LESSONS LEARNED IN THE PAST 11 YEARS OF IMPLEMENTING SHAREPOINT (AND COUNTING) Ishai Sagi Extelligent Design (

WHO AM I? Director and Solution Architect at Extelligent Design ( SharePoint MVP since 2007 Author of “SharePoint How To” 2007 and 2010 books Co-Manage the Canberra User Group Speaker: Australia, Singapore, Germany, Canada Blog: What’s with the hair?

AGENDA History of SharePoint ( ) What we learned in 2001 What we learned in 2003 What we learned in 2007 What we learned in 2010 Summary of Lessons Learnt My View : Using SharePoint as an Organic, Evolution-driven Information Management System - Empower Your Users

HISTORY OF SHAREPOINT

SHAREPOINT 2001 – IT BEGINS SharePoint Team Services part of office, not part of portal Hierarchical Database (like the file system) 100% dashboard, 0% collaboration Introduction of Web Parts (renamed from “nuggets” in outlook dashboard)

SHAREPOINT 2001 – SOME ISSUES No one knows how it should be used – theories abound Disconnected from other Microsoft products (no visual studio development, no connection to CMS or STS) except for office (WebDav) Competed with Microsoft Content Management Server Not running.NET

SHAREPOINT 2001 STORY – IMPLEMENTING 1ST TIME Implementing beta Lesson learnt…

SHAREPOINT 2001 STORY – RECORD MANAGEMENT Developed late 2001 Bought by one client Served to show how fragile the foundation was Highlighted issues with what methodology should be used – use the portal’s interface, or develop your own and use the portal as database?

SHAREPOINT 2001 LESSONS LEARNT People think of time saved to themselves, not to the company People are less likely to open their portal than they are to open their s. Tasks management must be integrated, with workflows. Document management system must be robust, backup and restore must be granular. Every client wants something different from the same system Some projects should not use SharePoint…

SHAREPOINT 2003 – BECOMING WORKABLE SharePoint Team Services (renamed WSS) as the basis Visual Studio development Web Parts are.NET, but not part of the.NET framework. No workflows yet (except 3rd party) WSS brought a focus shift to team collaboration Introduction of user profiles

SHAREPOINT 2003 – NOT THERE YET Limited in big team collaboration (taxonomies not scaling) Permissions – lost the ability to deny access. No document level permission. Difference in how permissions worked in SPS and WSS. SPS have “Areas” – which were not 100% WSS. Still competing with CMS

SHAREPOINT 2003 PROJECT STORY Building a migration application to migrate 2001 to 2003

SHAREPOINT 2003 – LESSONS LEARNT Upgrade and migrate are completely different things Analysis of how you should use the new system is more important than analysis of how your current system works Installing latest patches onto SharePoint,.NET and Windows can be critical.

SHAREPOINT 2007 – SYNERGY! One product to rule them all- everything is standardized on WSS, replaces CMS. Better taxonomy management (content types and site columns) Introduction of Business data catalogue Introduction of Page Layouts and Master Pages Workflow development as part of the Windows Workflow Foundation

SHAREPOINT 2007 EVEN BETTER Support the.NET Web Parts Federated Search (as part of a service pack) Item level security comes back SharePoint Designer replaces FrontPage and adds power user workflow designer, editing content in a client application.

SHAREPOINT 2007 PROJECT STORY Building intranets for two government agencies Analysing existing applications to be migrated reveals interesting results Training end users, developers and Infrastructure experts at the beginning of project Corporate Directory is the #1 requirement of any intranet Expectations of performance from the platform sometimes exceed infrastructure capabilities Used 3rd party applications to migrate, and to enhance

SHAREPOINT 2007 LESSONS LEARNT Implement disaster recovery strategy before going live You cannot have enough training Geo location aware platform is missing Active Directory needs cleaning, and maintenance for a proper Corporate Directory

SHAREPOINT 2010 – “ENTERPRISE-Y” Adds enterprise level taxonomy Adds better integration with external databases (as long as they are simple) Adds better search (built in, and the optional FaST) Adds standard development tools (Visual Studio 2010)

SHAREPOINT 2010 PROJECT STORY Implementing SharePoint 2010 as an extranet for a school Training too late = requirements change too late Agreement on project flexibility at beginning assures success at the end Using 3rd party applications to augment the out of the box functionality List project tasks into three categories: Must Should Would

SHAREPOINT 2010 LESSONS LEARNT SharePoint projects plays nice with Agile Start small, grow only as fast as you can Making life easier on end users is more important than anything

SUMMARY OF LESSONS LEARNT Implement backup and disaster recovery right after installing The importance of pre-training When implementing SharePoint for the first time Migrate, don’t Upgrade Start with small objectives, plan for scalability and progress Building Solutions In SharePoint or Purchasing 3rd party Solutions Use integration as best you can (Colligo & OnePlac ) End users should always come first – train them and provide them with easy tools and interfaces to ensure project success

USING SHAREPOINT AS AN “EVOLUTIONARY COLLABORATION SYSTEM” The legacy of Access Databases SharePoint Lists to the rescue Survival of the fittest application See spx?p= spx?p=

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