointwithout a clear strategicplan—often, ironically,as a direct result ofSharePoint’s perceivedlow cost.

of use, SharePoint requires some fore-thought before it’s installed and putinto use.“Someone once told me, ‘Share-

Point is a spotlight you shine on yourbusiness and it points out all theproblems,’” Harbridge said. “If youdon’t have project management andso forth in place before you start toimplement [it], SharePoint’s going tohighlight that.”

ENABLE ADOPTIONTO SPREAD VIRALLYPlantronics Inc. CIO Tom Gill agreesthat some advanced planning isessential for deployments. “Settingup a governance process in advanceis really important,” he said. “Howare you going to classify and managedocuments?What information needsto be tagged?”Plantronics, which manufactures

headsets and other communicationshardware, is updating all its Share-Point installations to SharePoint 2010.Gill, who is intimately involved in thatupgrade, recommended bringing inoutside consultants to help planSharePoint deployments. Plantronicshas done that in the past, with goodresults, he said.And what about adoption risk? “The

trick to adoption,” Gill said, “is findingpockets where people begin to use itand then letting it spread virally.”

Those pockets might not even beamong knowledge workers. Plantron-ics’ use of SharePoint includes local-language intranet sites at manufac-turing facilities in China and Mexico,where computer kiosks provide work-ers with access to necessary manu-

facturing documents, individual work-team sites and company informationthat the employees wouldn’t normallybe able to access.“Users who are focused on a team

quickly learn that for informationabout that team, their [SharePoint]site is the place to go,” Gill said. “I’vebeen in meetings where a new projector initiative was kicked off, and some-one immediately says, ‘I’ll set up asite this afternoon.’ You realize thatthey are using it.” �

Mark Clarkson is the author of seven books andhundreds of articles on all things technical, fromCAD/CAM to Photoshop. He lives and works inWichita, Kan., where he rarely leaves his basementand maintains his website at markclarkson.com.

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“The trick to adoptionis finding pockets wherepeople begin to use itand then letting itspread virally.”—TOM GILLCIO, Plantronics Inc.

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IT’S BEEN SAID many times: Share-Point is a complex platform. WhenMicrosoft released SharePoint 2010,management complexity increasedfurther with the addition of serviceapplications, more flexible deploy-ment models, new features such asOfficeWeb Apps and expanded data-handling capabilities (e.g., increasedlist item limits and remote storage ofbinary large objects, or blobs). As aresult, systems administrators needto be even more vigilant in maintain-ing their SharePoint farms to ensureacceptable performance.One of the biggest performance

drains in any SharePoint environmentis not having adequate hardware. Andbecause of all the changes in thedeployment models and the new fea-tures, hardware requirements forSharePoint 2010 have increased orchanged significantly compared with

earlier versions of the software.At the core of SharePoint is SQL

Server. Since SharePoint is verydependent on SQL Server to perform

most operations, it’s important thatthe systems running SQL Server haveenough processing power and RAM.Also, while Microsoft officially sup-ports virtualizing SharePoint imple-mentations, some SQL Server imple-mentations do not qualify as good

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SharePoint PerformanceManagement Load Gets HeavierSharePoint 2010’s increased capabilities, and complexity, requireadministrators to be more vigilant in maintaining their server farmsto ensure best performance. BY SHAWN SHELL

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Hardware requirementsfor SharePoint 2010have increased orchanged significantlycompared with earlierversions of the software.

candidates for virtualization. Andeven under the best of circumstances,virtualized instances of SQL Serverdon’t perform as well as physical

ones. Before you start virtualizingyour systems, make sure your envi-ronment will still be able to deliverappropriate performance levels.

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Diagnosing a SharePointPerformance IssueHAVING TROUBLE tracking down the cause of a performance problem in yourSharePoint farm? It’s not always easy to figure out where one might haveoriginated. Try following these steps to find the culprit:

1. Ensure that the hardware is not overtaxed or undersized (especially yourSQL Server systems).

2. Open Central Administration and make sure that Health Analyzer hasn’tidentified an issue with a service or farm configuration—insufficient diskspace, for example.

3. Are there services running on SharePoint servers that might impact per-formance—for example, backup routines or other applications?

4. Look in both the SharePoint logs (in the SharePoint root in the LOGS direc-tory) andWindows Event logs for latent problems, such as communica-tions issues or authentication failures between servers or services.

5. Are there errant sandboxed solutions or customer add-ons that may beconsuming abnormally high resources? If so, disable them or reduce theirresource quotas.

6. Investigate the connection between clients and the server. Are all ofyour client workstations experiencing a performance problem, or justspecific clients? Are there common attributes on the machines that areexperiencing problems?

7. Turn on the Developer Dashboard, a new feature that’s off by default;it allows you to see the processing times for different operations. �

There is much to be learned aboutthe pros and cons of virtualizing SQLServer and its impact on total systemperformance.

OUT OF SERVICE?Beyond SQL Server, SharePoint 2010’snew service application architectureneeds to be taken into account. Itenables administrators to createproper application server environ-ments, which are responsible forhosting all of the “shared services”(not to be confused with SharePoint2007’s Shared Services concept) forone or more SharePoint farms. Serv-ice applications supporting functionssuch as search, user-profile imports,bulk document conversion and man-aged metadata can all be installedand run independently of the largerSharePoint farm.However, different service applica-

tions have different requirements. Forexample, Visio Services uses a dele-gatedWindows identity to accessdata, potentially outside of thedomain where SharePoint is installed.As a result, you also need to set upthe Secure Store Service to storeexternal credentials used by the Visioservice. Though that isn’t necessarilyprocessing-intensive, failure to prop-erly configure the credentialing serv-ice can result in failed authenticationattempts, poor performance andunhappy users.

To cite another example, the SearchService is very processor- and RAM-intensive while the crawling andindexing process is running. If youhave lots of content sources or largevolumes of data, it could consume agood portion of the processing capac-ity on a server and cause perform-ance degradation for other servicesrunning on the same hardware.

While SQL Server and the serviceapplications require a lot of attention,performance can also be greatlyaffected by the front-endWebservers that typically are part ofSharePoint farms. With SharePoint2010, the minimum amount of RAMfor both standalone servers and sys-tems in a farm went up to 8 GB. How-ever, administrators will find thatSharePoint 2010 runs best with 16 to24 GB. Along the same lines, it’simportant to ensure that there’s suffi-cient processing capacity, meaning at

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One of the big improve-ments in SharePoint2010 is a new manage-ment feature calledHealth Analyzer thatalerts administratorsto potential problemsin SharePoint farms.

least a dual- or quad-core processor,though dual multicore processorswould be ideal.

RUNNING IN SANDAs part of SharePoint 2010, Microsoftalso introduced the idea of “sand-boxed solutions.” These are packagesof features, definitions and otherfunctionality that can be deployed by“site collection” managers or someindividual end users without theinvolvement of a SharePoint farmadministrator (though the correctpermissions are necessary); each sitecollection can contain its own set ofsandboxed solutions (see Figure 1).By default, SharePoint assigns

“quota points” to each site collection

on a server. As the sandboxed solu-tions operate, they consume quotapoints based on their usage of memo-

ry, processor cycles and specific callsto the SharePoint API. If one runspoorly, it can be shut down. However,one errant sandboxed solution cancause all of the others within a site

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Figure 1

Sandboxed solutions gallery within a site collection

Farm administratorsshould leverage controlswithin SharePoint’sCentral Administrationmanagement suiteto set up appropriatequota templates.

collection to be shut down. Therefore,farm administrators should leveragecontrols within SharePoint’s CentralAdministration management suite toset up appropriate quota templatesand block rogue solutions when nec-essary. And at the site collectionlevel, administrators can monitorsolutions for performance and quotaconsumption levels.While SharePoint 2010 adds man-

agement complexity, it also offerssome help for dealing with that com-plexity. One of the big improvementsMicrosoft made in SharePoint 2010

was to build more intelligence intoCentral Administration. A new man-agement feature called Health Ana-lyzer alerts administrators to poten-tial problems in SharePoint farms.Health Analyzer can detect, for exam-ple, if a specific service hasn’t beenproperly configured or if disk space isrunning out. Alerts are placed in aHealth Reports list (see Figure 2), andSharePoint makes note of them with acolored banner on the Central Admin-istration home page. A separate list ofrules governs what Health Analyzermonitors. Each of the rules can be

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Figure 2

Health Analyzer alerts list in SharePoint Central Administration

modified to suit specific needs; theycan also be disabled if necessary.This article really just touches on

the basics. However, many perform-ance issues that frustrate end users

and SharePoint administrators alikecan be traced to poor hardwaresizing, improper service applicationplanning or out-of-control customapplications. Beyond these items, it’salso worth considering and evaluatingthe individual workloads being run ona SharePoint farm. For example, poorcollaboration performance could becaused simply by insufficient band-width between client systems andservers, or by a misconfigured router.Since performance is dependent on anumber of “moving parts,” be sure toconsider the whole picture. �

Shawn Shell is the founder of Consejo Inc., a consul-tancy based in Chicago that specializes in Web-based applications, employee and partner portals,and enterprise content management.

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Poor performancecould be caused simplyby insufficient band-width. ... Since perform-ance is dependent ona number of “movingparts,” be sure to con-sider the whole picture.

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