SUCCESSFUL SHAREPOINT IMPLEMENTATIONS. Maximize Application Availability and Protect Your Mission Critical Assets

Transcription

1 SUCCESSFUL SHAREPOINT IMPLEMENTATIONS Maximize Application Availability and Protect Your Mission Critical Assets

2 Brought to You By 5090 Richmond Avenue Suite #336 3 Second Street, Suite # 202 Houston, TX Jersey City, NJ Phone: (888) Phone: (201) Web: Web: E mail: [email protected] E mail: [email protected]

3 Biography: Errin O Connor Founder of EPC Group.net One of the nation s leading SharePoint implementation and custom.net development firms Author of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside & Out by Microsoft Press Has completed 83 SharePoint Implementations in the Past 7.5 years Has worked on some of the largest SharePoint deployments to date (85,000+ Users)

4 About AvePoint Since 2001, AvePoint has been a global leader in SharePoint data protection and management. Propelled by one of the world s largest SharePoint exclusive development teams outside of Microsoft, AvePoint s award winning DocAve software delivers comprehensive and flexible infrastructure support for backup and recovery, replication, migration, administration, archiving and compliance solutions for all Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. AvePoint s globally recognized pioneering technology pilots the products of OEM partners such as NetApp and IBM. Headquartered in Jersey City, NJ, AvePoint serves over two thousand enterprise customers, including many Fortune 500 companies, across 6 continents, via offices in Jersey City, San Jose, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Dallas, USA; London, UK; Melbourne, Australia; and Changchun, Dalian, China. AvePoint is a Managed Gold Certified Microsoft Partner and GSA Certified Provider.

5 About EPC Group SharePoint 2007 Offerings Include: Enterprise Content Management Systems based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) Intranet and Internet facing implementations (WSS or MOSS) Custom Application, Web Part, Security Models and Workflow Development Migration initiatives for SharePoint 2003 to 2007 KPI, Dashboard, and Reporting Solutions Tailored SharePoint Training (either onsite or remote) SharePoint Roadmap development: 6, 12, 18, and 24 months Enterprise Metadata Design \ Retention Schedule Development SharePoint Hosting: Packages for both WSS or MOSS Exchange 2007 Hosting

6 Designing a Reliable, Highly Scalable and Indestructible SharePoint Platform Microsoft SharePoint will soon become the center of your business critical application platform. How can you ensure that your SharePoint environment is operating according to your organization s SLA? Learn how to maximize application availability with key considerations specific to your SharePoint environment based on departmental, functional or organizational requirements. Session Overview

7 Session # 1 Topics 9:00am 9:45am Designing a Reliable, Highly Scalable and Indestructible SharePoint Platform Capacity and performance planning for building a highly scalable, reliable and well managed SharePoint environment Properly defining what you are trying to accomplish with SharePoint Critical considerations for ensuring timely access to your SharePoint information and developing your organization s SharePoint service level agreements (SLA)

8 Session # 1 Topics (cont ) SharePoint Governance: A critical success factor Planning for the unexpected: protect your investment in SharePoint with a viable backup and system recovery strategy Maximizing application availability for your SharePoint environment Best practices based on real world SharePoint 2007 deployments

9 Audiences for Errin s Sessions 9:00am 9:45am Designing a Reliable, Highly Scalable and Indestructible SharePoint Platform This session will be focused towards SharePoint administrators, system administrators, architects, and database administrators. Topics are geared toward the people who will be responsible for the actual design, planning, and administering of the environment. Some topics will be helpful to business stakeholders and end users; especially those topics around what others currently doing with SharePoint. 10:45am 11:30 am Critical Success Factors in SharePoint Adoption This session is for anyone who is or may soon be involved in a SharePoint implementation. The topics in this session focus on sharing EPC Group s best practices on success factors as well as real world examples of how organization's are utilizing SharePoint.

10 Real World Examples: Ensuring SharePoint s Success A large number of organizations throughout the country are deploying SharePoint, but how many of those implementations are successful? What makes for a successful SharePoint initiative? Proper upfront planning (The System & Information Architecture) Looking at the big picture and developing a SharePoint Roadmap for your organization (A Roadmap for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months) Executive Sponsorship \ Executive Buy in Enterprise SharePoint Governance: planning and enforcement Development of a rock solid environment with a corresponding disaster recovery plan so you do not ever loose your users confidence or their content Developing Metadata \Content Type standards in the initial stages of your initiatives Finding and achieving quick wins to wow your users

11 Designing a Best Practices SharePoint Environment You must first determine what you are trying to accomplish with your organizations SharePoint environment. Is your organization s SharePoint deployment a: Intranet Solution Enterprise Content Management System Knowledge Management Solution Collaboration Solution Internet Facing or Extranet Facing Solution Business Process Automation Platform (i.e. Workflow) Application Development Platform A Hybrid of all of the above Organization s are answering this question more and more by saying that it is a Hybrid of all of the above

12 Understanding What the Organization Is Trying to Accomplish (Example) If you are deploying SharePoint as an Extranet Solution, then your architecture should consider: Deploying a security model that would include the various permission levels of customers, partners, and various other users Ensuring the design of the externally accessible SharePoint environment does not expose or place at risk your organization s internal data, network, and infrastructure Investing in an antivirus solution at the SharePoint level Is SharePoint going to be your organization s Business Process Automation Platform (i.e. Forms Housed in SharePoint with custom Workflows)? If so, you will need answer questions such as: Are you going to utilize InfoPath Forms Services? Will any custom workflows be developed that will have dependencies on other systems?

13 Proper Planning & Requirements Gathering Based on what your organization is trying to accomplish, the overall design of your SharePoint environment should include: Your organization s overall user base (Current & Possible Future) Geographical considerations such as whether you will have users accessing the environment in other cities, countries, or in remote locations. Content and sizing requirements (What is the total content size?) What will be the businesses expectations of the availability of SharePoint (i.e. What are the organizations SharePoint SLAs?) What other systems or data sources within the organization will SharePoint access or possibly interface (i.e. Will it utilize the Business Data Catalog, are Key Performance Indicators on the horizon?) Will SQL Reporting Services be SharePoint s reporting solution? Note: This planning must be done regardless of whether the environment is a singleserver deployment or a large server farm.

14 The Platform s Big Picture It is very important to have an accurate architectural picture of your SharePoint deployment. This will help you to: Acquire the necessary hardware to implement the physical architecture Have a good grasp of the best possible physical and logical configuration options that are available to you Start designing and implementing a solid and highly available environment Efficiently plan the deployment of the new SharePoint platform Plan the design of your SharePoint platform in a manner that would offer SharePoint as a SERVICE to your organization. SharePoint typically becomes so popular so fast that developing a reliable, highly scalable, and indestructible SharePoint platform is extremely critical as it will quickly become one of the most popular systems in your enterprise.

15 Based on Your Requirements: Select the Proper Architecture SharePoint supports a wide variety of configurations from a single server configuration with all components installed within it to a multiple server farm with components distributed across multiple servers to share the load of a single function. (Examples)

16 Enterprise SharePoint Deployments Organization s with a large number of users, massive content requirements, advanced functional requirements, or are geographically dispersed may require multiple server farms Load Balancing is critical in enterprise SharePoint initiatives Item level disaster recovery capabilities are essential as well

17 High Availability: Load Balancing Your Web Servers Microsoft poses three questions to organization s who are trying to determine if they require redundancy of their Web Servers: 1. Is your overall availability requirement below 99%? 2. Is the availability of your data critical? 3. Can your organization tolerate temporary loss of access to the data? Most organizations will determine that they will need to load balance their web servers. The next decision will be to determine which load balancing technology is a good fit for your organization? Three popular options are: Load balancing via a Cisco solution Load balancing via an F5 solution Network Load Balancing in Windows Server 2003

18 Planning Your Storage Requirements for SharePoint SharePoint can quickly become one of the most popular places to store content within an organization Your organization s initial storage needs may vary depending on your requirements, but you must have an allowance planned for data and site growth over time If you only design the infrastructure of your server farm around the initial data volume, it can quickly be outgrown Planning storage requirements on an upgrade of SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 is a bit easier than it is with a new SharePoint implementation because you will already have current storage statistics For a new implementation of SharePoint, I recommend planning for at least 3.5 times the amount of data you will store in SharePoint for your original storage requirement estimate

19 Additional Storage Considerations Archived Content: It is important to gather the requirements of the business to ensure you are prepared for possible bulk loading of documents and content On several occasions I have seen users upload into SharePoint a large amount of their departments archived content from CDs of backups. Communications from the SharePoint project team to the business and proper planning will ensure archived content is taken into consideration and migrated in a planned manner is key SQL Backups: Database administrators within your organization may perform SQL Backups outside of SharePoint s internal backup tools. The required disk space required by these backups should be added to the overall storage requirements.

20 SQL Server Environment Planning There are specific solutions you should consider when planning your SQL Server 2005 environment: 1. SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring This allows you to automatically mirror database contents from one SQL Server database to another. It also offers failover capabilities if your primary SQL Server goes down. 2. Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) The primary function of this technologies occurs when one server in a cluster fails or is taken offline. With Microsoft Cluster Service, the other server in the cluster takes over for the failed server s operations.

21 SQL Server: Log Shipping In the previous slide we talked about Database Mirroring, but be aware of SQL Server 2005 Log Shipping as well SQL Server 2005 Log Shipping Log shipping allows you to automatically send transaction log backups from a primary database to one or more secondary databases The transaction log backups are applied to each of the secondary databases individually. Database Mirroring or Log Shipping Not every organization has all of these options available to them but if you do, Microsoft has developed a key question to help you in your decisions: 1. How many destination servers do you require? If you require only a single destination database, database mirroring is the recommended solution. If you require more than one destination database, you need to use log shipping, either alone or with database mirroring.

22 Put Some Thought Into Planning SharePoint s Content Databases SharePoint enables you to store large amounts of content within it but you must plan for the proper growth of this content Several factors are involved in determining how large your content databases should be: Disaster recovery requirements High latency/low bandwidth locations Your organization s current storage solution and its current capacity and limitations (i.e. SAN limitations) Performance of your organization s infrastructure Based on your answers to these questions you can better plan the size of your content database.

23 Scaling For Growth SharePoint allows organization s to scale any aspect of your environment to meet additional requirements. You can add the following at any time: Additional front end Web server or Search server Additional Database server or Excel Calculation server Additional Application server

24 SharePoint Antivirus Planning Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint integrates multiple scan engines from industry leading vendors and content controls to help businesses protect their Microsoft SharePoint collaboration environments by eliminating documents containing malicious code, confidential information, and inappropriate content.

25 Forefront for SharePoint Features Multiple anti virus engines for comprehensive protection Run up to five scan engines at once from industry leading antivirus labs to scan documents and content Protection against inappropriate content Scans for administrator defined keywords within most Office documents, including Open XML documents and IRM protected documents, helping to enforce compliance with corporate policy Document filtering Configurable file filtering rules that help eliminate file types known for carrying viruses

26 Monitoring SharePoint s Servers with a Toolkit and System Center Operations Manager 2007 Last December, Microsoft released the SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit which works with System Center Operations Manager It contains two management packs that facilitate the management of SharePoint environments of organizations of all sizes. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack These management packs monitor the health state of the components in a SharePoint environment that affect performance and availability. When an issues arises that may cause service or performance degradation, Operations Manager 2007 uses the management packs to detect the issue, alert system administrators to its existence, and facilitate diagnosis and corrective action There is also a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack still available for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 which also provides very robust monitoring for SharePoint.

27 Your Organization s SharePoint Service Level Agreement (SLA) When developing Service Level Agreements for SharePoint there are key questions to pose to both IT and the business: Do we have mission \ business critical data stored in SharePoint? What is the acceptable downtime for SharePoint within my organization? How would lengthy downtown affect the overall user base s acceptance of SharePoint or any current or future SharePoint initiatives? What is the cost of investing in third party tools such as AvePoint s to quickly restore the data vs. the cost to the organization of just having users recreate it? If a site gets deleted at 3:00pm in the afternoon and IT has to restore it from yesterday s backup (at 1am) Users who performed any work that day are going to loose their data and you are going to have a hard time gaining their trust enough again to have them store anything of value in SharePoint Over the past few months, I have asked the question on acceptable downtime for SharePoint to several of EPC Group s clients and the average answer was approximately 4 hours

28 EPC Group s Best Practices SharePoint Governance SharePoint Governance for your environment is absolutely critical If you don t enforce Governance in the initial phases of your initiative, its going to be twice as hard to implement down the road BUT it needs to be done regardless of your current state At a high level, SharePoint Governance consists of two major areas: Infrastructure Governance Information Management Governance From these two major areas, I prefer to break it down further and create 4 major topic areas so that I can start gathering requirements to properly architect and design tailored organizationally specific SharePoint Governance Policies: Environment and Security Governance Custom Development Governance Content Related Governance Administrative and Training Governance

29 EPC Group s Best Practices SharePoint Governance (cont..) The major topic areas contain a large number of granular subtopics: Environment and Security Governance SharePoint Disaster Recovery Governance Defining SharePoint SLAs Defining SharePoint Maintenance SharePoint Security Governance Site Provisioning Governance Continued Custom Development Governance Development of Organizational SharePoint Development Standards Development of Deployment and Code Promotion Requirements SharePoint Branding Governance Third party Solution or Custom Solution Purchasing Policies SharePoint Designer 2007 Policies and Procedures Continued

30 EPC Group s Best Practices SharePoint Governance (cont..) The major topic areas contain a large number of granular subtopics: Content Related Governance Enterprise Content Management Related Policies Site Storage Policies (i.e. Quotas, File Upload limits, etc) My Site Policies Power User and Content Updating Guidelines Executive and Legal Content Policies Document Libraries and List Customization Policies Administrative and Training Governance SharePoint Training Guidelines SharePoint Communication Plan Guidelines SharePoint Committee Policies Enterprise SharePoint Support Model Executive Dashboard \SharePoint Reporting Guidelines Continued

31 New Site Provisioning Automation: Site Creation, User Training, and User Terms & Conditions

32 Is MySite a Potential Pitfall? SharePoint Server s My Site functionality enables users to have a dedicated personal site to manage all of their documents, content, and tasks. It also provides enhanced circles of collaboration with users that have similar skills and interests within the organization. My Sites in SharePoint really have two sites: a public site and a private site. My Sites can be an extremely powerful tool that organizations can take advantage of to vastly improve collaboration, but it is important to have policies and procedures in place to govern these sites. The nature of SharePoint is to encourage users to venture out into the organization and find important and relevant information as well as to help others find the content they are looking for in a timely manner.

33 MySite Governance is Critical! My Site templates and custom site definitions can be created to minimize these risks, but organizations should adhere to the following standards during their My Site rollout: All My Site Public View content must contain only work related material. This includes work related documents, discussions, pictures, links, calendar events, and related content. No My Site Public View content can contain any confidential or private data. If the organization would not allow all users within the company with a domain login to view this information, consider whether it should be on your My Site Public View. Content pertaining to human resources or legal is typically considered confidential and should not be listed on My Site Public View. Financial data must be reviewed prior to its posting on My Site Public View. Content on the private site must not contain personal audio files, inappropriate pictures, or other materials not allowed within the organization. All discussions or blogging done within a My Site must follow company policies and must not contain sensitive company material or defamatory comments about any person within the organization.

34 SharePoint Performance Testing A large number of organizations assign users to test the functionality of SharePoint and related Sites prior to rolling out into Production Very few organization's actually performance or Load Test SharePoint for the amount of anticipated users that may soon be accessing the system With Visual Studio 2008 Testing (Load Test), you can create a new load test for SharePoint that will simulate having a specific number of users access SharePoint at the same time and then perform an action for which you can specify (i.e. Perform a Search)

35 Load Testing SharePoint (cont ) Load Testing also allows you to specify more requirements for your tests

36 Do Users Get What They Expect from SharePoint s Search? It is important to not only monitor and audit the performance of SharePoint s servers, databases, and components but to also spend time reviewing what your user are searching for to make sure they are getting the expected results.