Michiel's ECM Blog

An interesting white paper when working on a business case for SharePoint was published by Microsoft, Five Ways SharePoint Can Save You Money:

In this paper, we look at how Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies can help you to reduce TCO and maximize ROI for your enterprise solutions. SharePoint Products and Technologies provide a comprehensive suite of features in all areas of information management, and can enable you to consolidate all your enterprise solutions into a single, manageable platform.  (…) The paper focuses on five specific ways in which SharePoint Products and Technologies can save you money. When you adopt SharePoint Products and Technologies in your organization, you can:

• Reduce IT costs and complexity
• Reduce development costs
• Simplify management and training
• Improve employee productivity
• Enhance the effectiveness of customer service and sales teams

Thanks to Michael Greth / @mysharepoint.

When you’re designing a logical architecture for SharePoint you need to understand the different containment elements and their hierarchy. Joel created this helpful illustration to help you understand the hierarchy:

In Understanding the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 containment hierarchy to design efficient information architectures Brian considers design decisions for each element:

The containment hierarchy within SharePoint will govern how you store information, your portal’s performance, extensibility and the general management and control you have over the growth of the usage of the SharePoint infrastructure.

And the TechNet article Plan for software boundaries is very helpful as well.

Today I got into a discussion on site collection sizing. This post is to preserve the results of my search for the answer. Joel recommends a maximum of 15 GB:

In WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 I recommend you pick a maximum site collection quota of no larger than 15GB, excluding the top level site collection and to move sites to dedicated databases where they need to grow beyond this.

Bill Baer also wrote an excellent article on Site Collection Sizing Considerations:

Site collections where growth is limited to a maximum of 15GB provide both ease of management and overall sustainability in terms of resources the ability to manipulate the site collection. Maintaining an environment with many site collections can be achieved through a proper governance plan, leveraging Site Directory taxonomy and the Windows SharePoint Services search service. In the situation where aggregation is desired, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be leveraging establishing an aggregation portal making the results from all site collections hosted on a Web application to be available to the portal through the Office Server search service and properly defined scopes.

There’s also a great article on TechNet that’s very useful in planning your SharePoint architecture: Plan for software boundaries.

Yesterday Joel Oleson had a new governance plan published to TechNet, a SharePoint Collaboration Governance plan:

It is a guideline outlining the administration, maintenance, and support of Fabrikam’s planned SharePoint deployment. It identifies lines of ownership for the business and technical teams and identifies who responsibilities for areas of the system. The plan also establishes rules for appropriate use of the SharePoint environments.

On his blog Joel explains:

It essentially takes a number of classic examples, plus some best practices and runs through what I (and Paul Culmsee) like to call the choose your own adventure of SharePoint. This Collaboration Governance plan is the essentials of coming up with a service offering that’s focused on the idea of an SharePoint as collaboration.

Download the SharePoint Collaboration Governance Plan on Technet.

Spencer wrote a very useful overview of important components in any serious enterprise scale SharePoint deployment that often get overlooked in budgeting, the business case and projects:

Backup and Restore

Out of the box doesn’t cut it. SLAs, Site Deletion etc. (…) There are a bunch of options here. AvePoint is the market leader simply because they had the solution in this space for previous versions and it is proven. Other options include Quest Recovery Manager and Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager, which offers a new approach to backup and restore of massive data sets.

Anti-Virus

The host anti-virus installed on your SharePoint servers is not adequate, it will *not* scan incoming (uploaded) files as those files never touch the file system on the boxes, they go straight into a blob in the database. (…) Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint (formerly Antigen), Bit Defender and Trend Portal Protect are all options in this space. Forefront has a decent management UI and multiple scan engines. It’s licensed on a per user basis or as part of your existing Enterprise Agreement.

Systems Management

If you are deploying a farm of any reasonable size you need a systems management toolset that can monitor operations, correlate logs and events for diagnostic and performance analysis/trending. (…) It’s common for enterprises to wish to use their existing toolset here, and whilst that is a reasonable goal, it’s not so practical as most tools don’t have SharePoint agents or management packs. If you are OK with implementing those yourself then Tivoli and NetIQ are good options. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is another great option here as this has pre-defined management packs for SharePoint (and the rest of the stack) which you can easily tweak for your deployment.

Usage Analysis (end user and IT)

OOTB stats are reasonable for very small deployments but simply don’t cut the mustard elsewhere except in the realm of search usage. (…) Nintex and Quest both have good tools in this space, as do some of the usual suspects such as WebTrends. (…) This area is often combined with Systems Management as there is significant overlap.