Presentation from 13 October 2011 at SharePoint User Group for DC.

1. SharePoint User Group DC (SUGDC)
Dan Usher
Edmond Avanesian
13 October 2011

2. Introductions
Typical situation at hand
Bad Practices and Pain Points
Proper Approaches
Conclusions

3. Dan Usher
Lead Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.
SharePoint Infrastructure Engineer and Architect
MCITP, MCP, MCTS, Security+
Edmond Avanesian
Lead Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.
SharePoint Solutions Architect, Project Manager
PMP, ITILv3, …
Who are you?

4. SharePoint in the Wild
SharePoint as a Collaboration and Development
platform…
Considerations for Frameworks and Governance
What to avoid and what definitely doesn’t work
Recovering from disaster…

5. It’s 8 AM on Wednesday morning and SharePoint seems
to be a mess…
Users can’t authenticate to the system…
New software patches were pushed over the weekend
through SUS…
The development team pushed new software updates
out onto the production servers from their dev laptop
virtual machines…
The Infrastructure team changed the switch port
settings…
DNS server IP addresses were changed…
All this happened on one day?!?!

6. Source: http://go.spdan.com/homerscream

7. Did we have a plan in place?
Anything for Development Guidelines?
Anything for Architecture?
Anything for Implementation?
How about change management?
Did you have a vision or business case for the
use of SharePoint in place?
Did you have a visioning group work to define
needed capabilities and solutions?

8. Lack of Governance surrounding several key
areas:
Development Guidelines
Infrastructure Processes
Architecting for the future
Deployment to the user community

9. Vision? Pshaa!!
Business case?? Change Management??
Who needs change management?? We’ve got eMail !!

10. Disposing of Objects improperly
Features, what’s a feature?
Solutions, let’s just deploy it all scattered
Assembly Deployment (GAC vs. bin)
CAS
Source Control Policy
Test Driven Development
Nunit
TypeMock

11. Zero documentation or implementation guides
We don’t need no stinkin’ source control
Missing QA / Test / Staging
Deploying Code directly to production
Realizing the difference between site
definitions, templates and master pages…

12. IT Governance & Service Level Agreement
System Maintenance
Disaster Recovery
Continuity of Operations
RTO / RPO / RLO

13. Scheduled and Emergency/Unscheduled
Maintenance Time
Deploying code without testing in a staging
environment
Disaster Recovery

14. Not knowing your tool sets and how to use
them…
Stsadm
Powershell
SP Admin Toolkit
PSConfig
SQL Analyzer & Maintenance Plans
Patching Approach…
Is there one?

15. Approach
Planning
Governance
Documentation
Execution

16. What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
Define the Vision
Project Milestones
Define Business Rules, Processes, and
Requirements

17. Start off with the governance checklist…
http://go.spdan.com/xeurd
Use the sample project plans…
http://go.spdan.com/hmewo
Firm up your stakeholders and work to define
solutions that meet their needs…
Hire a SharePoint consultant to assist…

18. Vision…
Use cases…
Planning the enterprise
taxonomy and logical
architecture…
Physical architecture?
Source : http://bit.ly/sps‐ref‐wssLA
http://go.spdan.com/kuouh

19. Remaining rigidly flexible for change…
Planning for Data Partitions and Software
Boundaries…
Disaster Recovery ‐ both big and small
Defining governance and use of the system.
Site Quotas
MySites
Site Creation Process
User Permissions
SharePoint Designer
Disaster Recovery Plan

20. Recycle Bin Misconceptions
Disaster Recovery “Oops”
Recovering across Domains

21. Roles and Responsibilities
Business Rules and Policies
Software Development Guidelines
Infrastructure Implementation and
Maintenance Processes
Architecture
System Usability and User Acceptance
Change Management
Training

22. Develop Use Cases to test against
Regression Testing Plan – Test all cases you create
QA
Use the architecture planning documentation
examples available from Microsoft ‐
http://go.spdan.com/yfeqp

23. SharePoint Online development guide ‐
http://go.spdan.com/cmzbm
SharePoint App Dev Guidance ‐
http://go.spdan.com/sp‐dev‐aug09
Implementation Guides
Communications
Training
Onboarding
User Documentation

24. Making sure that stakeholders, users, designers
and developers are going in the same direction
Visioning Team
Business Requirements and Solutions Development
Change Control Board
Project Plan & Milestones

25. Figure out what the system will be doing before
deployment… cast a vision and stick to it!
Ensure process and governance are developed
and used not only for Developers and Designers,
but for the end user.
Keep the user base informed, don’t expect them
to go in the web part gallery on a regular basis ‐
explain what’s new!

26. #joelward

29. Follow us on Twitter
@usher
@eavanesian
Follow Dan’s blog –
http://www.sharepointdan.com