This document contains notes from a presentation on building and managing enterprise SharePoint platforms. It includes considerations around governance, roles and responsibilities, capacity planning, hardware, monitoring, backups, and change management. The presentation emphasizes having the right people, processes, and documentation in place to support a large SharePoint deployment. It also stresses understanding technical requirements and having a plan to scale the platform over time.

1. Off the beaten path…….
Building SharePoint
Enterprise Platforms
#spsoslo
Andy Talbot
May 31st, 2014

2. Platinum
SharePint
Raffle
Platinum
Gold

3. Hvem?
Andy Talbot
SharePointArchitect|#SUGUKIOMLeader|IsleofMan
&UKNomadic|Coauthoring‘SharePointSurvivorsGuide’
/AndyTalbot @SharePointAndy SharePointAndy.com

4. Many years ago, you came to the
Isle of Man!

5. ...including the most FEARED

6. You knew how to par ty...

7. ....and integrated with the
community!

8. Thanks to you, we now do weird stuff like
this...

9. .....and this?!

10. Amazing days out(!)

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

12. 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/sharepoint-
still-not-dead-and-even-on-prem-is-not-dead/

13. Understand your Vision

14. 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

15. The G-Spot – 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

16. 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/sha
repoint-governance-an-inside-out-
perspective-part-2/

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

18. Quality Assurance
• Can you afford not too?
• Maintains standards
• What’s more expensive; testing or
loss of service / poor user
experience?
• It should be baked into ALL
deployments and configuration
change/s

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

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

21. 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?

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

23. 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

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

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

26. 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?

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

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

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

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

31. 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)

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

33. 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.

34. 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

35. 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?

36. 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 if the need arose?

37. 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….”

38. 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
INFORM,
Awareness
INVOLVE,
Engagement
INTEGRATE,
Commitment

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

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

41. 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
Determine the
company’s
future needs
Identify
opportunities
to consolidate
Determine if
existing
infrastructure
can support
anticipated
growth
Implement
Capacity
Planning

42. 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)

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

44. 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/en-
us/library/cc263199.aspx

45. 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)

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

47. 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.)

48. 3rd Party Tools
• Upgrade ready?
• Infrastructure requirements
understood?
• Training
• Support model
• Understand your procurement
framework
• Licencing, perpetual or annual?
Have we planned for growth
e.g. enough seats

49. 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.

50. 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)

51. 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

52. 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

53. 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
Processes &
Procedures
Operational
BC / DR
Plan

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

55. Reasons for Failure

56. 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?

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

58. Takk, hade!
Andy Talbot
SharePointArchitect|#SUGUKIOMLeader|IsleofMan
&UKNomadic|Coauthoring‘SharePointSurvivorsGuide’
/AndyTalbot @SharePointAndy SharePointAndy.com