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Understanding the Enterprise Landscape
By Brian Wilson
Described simply, business information ecology entails viewing the informational space of your organization as an ecosystem of a number of important dimensions that affect the complete information environment. It is focused on how people create, share, interpret, and use information. More importantly, it sees technology as only one component of a successful business information environment.
The major dimensions of your business information ecology include the following:
- Business landscape — The business landscape includes the business drivers, goals, and context in which the business operates, as well as the internal, micro, and macro environment in which the organization operates. Other factors include the sector, business formation and organizational structure, and the model and structure that the IT department uses to support and service business technology requirements.
- Technology landscape — The technology landscape involves understanding the SharePoint 2010 ecosystem, your organization's current enterprise architecture and strategy, your existing and planned infrastructure, and your existing portal and collaboration solutions.
- Legal landscape — The legal landscape includes understanding and complying with the regulatory and legal requirements under which your organization operates.
- Information landscape — This includes content storage locations and volume; common content formats in use; content structure and metadata; content dynamism; control and clearly defined content ownership.
- End-user landscape — This looks at patterns across your user base, such as organizational structure, key audiences, number of employees per office location, job roles, age groups, common information-seeking behaviors, and the current and desired user experience.
Gaining a deep understanding of the business dimensions enables you to develop a holistic understanding and snapshot of the organization at a point in time. As a Microsoft Partner or internal business representative, this enables you to define a business case and portal solution that resonates with key stakeholders of the organization.
How long should you spend researching the business information ecology? This largely depends on the size and complexity of the business environment and scope of the project.
Let's take a closer look at these various dimensions of the business information ecology.
REVIEWING THE BUSINESS LANDSCAPE
For new and aspiring SharePoint architects, the focus can sometimes be overly weighted to the technical aspects of SharePoint technology. This often detracts from truly understanding and focusing on the business requirements, as well as the business landscape surrounding the proposed portal solution. A successful SharePoint architect must be cognizant of the internal and external influences operating on a business, and must take these subtle requirements into account when producing a SharePoint portal solution.
This includes understanding key business drivers and the context in which the organization is operating, understanding the impact of various types and sizes of organizations, the typical IT department structures and funding models, and the effect these structures and models have on key decision-making processes.
The SharePoint architect must also be acutely aware of internal and external politics at play, and the key players and influencers that may impact a project. Failing to do this will make it more difficult to propose and design a solution, and even more difficult to get buy-in from key stakeholders across the organization.
Business Drivers, Goals, and Context
On a day-to-day basis, an organization faces all kinds of internal and external operational, tactical, and strategic issues. For the most part, non-unique operational and tactical issues tend to have well-established responses used to handle and resolve them. Naturally, strategic issues focus more on the long term, and deal with key internal and external business drivers (such as improving the corporate culture or responding to the changing market conditions in which the organization operates).
Chapter 11 provides more detail and information on common business drivers facing most organizations.
Understanding the vision and goals of the organization (and, more importantly, understanding the underlying business drivers that have shaped the vision and goals) will help you understand the context in which your SharePoint solution will contribute to achieving these goals. Context, continued value, and relevance are everything to a successful SharePoint portal deployment.
Factors Influencing the Business Environment
The discussion in this section may remind you of an “Economics 101” class, but it is still an important element when reviewing your business landscape. Proposing and designing solutions entails a detailed understanding of the macro, micro, and internal environment of your business.
Macro Environment
The macro environment is made up of the sociocultural, economic, technological, and political/legal forces. These are factors that tend to be out of the direct control of your organization, but influence your organization from the strategy it adopts to respond to the issues it faces in the macro environment. An example that influences most portal strategies and deployments is the regulatory and legal requirements that organizations must implement to ensure that information is held in a compliant fashion.
Micro Environment
Each industry is made up of communities, government, shareholders, creditors, customers, suppliers, competitors, trade associations, and, in some cases, unions. These factors influence your organization and the strategy it adopts to respond to issues faced in the micro environment. Examples of factors that influence your portal strategy and portal deployment may be related to how your organization collaborates and integrates with suppliers, how your organization is able to respond to audit requests, or fierce competition in the market that drives the requirement to collaborate and respond rapidly to changing market conditions.
Internal Environment
The organizational structure, corporate culture, core competencies, and resources at its disposal represent the internal environment of an organization. Examples of factors in the internal environment that influence your portal strategy may be a desire to improve the corporate culture, to improve the retention of knowledge, as well as the retention and growth of intellectual property in your organization.
Industry Sector, Business Formation, and Organizational Structure
A great SharePoint architect has more than just technical knowledge to offer. To recommend the best solution, great SharePoint architects ensure that they understand the industry sector in which the organization operates, the business formation of the organization, the impact of the size of the organization, and the competing and complementary software landscape. Various factors should be considered when proposing and designing portal solutions.
Industry Sector
Each industry sector has its own set of issues and challenges to overcome. Some of these are common across all organizations operating in an industry, and others are unique to a particular organization within an industry. Experienced architects must understand these issues to be able to recommend the most appropriate solution to overcome these challenges.
The organization's industry sector will influence how you position and design a SharePoint solution for your organization or customer. Let's take a look at a few examples of issues from various industry sectors:
- Defense — Defense organizations place a high priority on the classification and protection of all information, from inception to declaration as a record. Acquisitions of other specialist companies are commonplace. Autonomous business groups and units offer different products and services solutions from air, land, sea, and operational services. These are scaled up in times of increased production, and scaled down in times of peace. The retention of knowledge and the capability to rapidly scale is a high priority for defense organizations. Secure supplier collaboration and integration is imperative to the success of any solution. Redundancy, high availability, multi-device support, and offline working is required.
- Financial services — Dominating the financial services sector are compliance, risk mitigation, innovation, increasing regulation, dealing with the effect of mergers and acquisitions, and increased competition.
- Government — Government departments face unique challenges. They often face streamlining, reorganization, and re-engineering activities at irregular intervals in response to initiatives announced by political leaders. Creating difficulties for departments in the public spotlight are cross-government department working, retention and “brain drain” of talent to the private sector, difficulties in agile working, and a constantly changing political landscape. SharePoint provides many solutions across a wide range of areas. Examples include Internet sites such as www.recovery.org. Nimble cross-department collaboration sites incorporating Single Sign-On (SSO) technologies can be created in seconds, and intranet publishing, document management, and enterprise records management solutions can provide a common platform across many government departments to operate from.
- Life sciences — Most organizations in this sector invest a great deal of time and effort in research and development to produce new medicines and innovations (such as the biotechnology sector). Managing, retaining, and accessing clinical trial information and results in studies that can last over many years are absolutely critical. Measuring profitability, as well as managing and mitigating the risk of litigation from drugs that do not live up to expectations, play a large part in ensuring that processes and procedures are in place, followed, and recorded.
- Legal — Key issues on which legal firms focus include matter management, employee career management, intellectual property access, retention, management and reuse, and collaborative, secure working environments. Extranet rapid provisioning of collaboration sites enable many parties to work together.
Another aspect related to industry sectors is that, while SharePoint technology can provide solutions to organizations in each sector, competing specialized “best-of-breed” solutions exist to meet the needs of a specific market.
An example in the legal industry might be advanced solutions to help lawyers collaborate on matters. In many cases, SharePoint 2010 makes sense. In other cases, it may not provide out-of-the-box capabilities required to generate legal documents based on pre-completed paragraphs. But it does support multiple authors working on the same document.
Additionally, SharePoint 2010 supports the capability to “roll your own” custom applications and “out-innovate” your competitors. In these cases, deciding whether to build a custom solution or use a specialized application depends on the strategy of the organization and its preferred support model. As a SharePoint architect, be open-minded about what is best for the business. SharePoint is not always the answer.
Business Formation
From a SharePoint perspective, a key goal for analyzing the size and business structure of the organization is to gather information to be able to provide solid recommendations back to the organization. Another key objective is to get a feeling for the magnitude of scope of work and tasks that lie ahead.
There are no hard-and-fast business formation categories. All organizations form and arrange themselves based on a multitude of factors, which are beyond the scope of this book. What is of interest in this discussion are the complexities and challenges that arise from said business formation, and what you can and cannot advise to your customer.
Table 2-1 describes key considerations related to common business formations when designing SharePoint 2010 solutions.
TABLE 2-1: Key Considerations Based on Your Business Formation
Organizational Structure
Businesses can be structured in many different ways, depending on drivers, operations, and strategy. The organizational structure determines how the business will operate and perform, and is often reflected in the organizational chart of your business. The most common organizational structures can be described as follows:
- Functional structure — This is the most common structure used in today's business world. In this structure, the business aligns employees based on functional areas. Each department contains employees with similar skills. Examples include an Engineering Department, Sales Department, and Finance Department.
- Divisional or product structure — This structure is concerned with placing groups of people with similar abilities where they are needed across your organization. For example, marketing personnel or accountants will be found in different divisions of your organization. These individuals are dedicated to separate products and services.
- Matrix structure — This structure incorporates elements from both functional and divisional structures. From the outside looking in, a functional structure and functional authority exist. What is different is how the resources are utilized in each department. A project authority and project manager uses (or leases) resources from a number of functional departments in the formation of a close-knit team to complete a desired business objective.
- Horizontally linked structure — This structure groups employees along the value chain. For example, the research and development group passes its output to the engineering group.
- Flat structure — This structure has few or no levels of management between employees and managers. This structure is typical of smaller businesses, and is not common in larger organizations.
- Multinational structure — This structure is a complex form of the matrix structure because it coordinates activities across products, services, functions, and geographical areas.
- Team structure — This is one of the newest structures. It is used within other structures to bring together a set of employee competencies to move rapidly and achieve better results.
- Virtual or “communities of interest” structures — This structure enables employees in any part of the organization to collaborate, learn, and improve, based on interacting with fellow employees with similar skills, interests, and attributes, virtually by using online and offline technologies. For example, although working as a Senior Consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services UK, this author virtually collaborated across and contributed to a community containing people outside of his direct team. This community consisted of passionate individuals, teams, and product groups all focused on SharePoint technology. This community collaborated via e-mail distribution lists, community and collaboration sites, internal training sessions, and technology conferences.
Table 2-2 describes key considerations for the most common organizational structures when designing SharePoint 2010 solutions.
TABLE 2-2: SharePoint 2010 Considerations Based on Organizational Structure
Finally, “organizational change” and the addition (new hires) and removal (resignations and redundancies) of full-time and part-time employees will affect your SharePoint 2010 environment. These changes should be considered and catered for in the structural design and information architecture of your SharePoint 2010 environment.
Important IT Models
SharePoint portal solutions are often designed without considering the impact of the organization's IT department model. This lack of understanding often leads to issues in the governance of the SharePoint platform. Understanding the common IT department models, the roles and responsibilities of the teams, and funding models for IT departments will influence key early design decisions, mitigate risks associated with your project, and help your project successfully navigate a path to success.
IT Organization Model
IT organizations are typically structured to support the ongoing activities of the organization. Employee roles and responsibilities, budgets, and skills are carefully planned and grouped into teams based on your organization's overall enterprise IT strategy. Though common roles exist in most IT departments, the teams and organizational charts differ widely from business to business.
Table 2-3 describes the most common IT organization models.
TABLE 2-3: SharePoint 2010 Considerations Based on an IT Organization Model
| IT ORGANIZATION MODEL | CONSIDERATIONS |
| Centralized model | All or most IT services are consolidated and controlled by a central department. Budget planning and forecasting is controlled by a central IT team.
In some cases, this model may result in a platform-oriented approach, centered on IT and risk-mitigation concerns. Other concerns are the lack of well-developed business relationships necessary to engage and drive out real business requirements. |
| Federated model | The IT organization maintains a central IT function responsible for coordination of key activities, but additionally devolves various IT functions to corporate IT within a division.
The more autonomous each division, the more difficult it may be to coordinate activities from a central IT department to the corresponding divisional IT departments. This can lead to rogue SharePoint solutions and duplicated investment. |
| Outsourced models | The business outsources various aspects of its IT operations to a specialist infrastructure or application vendor. All activities related to the deployment of new hardware, or maintenance and support of new applications, require input and involvement from the outsourcer to implement successfully. In some cases, all stages of your SharePoint project take longer to complete. This is because of a risk-averse and process-driven nature. The internal organizational structure of large infrastructure vendors tends to have many independent specialist teams that must be utilized in a SharePoint project. |
Each model has its advantages and disadvantages, all of which will influence your SharePoint portal project.
IT Team Model
A wide variety of skills and roles are required to successfully architect, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and optimize. Table 2-4 describes common teams with which various roles in your SharePoint team will interact. Depending on your IT department model, these teams may be an internal team (centralized model), a central team in central IT (federated model), or an external infrastructure or application vendor (outsource model) embedded in your business.
TABLE 2-4: SharePoint 2010 Considerations Based on a Team Model
| IT TEAM MODEL | CONSIDERATIONS |
| Infrastructure team | The infrastructure team is responsible for managing the life cycle of hardware in your data centers. Their responsibilities differ from business to business. In large businesses, many activities are split into dedicated teams. Your SharePoint project will need support from this team to perform a number of activities. The common SharePoint project “touch points” are hardware (physical or virtual), hardware procurement, data center management, network, monitoring, backup and availability, infrastructure optimization, SharePoint configuration, disaster recovery, and hardware or software load balancing.
To improve agility and ability to respond rapidly to business requirements, businesses may make the infrastructure team responsible for the “boxes and wires,” while anything from the operating system layer and above is the responsibility of a dedicated SharePoint team. This is definitely recommended, because SharePoint requires specialist knowledge and focused attention to manage the day-to-day tasks required to manage the SharePoint platform. |
| Business end user support team | This team is often a central team responsible for all solutions in your business. A first-line support team logs incidents accurately, and responds to issues within its capability to solve. Second-line support handles escalated issues according to severity, and based on the SLAs in place. Third-line support handles escalated issues, and requires specialist SharePoint expertise to resolve. These resources are typically in a dedicated SharePoint support team. |
| Business solutions team | This varies from business to business, and the activities and makeup of this team are largely driven by the activities and priorities of the business and IT department. This team consists of architects, analysts, developers, testers, and other business-solution specialists.
Most SharePoint projects start in the business solutions team. As the business understanding of the impact of SharePoint matures, a dedicated SharePoint team is set up to handle business requirements for custom SharePoint solutions. |
| IT Portfolio Management Organization (PMO) | This team is responsible for project management, investment decisions, project funding management, and benefits realization from technology investments. This team is closely aligned to the design and strategy authority within the IT department, and to key business partners (internal customers) within the business. |
| Architecture and strategy team | This team is the technical design-and-strategy authority within the IT department. They work closely with the business to assess strategic business plans and needs with an IT vision. They define the IT requirements and internal practices required to realize the business vision. Key outputs from this team are policies, operational procedures, guidelines, systems life-cycle planning, capital planning and investment control, architecture, future strategy, and realization of benefits. |
| Business data team | This team is responsible for managing the data of the business. They manage databases, integrate data from internal and external sources, and are often involved in mining of data in business intelligence solutions.
SharePoint 2010 has a plethora of content, service, and configuration databases. SharePoint database management requires a deep knowledge of how SQL Server functions, how it interacts with the underlying disk and network infrastructure, and how it can be optimized. Although it is preferred to have specialist database resources within a dedicated SharePoint support team, the cost and other business responsibilities of these resources often prohibit this. To mitigate the risk of database performance degradation, a close working relationship with the database team is required. “Content” databases can contain many terabytes of data. In larger implementations, remote blob storage may be implemented to offload large files from the database to lower cost storage. Third-party solutions exist to improve the experience. Chapter 16 discusses these requirements in more detail. SharePoint houses business-critical data, and many options exist to ensure business continuity in the event of failure at the database level. Chapter 21 discusses this in more detail. |
| Network and security teams | The network and security teams manage the network infrastructure, connectivity, users, and security measures (such as firewalls, threat and vulnerability identification, and resolution).
This team is involved in the network-impact assessment the SharePoint solution will have on the business. Because SharePoint is a centralized solution, the team may recommend improvements to network links to maintain a solid user experience. |
| SharePoint team | The SharePoint team consists of a number of resources, depending on the business. These include analysts, architects, development and testing teams, “IT Pros” responsible for managing required day-to-day activities, project management, and business impact and engagement specialists.
It is strongly recommended not to split the resources in this team into disparate teams because this may result in decreased business and technical agility, decreased capability to respond, and increased lack of ownership (which results in “passing the buck” between teams). In federated and outsourced business models (especially in large businesses), it is not always possible to have a single team, because divisions of the business may have many thousands of users under the control of local IT teams. In all models, a clearly defined governance model is required to control and manage the responsibilities of each team, and manage the types of changes that can be made by each team. This avoids paralysis and total lockdown of the SharePoint platform by one team, which results in a decreased capability to respond to business needs and to end users. |
IT Funding Model
“Money makes the world go 'round,” and the same statement applies to SharePoint projects. A significant investment is required, not only from a licensing and hardware perspective, but from the perspective of ongoing business solutions, support, and business change. Understanding the funding model in large organizations is important to garnering the financial support needed to make your SharePoint project a success.
Additionally, understanding the funding model enables you to predict how divisions will cater (or not cater) to these costs. This enables you to overcome obstacles related to funding earlier on.
Funding models are largely dependent on the IT organization model and the team model within your IT organization. It must be said that funding models can differ greatly from business to business, and largely depend on the business IT portfolio.
Table 2-5 describes common IT department and project funding models.
TABLE 2-5: SharePoint 2010 Considerations Based on an IT Funding Model
| IT FUNDING MODEL | CONSIDERATIONS |
| No-chargeback (centralized) model | This model relies on a budget as part the central planning-and-approval process for your business to decide on the IT department's budget. This provides a centralized approach to funding for the entire business.
From a SharePoint perspective, depending on the size of the business, this provides a better position to negotiate better licensing deals from Microsoft, and enables you to get better value from your infrastructure and application partners. One of the disadvantages of this model is that users and business divisions may consume IT resources unequally, and may not be aware of the impact of their actions on the IT department. |
| Metric-based chargeback model | This is similar to the no-chargeback model in that a budget is planned and approved using a central planning-and-approval process. What differs is that IT department funding is split between business divisions based on a non-IT metric (such as percentage of revenue). |
| Direct chargeback model | This model allocates costs for each service back to the business unit. This approach makes it more difficult to implement business-wide solutions such as SharePoint, and may lead to silos, duplicated hardware, and potentially increased licensing costs for the business. |
| Federated model | In a federated business model, a central IT team is funded to manage enterprise IT initiatives and core systems (such as e-mail, telephony, and network and hardware infrastructure). Within each of the key business divisions, divisional IT teams are responsible for funding their specific IT requirements.
Using this model, the central IT team will play a significant part in designing and promoting enterprise-wide solutions. In some cases, the central IT team is more used to dealing with infrastructure-related projects, and may feel uneasy about entering the application space using SharePoint technology. On the other side, divisional IT teams may feel threatened and resistant to a centrally managed and governed SharePoint solution. Strong leadership and business engagement is required to involve key stakeholders from both central IT and divisional IT teams to ensure that your SharePoint project is a success. |
IT Development Model
The IT development model governs how your business will approach each project. This differs from project to project, and depends on a multitude of factors, such as the skills available, as well as the capability and maturity of the internal IT team to architect, develop, and implement the proposed solution. Common IT development models include the following:
- In house — In this case, the entire project is developed internally using a combination of permanent and contracted personnel. This requires sufficient knowledge of the SharePoint platform.
- Partnership — The project is developed using a combination of in-house resources, but primed by a deeply knowledgeable Microsoft Partner.
- Outsourced — The project is developed on behalf of the customer by the infrastructure or application partner. Although the customer is involved in defining the requirements in the early stages, and performing user acceptance testing, little involvement is required during the development, testing, and deployment life cycle.
A key point to make is that no matter the development model, if you do not engage and involve both the IT department and representatives within your organization from the start, you will have issues with winning over the business and gaining their acceptance of your portal solution.
REVIEWING THE TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE
The technology landscape involves understanding the SharePoint 2010 ecosystem, your organization's current enterprise architecture and strategy, your infrastructure, and your existing portal and collaboration solutions.
It also provides a number of clues to the associated risks and issues that may affect the outcome of a deployment of a new technology in your organization. Failure to identify risks early on can be fatal, because these become issues that you must overcome to deploy SharePoint successfully.
Understanding the SharePoint 2010 Ecosystem
The SharePoint 2010 ecosystem is a combination of the various Microsoft product and engineering groups, Microsoft Partners adding value to the SharePoint platform, a strong SharePoint community of able like-minded individuals supporting new and existing deployments, and, most importantly, customers and business professionals exploiting these technologies to improve various aspects of their business operations. This section provides more on each of the key groups in the SharePoint 2010 ecosystem.
Microsoft
Microsoft has released four versions of SharePoint. Each release occurs in three- to four-year cycles, with early betas available to provide early insight to the key changes and improvements.
Microsoft has catered to various deployment and licensing models to help businesses of all sizes use these technologies, hosted in the cloud or on-premise in your data center.
Microsoft product, marketing, evangelism, and technical education teams provide detailed information required to train your staff. SharePoint conferences worldwide are supported, online services are available to Partners and customers, and e-learning tools are available on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and Microsoft TechNet websites.
Microsoft provides certification programs to ensure that technical personnel you employ are suitably qualified to manage your SharePoint environments. The highest level of certification is the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program for SharePoint, which involves intense training onsite in Redmond with the best specialists in the field.
Microsoft provides great support for SharePoint technologies through the Microsoft support and incident-management program. Premier Field Engineers (PFEs) are available to assist and resolve a wide variety of issues occurring in your SharePoint environment. Additionally, the Microsoft Services division provides dedicated support engineers (DSEs) to embed in your team.
From an architectural, design, and development perspective, the Microsoft Services division often works together with customers to implement groundbreaking solutions for customers. They also provide technical quality assurance (QA) services to reduce and mitigate risks associated with developing and implementing SharePoint solutions.
Microsoft Partners
Microsoft Partners are independent software vendors (ISVs), and are completely focused on helping customers deploy great solutions using the SharePoint platform.
Microsoft Partners come in many flavors. Examples of the specialist areas provided by Microsoft Partners include infrastructure, development, testing, and niche feature areas. Examples include records management specialists, workflow specialists, and search specialists.
Keep in mind that every project boils down to the individuals doing the work. From a customer perspective, to reduce your risk, ensure that you assess the capabilities of the individuals provided by the Microsoft Partner. Be sure to ask for curriculum vitae (CV) for candidates, and review their SharePoint project history.
Another form of Microsoft Partner is those who provide value-add extensions or third-party add-ons for the Microsoft platform. These partners unleash their creative energy to take SharePoint to the next level. Some of these solutions may be focused on infrastructure management and tooling, while others may drastically improve the workflow and reporting capabilities available to end users in an organization.
SharePoint Community
The SharePoint community is the most amazing community to be a part of. It has grown exponentially over the years, initially through blogging, but more recently through social media technologies such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Additionally, Microsoft supports a number of community-based sites where business and technical professionals can answer simple and complex questions. Examples include http://sharepoint.microsoft.com (business-orientated), http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/ (for developers), and http://social.technet.microsoft.com/ (for IT professionals).
Microsoft recognizes and rewards individual contributions to SharePoint using the Most Valued Professional (MVP) program. A number of MVPs exist, and are very valuable members to have on your team. For example, Andrew Connell provides brilliant advice and guidance on building publishing sites, and Spence Harbar contributes fantastic infrastructure knowledge and lessons learned while using and implementing SharePoint 2010.
It is important to distinguish between the MVP award program and the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM). MVP awards go to individuals who contribute significantly to the SharePoint community. Although almost all SharePoint MVPs have exceptional technical talent, keep in mind that this is a community award for contribution to the community. It is not equivalent to the MCM training, where individuals have been rigorously trained, tested, and certified to be competent by Microsoft at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The SharePoint community has reached a crucial milestone and tipping point, in that it is now self-organizing. A ton of community activities occur across the world. Examples include www.sharepointsaturday.org and www.sharepointbestpractices.com conferences, to name a few.
Customers and Business Professionals
Customers and business professionals are the lifeblood of the SharePoint community. They use SharePoint on a day-to-day basis. A number of sites exist to assist them in the exploitation of SharePoint in the day-to-day business activities. A good example is www.endusersharepoint.com.
Understanding Your Enterprise Architecture and Strategy
An up-to-date, overarching IT architecture and strategy provides evidence of a coherent plan for all IT systems of an organization. Though it is not always possible, engage with your enterprise architecture team to ensure that your SharePoint design and architecture is aligned to their vision and requirements.
Microsoft provides an in-depth article of the top four enterprise-architecture methodologies in use today. As a SharePoint architect, you should familiarize yourself with these methodologies, and understand how your SharePoint architecture and strategy supports your enterprise architecture. See the following MSDN article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466232.aspx for more information.
Deploying business-wide solutions requires support and leadership from your enterprise architecture team. They are the design authority that all business teams must follow in the implementation and adoption of new technology.
Understanding Your Existing Infrastructure
The SharePoint 2010 platform relies on infrastructure and software already deployed in your organization. Researching the following areas will help you better understand the infrastructure available in your business:
- Data center — Your data center is used to host the hardware used by your SharePoint solution. Does the data center have sufficient rack space and enough power for a SharePoint farm?
- Network — Network-related issues severely affect the overall SharePoint end-user experience. Ensure that you evaluate the current network topology, latency between users and your data center, network access to external users through endpoint protection products, concurrent bandwidth usage versus total bandwidth available, and average and peak load for each office location.
- Identity management — What identity-management software does your business use? Are these technologies managed, maintained, and in a healthy state?
- Monitoring — Does your IT team use monitoring technologies (for example, Microsoft System Center Suite) to manage and respond to issues with existing hardware and software?
- Communication — What communications (telephony, e-mail, business instant messaging) technologies are used in the organization? What is the state of these technologies? Are you using a Microsoft technology suite, or a competing vendor's suite?
- Virtualization — A growing trend in businesses is to use virtualization technologies to reduce costs and get more value out of existing hardware. Does the virtualization team have mature processes, from inception to destruction, in the management of virtual machines? Are there established processes for moving virtual machines between hosts?
- Database — Do you have a dedicated team to manage your databases? SharePoint 2010 uses a plethora of databases. SQL management and optimization skills are crucial to the continued performance of a SharePoint 2010 environment.
Failure to understand the stability and maturity of underlying supporting infrastructure may cause issues in deploying SharePoint 2010 to your business. Chapter 3 describes these technologies in more detail.
Understanding Your Existing Portal Solutions
A valuable lesson learned during this author's time at Microsoft Consulting Services was to look at the state and adoption levels of existing portal technologies in a business, as well as the maturity, skills, and state of the IT department to handle new portal solution implementations.
For example, in a previous project, the customer was aiming to deploy a “greenfield” SharePoint environment. Numerous issues became evident, some of which related to internal skills, lack of mature IT processes, and maintenance issues with other internal systems. Other issues related to a lack of a clearly defined overall portal solution strategy to govern individual business unit portal solutions.
As you can imagine, all these issues stacked up during the course of the project to present blocking issues in deploying new technology. Therefore, it is important that you take into account the following considerations:
- Understand your existing portal footprint — What collaboration and portal solutions have been set up? What features do your end users value? Are these technologies centralized, distributed, or geo-distributed? Are existing portal solutions planned and governed? Are there a number of “rogue” deployments? Keep in mind, this point is aimed at understanding your implementation of portal intranet and collaboration platforms.
- Underlying portal technologies — Has your organization adopted a single portal technology vendor, or are a number of different vendor technologies in use in your organization? What is the state of these portal environments? Is the technology out of date? What are the licensing, support, development, and maintenance costs for each of these environments?
- Content migration — Is there a requirement to migrate data from one or more legacy portal environments to your new portal solution? Do you require third-party migration tools to migrate this content to your SharePoint 2010 environment?
- Level of customization — What level of customization has been applied to existing portal solutions? Is there an expectation that custom capabilities will be migrated to your new portal environment?
- Level of politicization — IT departments consist of people who may have strong opinions and bias toward particular vendor technology suites. Understand the existing portal-related technology investments to make wise decisions in the deployment of new portal technologies. A good deployment of a specific SharePoint 2010 portal feature set will drive adoption and win over the skeptics.
Take time to understand existing portal technology solutions in your organization. New portal technologies will not solve inherent business and portal governance problems. Ignoring previous experience and the lessons learned from these environments can be fatal to a SharePoint 2010 deployment, because similar issues will appear in these new environments.
REVIEWING THE LEGAL LANDSCAPE
Organizations face an ever-increasing and complex legal landscape. Often, technical designers are not aware of the regulatory and compliance obligations they must cater to in the deployment of portal solutions in your organization. Failure to take the legal landscape into consideration increases your exposure to legal risks, financial penalties, and end-user productivity. This section covers the common legal laws and areas you may need to consider.
Disability Discrimination Laws
Disability discrimination laws are civil laws that prohibit discrimination based on disability. These laws make it unlawful to discriminate against people with respect to their disabilities in relation to employment.
From a SharePoint 2010 perspective, this translates to complying with industry standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They have published a series of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 or 2.0. All requirements are grouped into three priority levels. You can find more information on WCAG at www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.
Microsoft adopted WCAG 2.0 to make SharePoint 2010 level AA compliant. The article at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/03/09/accessibility-and-sharepoint-2010.aspx provides more information on SharePoint 2010 compliance.
Examples of laws in the United States include the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). In the United Kingdom, the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and Equality Act (2010) exist.
Freedom of Information Laws
Various countries have provided freedom of information laws (also known as sunshine laws) to allow for full or partial disclosure of unreleased information from public bodies. Examples include the Freedom of Information Act in the United States and United Kingdom.
Facilitating requests for information can be costly, because it may involve a number of internal requests to different departments. Fortunately, SharePoint provides a number of out-of-the-box capabilities to manage these types of requests.
A site can be set up to manage each case, parallel workflows can be set up to manage and monitor internal parties’ responses, search capabilities can be used to surface information required to handle each case, and security and controls can be applied to information returned by each party.
Personal Data Privacy Laws
As described by Wikipedia, “Information privacy or data privacy is the relationship between collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them.”
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) refers to information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person. These concerns apply especially where information is stored in an electronic format.
Large organizations usually maintain strict corporate policies that govern what information can be retained, what information can be used, and what information can be shared with third parties.
In some countries, this is strictly governed, and clear laws exist to regulate this area. Examples include the European Union (EU directive 95/46/EC) and the United Kingdom (UK Data Protection Act). Other countries (such as the United States) have a set of laws that indirectly refer and cater to information privacy. Some of these laws only seem to apply within a state. For example, California passed a law called the Online Privacy Protection Act. Although many bills have been proposed, and although the United States Constitution's Fourth Amendment indirectly protects individual's right to privacy, no single law exists to control and regulate the use of PII.
From a SharePoint perspective, if you are architecting any solution that will maintain PII information, you should seek to ensure that your solution complies with the policies set out by the legal department of the organization.
Electronic Records Management Standards and Compliance
Records management refers to the management of records of your organization from the time they are created to the time they are disposed of or deleted in compliance with regulatory and legal requirements of the countries in which your organization operates. Many laws and regulations have been enacted in different countries to govern and regulate the compliance of business activities.
In the United States, Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2-STD has become the de facto standard for electronic record management solutions. From a Microsoft perspective, the product team successfully certified SharePoint 2007. As of this writing, one or two Partner solutions that use SharePoint 2010 have passed certification.
In the United Kingdom and Europe, MoReq2 describes model requirements for the management of electronic records. Another internationally recognized standard is ISO 15489.
SharePoint 2010 provides many records management features that can be used to comply with the laws applicable to your country. Chapter 32 provides in-depth detail on records management functionality provided in SharePoint 2010.
Corporate Rules and Regulations
The Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Act (2002) provides civil and criminal penalties to ensure publicly owned companies comply with the regulation of financial practices, such as auditing and finance disclosure, and corporate governance. The act is administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
From a SharePoint perspective, complying with SOX entails ensuring that records are not destroyed, altered, or falsified in any way. It entails ensuring financial records are retained for a period of time before being disposed of, and the types of records that need to be stored.
SEC 17a-3 and 17a4 are rules and regulations that govern exchange member, broker, and dealer organizations. They define the types of records that must be created and retained, and the length of time for which they must be retained.
Many other rules and regulations may affect your SharePoint environment. Two final examples include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (which guarantees consumers access to their healthcare and protects the privacy of their information) and Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regulation (which governs the use of electronic data and electronic signatures in the pharmaceutical industry). All data modifications must be traceable.
Basel II mandates specific ways of accessing and mitigating operational risks for banks. The regulation establishes rigorous requirements for a bank to hold capital reserves appropriate to the risk they are exposed to.
Finance Standards
Other important financial principles and regulations include International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and the regulation of the financial systems by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the United Kingdom.
From a SharePoint perspective, it is the ideal place to surface compliance and risk information as dashboards, support records management activities, and reduce the cost of implementing processes to ensure the compliance of your organization.
Export Control Regulations
Export control regulations are usually found in organizations that work in specialist areas, or in organizations that manufacture and produce military solutions for the government. Export control regulations serve to ensure national security, foreign policy, and economic and technological competitiveness goals are upheld.
Examples in United States are the International Traffic in Military Arms (ITAR) legislation and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). In the United Kingdom, the Export Control Act and the Official Secrets Act control the dissemination of sensitive information (such as the design of military equipment).
From a SharePoint perspective, developing solutions for defense and government organizations requires much more up-front design work to cater to strong governance, classification, and control of content, compared to other portal solutions.
The cost of legal and regulatory compliance differs widely, depending on the level of compliance required. Keep in mind that compliance requirements affect the productivity of your information workers, and increase the amount of training required. As a SharePoint architect, always attempt to provide simple, productive end-user experiences. This will win over end users and drive support for solutions your team delivers to the organization.
REVIEWING THE INFORMATION LANDSCAPE
We live in an age where organizations use information and corporate knowledge to respond nimbly and adapt quickly to market forces. In today's world, the time available to respond and react has diminished. Survival and continued relevance in today's marketplace requires having access to the right people, knowledge, and information to make informed choices and decisions.
Table 2-6 details key areas to research to understand the information landscape of your organization.
TABLE 2-6: Understanding the Information Landscape of Your Organization
| INFORMATION LANDSCAPE | RESEARCH CONSIDERATIONS |
| Information locations | Review the common file storage locations. Are they distributed in regional office file shares, in central file shares, or portal environments? Build up a picture of the locations of your business-critical information.
Assess the percentage of content that exists only on employees’ workstations and laptops. This percentage is a hidden metric that you can use as a driver for your portal solution. The lower the percentage, the more corporate information is retained in your business. Retained corporate knowledge is a key driver in many organizations. |
| File formats | What are the common file formats in use in your business? As part of your research, patterns will emerge on the common types of files in use. These will guide you in providing solutions that are best suited to managing these types of information.
Not all file formats are suitable to your portal environment. Focus on the file formats you plan to support in your portal environment. Examples of files that may not be suitable are very large CAD drawings. |
| Corpus of data statistics | What is the average file size for each file type, and how many files are stored in each of the identified locations? This type of information will enable you to identify which files you might migrate. Large files (such as access databases) may skew your findings for a storage location. |
| Structure | How structured is your data? Examples of structured information may be content stored in databases, whereas unstructured information may be a 100-page research Word document, or a very large PowerPoint presentation that mostly contains images. All contain valuable information, but structured data is easier to incorporate in your SharePoint solution.
Structure includes the folder structure in place to organize content. This folder structure provides a glimpse of how the business organizes and accesses content. The folder structure hints at common business entities. For example, the folder hierarchy Projects |
| Enterprise taxonomies and structured metadata | Metadata is information that further describes and classifies content. A good example is the author property of a file. Is content in your business consistently tagged with meta-information? Is a controlled “top-down” taxonomy or uncontrolled “ground-up” folksonomy used to tag this content? Metadata is useful in that it helps you to understand how information could be organized, assists business professionals with information retrieval, and identifies similar information in your business's information landscape.
SharePoint 2010 provides new capabilities to manage and support taxonomies and folksonomies. The most difficult part of introducing this capability is not the technical aspect, but the business aspect. Enterprise-wide classification and labeling hierarchies are difficult to model for a number of reasons. Organizational politics, detailed research, and the constant changing business landscape all are factors that will influence the success of your enterprise taxonomy. Specialist vendors can help you define a good starting point model. However, factor in dedicated resources to continually improve and maintain your enterprise taxonomies. |
| Dynamism | Dynamism deals with how often the same information or file is updated. Dynamism is important because it shows where information worker activity is occurring in your organization. |
| “File age” and “last access” | “File age” defines how old content is, and “last access” determines when it was last used. Documents written five years ago may not be as relevant as documents written in the past three months. Knowing the average age and the last time content was accessed helps you evaluate whether content may be stale and is no longer needed. |
| Control | What controls are in place for various types of identified content? Are strict retention policies in use? If not, should there be? Are you compliant with the regulatory and legal laws of the market in which your organization operates? Do you require government, security, company markings, or barcodes for specific content? |
| Content ownership | People move to other departments, leave the organization altogether, or a number of business units or departments are re-organized. What happens to the management and ownership of the information and corporate knowledge?
This is a really painful issue for any SharePoint team to deal with. Stale content cannot be deleted without owner approval. More importantly, content with no owner is very difficult to migrate to the next version of SharePoint, because no one is available to assess the relevance of the content. A strong recommendation is to tag all content with a business owner at the time of upload. This provides your team with a business, department, or project that can make decisions about the content three to five years down the line. Tagging content using an individual will not work because the individual may have left the business. A good SharePoint architect will design a solution that caters for “now” and three to five years’ worth of business change. A not-so-good SharePoint architect will only cater for today's business structure. The impact is the cost to the organization to fix these issues, the time to address these issues, and the failed opportunity to use this budget in the pursuit of meaningful improvements to your portal environment. |
Client Name Information and retained corporate knowledge is vital to the long-term success of your organization. Be sure you understand your organization's information landscape.
REVIEWING THE END-USER LANDSCAPE
People are the lifeblood of any organization. They perform the functions and tasks that an organization relies on and requires in the pursuit of a collective outcome. Understanding people and end-users’ attributes, their needs, tasks, and desired user experience is important to the success of your portal solution.
Factors Influencing the End-User Environment
Table 2-7 details key areas that are important to understand about the end-user landscape of your business.
TABLE 2-7: Understanding the End-User Landscape of Your Organization
Tools of the Information Worker
Information workers and end users rely on the tools (namely the hardware, software, and network infrastructure) of your organization. In today's fast-paced business environment outdated hardware, software, and slow networks affect the productivity of your information workers.
The hidden cost of lost productivity is considerable. Common examples include corrupted office files, reboots of computers, long file download times, and unsuccessfully searching for specific files or information. These examples result in small increments of lost time per user, and cumulatively the cost to your business is considerable.
Table 2-8 details the key tools of the information worker.
TABLE 2-8: Understanding the Key Information Worker Tools
| INFORMATION WORKER TOOL | CONSIDERATIONS |
| Hardware | A user relies on existing hardware and software to interact with the rest of the organization. Outdated hardware directly contributes to lost productivity.
Most organizations provide remote working capabilities to end users. In a permanently connected world, this capability is essential to enable users to complete tasks at home and in other locations. A number of hardware and software solutions exist to enable this capability in your organization. Smartphones, slates, and tablet-type devices have become essential tools. Their form factor, great end-user experience, and fantastic “App” ecosystem will result in a slew of new applications that support working with information held in SharePoint 2010. |
| Browser | The browser is your end user's “window to the world.” SharePoint 2010 supports a number of browsers. You can find a full list at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx.
Flash and Silverlight technologies enable rich end-user experiences through the browser. With its new client-side object model, SharePoint 2010 provides significant new support for enabling these types of end-user experiences. |
| Office technologies | Office technologies (such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) are key tools in any information worker environment. SharePoint 2010 has integrated the Ribbon into all pages of the portal environment. To provide a consistent user experience, ensure that Office 2010 or, at a minimum, Office 2007 is deployed.
Each version of Microsoft Office provides varying degrees of integration and support for SharePoint portal capabilities. The later the Office version, the more capability and integration provided to your users. More information is provided by Microsoft at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=209803. Be careful when experimenting with non–Microsoft Office technologies. Remember, your aim is to provide a seamless office and portal environment to end users of your organization. While your aim may be noble (for example, driving costs down or supporting Open Source software), your end users may suffer, and the hidden cost in supporting a number of patched-together solutions will rise. |
| E-mail, calendaring, contacts, task management | Microsoft Outlook is the best e-mail client on the market. It provides a rich client interface, with many capabilities and access points. Key capabilities include “rich” e-mail authoring, advanced calendaring, offline e-mail stores, advanced instant search capabilities, support for records management and compliance tools, information rights management, global and local contacts management, and task management. Key access points include rich client application, browser-based access to support remote working scenarios, and rich device support for a plethora of smartphones on the market.
SharePoint 2010 provides support for each of these key workloads. Microsoft Outlook can host and take content offline from a SharePoint 2010 environment. Examples include central calendar synchronization, offline document libraries, tasks lists, contact lists, and the capability to create meeting and document workspace sites from within Outlook. For more information on the deep integration, see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/synchronize-sharepoint-2010-content-with-outlook-2010-HA101881295.aspx. For environments that do not use Microsoft Outlook, and instead opt for other clients (such as Lotus Notes), or alternatively opt for non-Microsoft cloud-based e-mail providers, it becomes your responsibility to understand the key use cases, and maintain a productive experience for your information workers. Plan out what integration your information workers require to work seamlessly between your chosen messaging solution and your chosen portal environment. Failure to do this will result in a poor end-user experience. |
| Instant communication | Two key tools that most organizations provide are the capability to host live meetings across a number of locations, and the capability to collaborate using business instant messaging (IM) technologies. Both technologies provide instant communication and collaboration within your business.
Microsoft Lync (formerly known as Office Communication Services) can be categorized as a unified communication experience. It caters to IM and presence, audio and video conferencing, and mobile experiences. For more information, see http://lync.microsoft.com/en-gb/Product/Workloads/Pages/workloads.aspx. SharePoint 2010 supports these technologies by displaying live presence information within the portal experience. For example, you search for a document. In the search results, if presence is enabled, hovering over the author's name will cause a contact card to pop up. A number of communication options are provided to enable you to find out more information about the author, to initiate an e-mail, an IM, as well as an audio or video conversation with the author. If enabled, this experience is pervasive and consistent across all pages in SharePoint. |
| Note taking | Microsoft OneNote is the often forgotten tool and unsung hero of the Office 2010 suite. Essentially, it manages your rough notes (or a team's rough notes) in a structured way. SharePoint 2010 supports collaborative or team-based notebooks. Once you have uploaded the OneNote file, if you have SharePoint 2010 Office Web Application installed, you can work and annotate the same OneNote file collaboratively with other peers in your organization. |
| Working offline | Microsoft SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Microsoft Groove) provides new capabilities to the Microsoft Office 2010 suite. It enables information workers to take SharePoint content offline. It enables real-time synchronization of content on your desktop with SharePoint 2010 document libraries and lists. A key feature that it supports is the capability to edit content offline and synchronize your changes with other users’ changes when you are online.
Microsoft SharePoint Workspace supports rich and secure collaboration environments with suppliers external to your organization. For example, this book uses a peer-to-peer workspace to enable team-based working and to manage individual author contributions. Microsoft SharePoint Workspace is the best choice because it enables peer-to-peer replication of content between authors. Additionally, it is cost-effective because it does not require an expensive server to host the content and authenticate each user. |
| Business forms | Microsoft InfoPath provides a significant capability to create, manage, and read business or electronic forms. SharePoint 2010 provides deep integration of electronic forms capability. Chapter 31 discusses this in more detail.
Microsoft supports the saving of InfoPath forms (and all office files) as Adobe PDF read-only files. This technology is a free application provided by Adobe, and is commonly used in the organization to share content in a read-only format. |
| Information rights management | Information rights management is a persistent file-level technology that uses permissions and authorization to help prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. It provides the capability to secure company communication and information. SharePoint 2010 and the Microsoft Office suite deeply integrate information rights capability. For example, e-mail communications can be tagged as “Do Not Forward,” thus disabling a recipient's capability to forward the e-mail, and files can be protected to only allow specific individuals access. |
| Mind mapping | Mindjet MindManager provides a unique capability to structure, organize, and visualize content based on how your brain perceives content. This tool helps overcome “information overload” by enabling information workers to build and retain a visual map or lattice of key ideas and thoughts. MindManager provides a number of collaborative capabilities that integrate into SharePoint and the Microsoft Office suite. For those looking for a more cost-effective mind-mapping tool, XMind currently provides a free and pro version. |
All these hardware and software services intimate how forward-thinking an organization is, how well you have adapted to new way of working, and how well you have catered to information workers in your business. Attracting and retaining the best talent involves providing them with the best hardware and software. Today's generation will not accept anything less.
GATHERING ISSUES AND METRICS
Ever hear the phrase, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”? This is often the case in the deployment of SharePoint technology. In some cases, businesses deploy SharePoint before truly understanding what problems they are trying to solve. In other cases, the project is overly technology- and feature-centric, resulting in a slew of features the business does not expect or require. Poor adoption and unmet expectations result.
Overcoming issues in your planned deployment requires understanding and quantifying (where possible) issues with existing collaboration and portal technologies. Survey your users, websites, and key stakeholders. Listen to their responses.
Following are some of the questions to ask:
- What technologies work in your organization? What areas need improvement, and why?
- If current portal technologies have been deployed, what areas of your existing portal site do you use most often, and what areas have become stale or not useful to your job role, and why?
- What information can you find easily? What types of information do you struggle to retrieve, and why? How long does it take, on average, to retrieve information when you need it?
- Is it easy to find people in your business, or in another area of the business you work for? Is it easy to find people with similar interests and/or job roles to you?
- What places do you commonly save your files? How do you share files with other users? Where do you back up files stored on your computer?
Metrics are important to gather on the issues you have ascertained. They provide concrete facts that you can use to develop your business case and portal strategy. For example, if your survey determines that users spend an average of 30 minutes a day searching and finding content, this enables you to quantify what this activity costs your business, and how a particular solution might reduce this cost.
Summary
The enterprise landscape and business information ecology consist of a number of major dimensions that all play a part in the outcome of your SharePoint 2010 design and deployment.
A deep understanding of these business dimensions enables you to design long-lived, well-received solutions. It enables you to make the correct decisions that result in solutions that resonate with key stakeholders of your organization.
Chapter 3 takes a look under the hood at a number of supporting technologies a SharePoint architect must understand.