Create a Support Program for your SharePoint Environment

A recent article in CIO Magazine provided some great content around the true cost of SharePoint.  Social software and portals expert, Peter Sejersen from J Boye, has expanded that discussion when he added a quick case study of a DIY SharePoint implementation at the municipality of Aalborg in Denmark.  However, one dimension of SharePoint that has not received a lot of attention is support.

In virtually every engagement we have with clients, the cost of supporting SharePoint comes up.   Clients want to better understand what it takes to “care and feed” for an enterprise SharePoint environment.  If you’re struggling with this same challenge, I’ve included some of the various support dimensions touched lightly in the CIO article and that may help you create your support program:

• Monitoring
  Do you want to get the most value out of SharePoint?  Make sure you monitor the servers, the applications and ensure up-time.  During your implementation’s early stages, little attention will be paid if it’s unavailable.  Once the site has been around a while, you better ensure it’s running in top form.  Beyond that, you should really know if errors are being generated in the event logs, issues manifesting themselves in the SharePoint logs or if your content databases are getting to large.  This means that you must get serious about monitoring and look at more than just ping responses.  Microsoft has System Center Operations Manager, which provides a good tool for monitoring your environment.  You can also leverage a combination of event log monitors, perfmon or manual checks.  At Consejo, we developed a monitoring agent with Panopta and integrated it into our SharePoint Support offering.   Whatever approach you choose, make sure you have one.
• Patch Management
  The SharePoint team releases patches with relative frequency.  They are sometimes in the form of a “hot fix” (an update the corrects a “small” feature or function within SharePoint), a roll-up (a collection of these hot fixes) or a service pack (the total collection of hot fixes plus updates not found in any hot fix).  Whatever the form, you need to have a program to apply them regularly, since you don’t necessarily want to update SharePoint the way you update the OS.  While you may have a program for applying fixes to your server and desktop OS, a lot of organizations fail to regularly implement SharePoint-specific fixes – some of which are required for working with certain OS and/or .NET framework patch levels.    The tricky bit about this element of  a support program is the number dependencies created by either custom or commercial add-ons; this means testing ahead of deployment.
• Reusable Components
  Companies like Telerik and Infragistics have made a good business out of creating new controls or components that fill in functional gaps between what Microsoft provides in the .NET framework and what you may have to create for your application.  In the same way, consider creating an organization specific set of controls, components or SharePoint add-ons that you can reuse across your SharePoint applications.   Examples of this might be a “print Wiki” function that can be used with any wiki in SharePoint or SharePoint site archive function that backs up a SharePoint site before deleting it from a Site Collection.    More granular examples may be components that make it easy for developers to connect to your specific SAP implementation.  While your needs may be different, creating a collection of reusable components will help improve development quality and speed within your organization.
• End-user Assistance/Help
  A lot of IT organizations tend to take the “build it and they will come” approach to SharePoint.  This approach suggests that IT organizations simply need to make a facility like SharePoint available; from there business users will “figure out” how to be more productive.  Unfortunately, most end users are unable to conceptualize how SharePoint can help them to be more productive as they tend to struggle with the basics like simply uploading documents or using search.  Instead, enterprises should create real training materials that translate SharePoint capabilities into tangible benefits in the context of the business.  This means demonstrating how users can be more productive in real situations using SharePoint to supplement or replace tools they already uses – like Word (just as an example).   When we deliver our Fast Track to SharePoint solution, we provide a license for the SoftwareFx Virtual Training Center for SharePoint (created by PortaLogiks) and embed them in the SharePoint application we create for our clients.   The materials give end users 30 second to 4 minute flash-based narrated videos on everything from uploading a document to a document library to customizing a page with SharePoint Designer.  Along with these materials, we typically recommend clients create application-specific help material that will further supplement the rather generic videos with specific information on their implementation.  In this way, business users don’t have to “imagine” how they can be more efficient -- they’re shown.   This will encourage use and help with adoption.
• Be Serious about Adoption
  Another frequent topic of conversation is end user adoption.  Adoption describes how you get your business users to utilize the new intranet, extranet or internet site you’ve built on SharePoint.   There are no easy answers to help to spur adoption; each organization will need to create a specific program to fit their end-user community.  However, success of your SharePoint implementation will depend entirely on end user adoption.   If you’re interested in learning more, check out a blog entry by Bianca Wong at Prescient Digital Media on change management strategies to support intranet adoption.

Admittedly, creating your own support program will be specific to your organization.   It also likely you’re doing some related activities already, so adding SharePoint-specific elements to those existing programs should not burdensome.  However, consider the alternative costs if you avoid creating a disaster recovery program or skimp on training your users.

Article: Effective Site Provisioning for SharePoint

One of the criticisms lodged against SharePoint is that you install it one day and the next day you end up with thousands of sites. Each site brings with it potential security risks from improper security settings and massive storage consumption resulting from, among other reasons, content dumping.

Even assuming you don't have either problem, it's always better to have a well managed SharePoint environment than one without appropriate controls on usage. That's where site provisioning comes in.

To be honest, there's no magic formula for managing the site-provisioning process on SharePoint. Different companies will have success with different approaches. But there are some guidelines that enable every organization to both provide flexibility to its end users and ensure an appropriate framework to help manage growth, security and usage.

URL: http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid1_gci1360488,00.html

NOTE: Beyond what’s mentioned in the article, SharePoint Solutions has a good tool for helping to managing the provision process called siteProvisioning Assistant.  The product provides a nice mix of pre-built approval processes and end user ease of use.

Free Webinar Series: Improving SharePoint Search

I will be joining a list of fantastic speakers on a free four-part webinar series on improving SharePoint search.  The series was developed by Earley & Associates. 

From the web site:

“From basic search scopes to custom properties, unstructured content to structured data, we’ll cover a variety of methods you can use to improve your search experience and results.”

Please join us for one or all of the calls during the month of June.  You can register here.

New Support Offering for SharePoint Farms

Today we announced the availability of a new SharePoint support offering called SharePoint Operational Support Solution or SOSS. 

Consejo has been focused on SharePoint development since our founding.  What we’ve found, particularly with small and medium organizations, is that it’s tough for IT groups to support the relatively new SharePoint implementations effectively.  Most often, we see organizations struggle to create a support plan that addresses all of the critical support areas:

• Level 2 and 3 support
  Level 1 support is typically handled by internal IT staff.  As long as the issue is related to basic usage, IT groups seem to be fine.  However, when the error or issue is more complicated, a number of IT groups have trouble resolving the issue without external assistance (be it a blog entry or a call to Microsoft).   With our offering, we supplement your team by providing the expertise at the ready.
• Farm monitoring to ensure uptime
  Is SharePoint running?  Why can’t users access their documents?  Is my SharePoint server nearly out of disk space?  These are common questions and without proper and active monitoring, you won’t known until your end users are already complaining to find out.  We partnered with Panopta to create a proprietary monitoring agent that leverages their existing global monitoring servers without the need to expose your SharePoint farm to the internet.  Our agent gathers multiple performance and status data points from your SharePoint farm and securely transmits that data to Panopta.  Both you and Consejo can see your SharePoint farm status through the Panopta monitoring dashboards, receive weekly/monthly reports and receive alerts when farm performance is outside of pre-established thresholds.
• Service pack and hot fix management
  It’s a pretty common problem: Microsoft issued a service pack or hot fix and you’re unaware it exists.  Unfortunately, the trouble you’re currently having with your SharePoint farm is fixed by installing the new fix.  The SharePoint Operational Support Solution corrects this problem by enabling Consejo to manage this operation for you:  we monitor Microsoft for all new service packs/fixes related to SharePoint, we’ll notify you about the existence of a fix, identify whether it’s important to install and physically install the update if necessary.
• Periodic strategic reviews of the environment
  Are you making the best use of SharePoint?  Are there ways to improve operations?  Are there new services or features that will impact your operations?  We’ll review your environment on a quarterly basis and identify areas for improvement.  Since we have performance data available, we’ll even be able to tell you if your farm is operating within established thresholds and where you may want to make changes.  

All of these services are delivered through our solution, which is sold as a subscription; we ensure you don’t have to “find” help when it’s too late.

If you’re interested in seeing what we have to offer and how we can potentially help your firm, check out the new solution on our web site or simple contact the Consejo Sales Group.

SharePoint Summit 2009 Recap

I have just returned from a fantastic trip to Montreal for the SharePoint Summit, where I taught one tutorial on making SharePoint work in the Enterprise and one regular session on Web 2.0 and SharePoint.    The sessions were very well attended (partially to my surprise) and I really enjoyed seeing a different side to SharePoint implementations – in the U.S., Consejo tends to see more commercial organizations and, while there were definitely a number of folks from commerical organizations, I saw quite a few Canadian governmental agencies represented as well.

Overwhelmingly, the questions about SharePoint remain largely consistent with the U.S.

1. What does SharePoint do well and where does it falter? 
   The answer to this question really depends on your needs.  I saw quite a few organizations who needed records management, for example.  However, as readers of CMS Watch’s SharePoint Report 2009 know, SharePoint does not have any real depth in records management; if that’s what you need, you should probably look elsewhere or find an add-on to improve SharePoint’s RM capabilities.  Beyond that (and imagining), SharePoint is a pretty mediocre player.  However, Mike Fitzmaurice  from Nintex (and his Microsoft days), made an interesting point: SharePoint doesn’t have to be the best at any one thing as long as it’s pretty good at a lot of things; partners, organizations or even Microsoft can add point capabilities to supplement what SharePoint does natively and cover a good deal of what organizations need to accomplish.  Interestingly, Mike made his point with a little “presentation zen,” by showing images that represented examples of the “best” animals in specific categories (e.g. Cheetah’s are the fastest land animals, the Bull Elephant is the strongest , a specific species of Shark is the fastest sea creature) and then comparing those “best of breed” animals to a human with a tool.  Obviously an elephant could lift, literally, a ton.  However, a human with a crane can best the elephant.
   
2. How do I control (govern) SharePoint in my environment? 
   This is something that I had the opportunity to give a keynote on during the conference.  I’ve also written a little about governance in the SharePoint Report 2009 and on SearchWinIt, in my article “Four steps to creating practical SharePoint governance standard.”  However, the short answer (if you don’t want to read the source material) is really about establishing “how” to use SharePoint within your organization.  Microsoft gave administrators some tools to limit growth or unused sites, but the tool won’t solve any real governance problems or create your policies.  Good governance has to be an explicit effort on your part.  You must actively engage in a process of policy creation and education to ensure your success.
   
3. Do I have to buy add-ons to SharePoint and/or why doesn’t Microsoft handle “this” out of the box?
   The answers to these questions are: “probably” and “by design.”  More often than not, organizations will have to buy/build/download add-on components to supplement SharePoint.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Microsoft could not be expected to anticipate every need or “solve” any specific requirement in a way that all organizations may require.  In fact, as Mike pointed out, Microsoft explicitly excludes certain features and/or components by design.  Mike shared that even Microsoft does not have inifinite resoures and when deciding on what features end up in a version of the product and which don’t, the product team focuses on “platform functionality” over “improvements to the UI or scenario specific” features.  The expectation is that partners, consultants or customers will fill in the gaps.  This approach doesn’t work for every customer, so be clear about your own goals and how much you’re willing to accept with regard to “missing” functionality and/or capability.
   
4. What’s in the vNext of SharePoint?
   Only the Microsoft product team knows for sure.  However, what I did hear from people in the know is that Office 14 (the version number of the next release) will be largely evolutionary with some slightly cooler, but not revolutionary components.  The one caution I will provide is that point 3 (above) still holds true; don’t expect Microsoft to cover every base and you should still budget for consulting and add-on products in your implementation.

Beyond all of the points I’ve made here, SharePoint is one of the fastest growing portal products on the market.  There were over 300 attendees at the conference and, universally, everyone was legitimately interested in better understanding SharePoint – primarily because they had all committed to using the platform for some web-based application within the enterprise.  I’m excited to see what’s coming in the next release and encouraged by the excitement I saw at the summit. 

SharePoint Migration PodCast

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a podcast regarding SharePoint migrations.  The podcast is in the style of an interview.  We cover topics like: what to watch out for, best practices for migration and practical planning tips.

You can register to hear the podcast here: http://library.theserverside.com/data/document.do;jsessionid=DE5FF872B3C13936ECBD952257887AC9?res_id=1237487165_496

SharePoint Page Layout Error: Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls

I recently built a SharePoint feature to provision custom master pages and page layouts for a client.  Overall the solution worked pretty well until one day, while making changes to one of the page layouts, I saw the following error: Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls.

Since other blog entries, referenced at the end of this article, can explain the background I'll get right to the cause and the solution.  The cause is improper case for the <asp:Content> control tags in my page layout.  A few contorls used a lower case "c" instead of an uppercase "C" in the word content.  The page layout that had trouble had tags that looked like: <asp:content> instead of <asp:Content>.  The specific offending tag is the one associated with the page title (<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderPageTitle" runat="server">).  The solution was as simple as correcting the case of the tag name and all worked well.

Here's an example of the symptom I saw.  Errant code is inserted in the page layout after it's deployed to the master page library in SharePoint and result is an error when trying to render the page; this errant code will not appear in the source, but you'll see it if you open the layout in SharePoint designer from the master page gallery:

<html xmlns:mso="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"xmlns:msdt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882"><head>
<META name="WebPartPageExpansion" content="full">
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<mso:CustomDocumentProperties>
<mso:PublishingPreviewImage msdt:dt="string"></mso:PublishingPreviewImage>
<mso:ContentType msdt:dt="string">Page Layout</mso:ContentType>
<mso:MasterPageDescription msdt:dt="string"></mso:MasterPageDescription>
<mso:PublishingAssociatedVariations msdt:dt="string"></mso:PublishingAssociatedVariations>
<mso:PublishingHidden msdt:dt="string">0</mso:PublishingHidden>
<mso:PublishingAssociatedContentType msdt:dt="string">;#Agenda item;#0x010100C568DB52D...;#</mso:PublishingAssociatedContentType>
</mso:CustomDocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]-->
<title>Dummy Content Type</title></head>

SOURCE: Tech MOSS Team blog on SharePointBlogs.com

Where I found my solution:

• Rich Finn's Blog



• Tech Moss Team Blog (by Waldek Mastykarz)

Both of these blog articles were older entries, but they saved many more hours of work.  Thanks to both Rich and Waldek!