What Will You Learn in This Chapter?
- Why portal functionality should be divided into manageable services
- How to identify and categorize services for governance
- How to prioritize the services for implementation in the portal
- How to plan the implementation of a service
- How to plan for the monitoring of a service after deployment
- How to plan for the maintenance and upgrades associated with a service
- How to plan for the eventual decommissioning of a service
- How to divide and conquer services
Let's take a moment to review the concept of services introduced in Chapter 2. A service is a discrete set of features that the portal provides to the community of end users. By aggregating the features of the system into services, you divide the governance of the system into manageable pieces.
Note Remember that in a governance context a service is a conceptual collection of features. SharePoint contains many subsystems that are also called services, such as Excel Services or PerformancePoint Services. SharePoint services may or may not map directly to governance services. A governance service may contain one or more SharePoint services, or none, along with other features that are not part of any SharePoint service. The services described in this chapter are governance services unless explicitly noted otherwise.
Recall that a service always has a lifecycle (Figure 4-1). Start by identifying and planning for governance of the service. Then the service is implemented and released to the user community. The governance plan will include monitoring the usage and performance of the service. You then collect feedback from the users to plan future upgrades and changes to the service.
Figure 4-1. The lifecycle of a service
Try not to think of service planning as a one-time effort. The governance team will be involved in monitoring and reevaluating each service continually over time. This allows the system to grow and evolve as needed without becoming clogged with unused or unusable services that no longer provide the value they should.