A common SharePoint scenario: As you are preparing to migrate your old SharePoint environments to SharePoint 2010, several Site Admins ask for help in reorganizing their site structure, using the migration as an opportunity to restructure and improve alignment of SharePoint with the growing needs of the business.
Migrations are often a great opportunity to restructure Sites and Site Collections. SharePoint can grow organically, and from time to time restructuring is needed to align changes in the business with how the environment is being used. Most SharePoint environments contain numerous abandoned sites and site collections -- because moving these sites was more difficult and time-consuming than simply recreating them in a new structure.
Many organizations chose to redefine site structure during migration, reducing the SharePoint site sprawl and helping teams to stay productive by simplifying restructuring. This can include promoting Sites to be Site Collections or demoting Site Collections to sites. Axceler’s Davinci Migrator provides options for promoting and demoting during migrations, achieved in an easy point and click fashion.
The below migration set shows a screenshot of site 1030 in a MOSS 2007 farm being promoted to a Site Collection in SharePoint 2010. Setting up this type of migration scenario can be done quickly and easily, allowing admins to quickly redesign their environments as part of their migration to 2010.
Davinci Migrator is the most comprehensive migration tool on the market, whether quickly migrating one or two sites to SharePoint 2010, or applying unique rules and filters to each individual site or site collection in a very granular fashion. Davinci is the only migration tool that provides full-fidelity migration of Nintex Workflows, as well as detailed query and pre-migration analysis capabilities to ensure the success of your migration.
To find out more about Davinci Migrator, you can download the datasheet here, or download a fully-functional trial version here.
This past week, Axceler President and CEO, Michael Alden, was invited to appear in studio on CMS-Connected, a monthly webcast featuring news, trends and commentary related to the content management industry. Streamed live on the TPN network, the show features content management professionals from around the globe discussing topics relevant to CMS practitioners everywhere.
The April broadcast, which also included an interview with Tim Walters from Forrester Research, focused on SharePoint 2010 and the increased dialog within the SharePoint community around governance. Michael was asked for details surrounding Axceler's current governance initiative, and shared some of his insights into what Axceler has uncovered to date (survey results are available here).
Michael appears at 36:10 minutes, and is interviewed by host Tyler Pyburn and show producer Scott Liewehr.
In the Rapid Fire segment (at 48:50 minutes), the hosts also mention takeaways from CMSWire's April Tweet Jam, which focused on the state of Digital Asset Management (DAM). The Twitter-based conversation, with more than two dozen collaboration and DAM experts participating and sharing their thoughts on the space, took place on April 18th with Axceler evangelist Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) participating. You can read more about the Tweet Jam on CMSWire here.
An often overlooked task in a file migration project is User Acceptance Testing (UAT). For those unfamiliar with the term, UAT is a process to obtain confirmation that a system meets mutually agreed-upon requirements. In a file share migration, a Subject Matter Expert (SME) who is preferably the owner or author of the files, provides such confirmation after trial or review. UAT should be one of the final stages of a project, and often occurs before a client or customer accepts the new system.
Often times, a system administrator or consultant will move files into SharePoint and then send a generic email to end users that their documents are now available in SharePoint. No documentation is provided to support such a claim, and no end user testing is performed to verify that the correct files have been migrated and tagged with the appropriate metadata. In other instances, end users are left to upload their own documents with no supervision and no verification that company files have been migrated successfully. This can cause many problems for the business (incomplete migrations, broken workflow, lost content that isn't tagged properly), as well as for the owners of the content (who may need to do extra work to clean up the mess), so checking the files after the upload is critical for the project’s success. Some things to look for:
- Correct Files
- Correct Created Date
- Correct Metadata
- Files can be opened and are not corrupted – spot check
- Correct Created by (original author – not the person who performed the upload)
FileLoader provides a migration report after an upload. This migration report is created as an Excel spreadsheet, allowing for the document to be shared with the content owners -- so that they can verify its accuracy. It can also be archived for legal purposes. This report shows the status of uploaded files as successful or error.
An error may occur for various reasons. One common examples is that the source document has been deleted or illegal character correction was not turned on. (Screenshot)
So remember, a proper file share migration project should always include a User Acceptance Plan. And a project is never complete until that plan has been performed and signed off on.
If you would like to learn more about FileLoader, you can read the datasheet or download a demo version here.
After attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles last year, Jeff Shuey (Kodak) and Christian Buckley decided to get more involved with the local partner community in Seattle, launching a local chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP). While Seattle is the backyard of Microsoft, a chapter had been absent from the region for several years. Following WPC, Buckley and Shuey decided to take action, and began piecing together a board of directors and the necessary Microsoft support to make the chapter a reality.
"IAMCP is not like a user group, where people attend to listen to speakers. It's not passive," states Buckley. "The goal of IAMCP is partner-to-partner networking. It's about finding ways to expand and grow our business. The more people we can get to attend and register as members, the more potential business opportunities we will identify."
Seattle board members represent a broad range of product and service companies, such as SharePoint ISV Pingar, local training provider QuickLearn, and well-known staffing solutions provider Robert Half Technology.
The IAMCP Seattle chapter held it's first official meeting in January, and is steadily growing its membership. Buckley is sharing his experiences as a co-founder and current chapter president on Microsoft's DigitalWPC.com site, part of the broader Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). The chapter meets on the third Thursday of each month from 11:30 to 1pm in Microsoft's Civica Building in Bellevue, and a new website is available at IAMCPSeattle.com. Speakers have included Tina Hanson, who shared developments around Microsoft's PinPoint, and most recently Jon Roskill, Corporate VP of the Worldwide Partner Group. More great content and events are being planned for 2012.
While presenting at SPTechCon San Francisco in February, our own Director of Product Evangelism, Christian Buckley, sat down with SPTV's Stacy Deere (@sldeere) and Stephanie Donahue (@stephkdonahue) to discuss his role, his travels, and his thoughts on the state of the SharePoint community. SPTV (@my_SPTV) is a relatively new program that conducts in-depth interviews with experts and companies in the SharePoint space, and can be found at www.MYSP.tv
After last weekend's SharePoint saturday Los Angeles event, Christian is getting ready to hit the road again, speaking at three more events in April:
SHARE Conference Atlanta
http://www.shareconference.com/us/
'The Connection Between Metadata, Social Tools, and Personal Productivity,' Wednesday, April 25th, 11:30am
SharePoint Saturday Belgium
http://sharepointsaturday.org/belgium/Pages
'The Connection Between Metadata, Social Tools, and Personal Productivity,' at 9:30am, and 'Mastering SharePoint Migration Planning,' at 1:30pm
SharePoint Conference.ORG
http://sharepointconference.org
'10 Best SharePoint Features You've Never Used,' and 'Law and Order: Content Governance Strategies'
If you are able to attend one of these events, please be sure to stop by and say hello to Christian. He may also have one or two copies of his latest book to give away, 'Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real-World Projects.' (link) You can follow him on Twitter at @buckleyplanet or LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/christianbuckley
A common SharePoint scenario: As the SharePoint administrator, you would like to get a handle on the web parts being used across your environment. What are the most frequently used web parts? Where are they implemented? Where are my web parts hidden or closed? SharePoint out-of-the-box just doesn’t provide administrators with the top-down, farm-level view of where web parts are being used – which is exactly what you need.
With ControlPoint, administrators can view the total number of pages on which a web part is being used, on which specific pages the web part is being used, who created it, who modified it, when it was created, when it was updated, and the total size of the web part. This powerful report can be run across any scope of the farm, and can even be run to just find where web parts are hidden or closed.
Part of what makes ControlPoint the #1 governance and administration tool on the market is the ability to automate reporting, or to create policies in advance or on the fly to help you better manage your environment. If you would like more information about the award-winning ControlPoint platform, you can find the product datasheet here, sign up for a live webinar here, or simply download a copy and try it yourself.
A common SharePoint scenario: As SharePoint takes hold within an enterprise, it’s not uncommon for the size of the environment to grow very rapidly and organically. The best way to manage that growth is to delete or purge historical versions of documents that are taking up a large amount of storage space. ControlPoint provides an out-of-the-box storage report that makes it easy to find all lists and libraries with versioning enabled, allowing administrators to clean up, as needed.
The report displays the number of old versions as well as the amount of space the old versions are taking up. The report gives administrators insight across many lists and libraries. Based on the report, an administrator would probably be interested in immediately purging these historical versions. The challenge is that even though SharePoint out-of-the-box allows administrators to retain a certain number of major and minor (draft) versions, and will purge those old versions for you, there are limitations:
1) The purge only occurs after a save or check-in occurs on the document
2) The setting needs to be applied to each library, one by one
ControlPoint solves these two issues by immediately and automatically purging your old versions, without having to wait for an end user to take an action on the document. Additionally, the version setting can be applied across any scope to any number of libraries at once. The version setting can even be enforced as a policy so that all future lists and libraries that are created will have the same properties automatically applied.
If you would like more information about the award-winning ControlPoint platform, you can find the product datasheet here, sign up for a live webinar here, or simply download a copy and try it yourself.
In the first phase of our SharePoint governance initiative this year, we conducted a survey on organizational perceptions of governance, with 265 respondents, three-fourths of which were SharePoint administrators or managers. Nearly 65 percent of the respondents consider SharePoint a “strategic enterprise platform,” while a strong majority said SharePoint governance is important or extremely important in their 2012 SharePoint planning. Despite those responses, the survey also found that more than half of the organizations have just started their governance planning efforts, or have not begun them at all.
In this second phase of our initiative, we are asking survey respondents to share feedback on how well roles and responsibilities have been defined within their organizations, and identify whether ownership and accountability across different aspects of the governance continuum are clear. Governance is a set of defined roles, responsibilities, policies, and procedures that will help your company to proactively manage your information technology resources in a way that maximizes business value. Within SharePoint, these governance policies will help guide and inform your initial environment design, your information architecture, and of course roles and responsibilities. But without clear definition of roles and responsibilities, many organizations struggle to enact or enforce governance policies.
How well are governance roles and responsibilities defined in your company? Do you have a plan in place today that articulates accountabilities? Is governance a major initiative for 2012? We'd like to know your experience.
Axceler is conducting an initiative this year to study different aspects of the SharePoint governance experience. The goal of this short survey (12 questions) is to understand the maturity of role definitions within the SharePoint community.
Please take a few minutes to complete our short survey, and to share your thoughts. In addition to receiving a copy of the survey results, by participating you'll also be eligible to win one of three $100 Amazon gift cards (winners to be announced June 8th). On that note, congratulations to Dane Bamburry and Kenneth Reid for winning for Phase 1!
And if you'd like to take the first survey on SharePoint governance perceptions, you can still do so here. Or you can simply download the results here.
While participating in SPTechCon San Francisco in late February, Axceler's VP of Sales for the Eastern Region, Nick Fasano (@nfaz4), and VP of Sales for the Western Region, Michael Burns (@michaelxburns), were interviewed by Stacy Deere (@sldeere) from SPTV (http://mysp.tv/) on the rapid growth of the company, what sets Axceler apart from the competition, and their views on what is happening inside the SharePoint community.
Watch the video here:
Watch more coverage of SPTechCon San Francisco, including snapshots of Axceler's huge "SharePoint Nomikai" party, here. For more information about the next SPTechCon event taking place this summer in Boston (where Axceler will once again be sponsoring), go to www.sptechcon.com
With storage so readily available and relatively inexpensive nowadays, a storage strategy within organisations can sometimes be as simple as “Let’s buy more!”. I remember my early days of consulting and visiting customers to implement our latest leading-edge technology with six floppy disks in tow, whereas today most people walk around with enough storage space on their phone/mp3 player to service a small company.
We are now living in the Information Age and people’s attitudes toward storage have changed; just compare your inbox to 5-10 years ago. Here at Axceler, my email quota was recently increased from 500MB (how did I survive with that?) to 2GB….my Gmail account is 7.5 GB….My Hotmail account “includes email storage that expands to provide you with as much storage space as you need. Your inbox capacity will automatically increase as you need more space”. Why should I delete anything? I might need it at some point? (I hope my IT admin is not reading this).
So if storage is so readily available what’s the problem? Well in terms of SharePoint, there are a number of potential issues:
Search
If you have a clear strategy for your MetaData and Taxonomy within SharePoint, maybe you are using the SP2010 Managed Metadata Service, then you can certainly make your data findable but the principal of garbage in/garbage out still applies.
Slower Performance
Obviously as the amount of content grows, the more work your servers will have to do to serve that information to your users. I was at a client recently where they were having some performance issues so we did some investigation and found document libraries with several thousand versions of Excel files (one single file and its many versions was over 5GB in size).
Backup
Again, it’s fairly obvious but as the amount of data increases the longer your regular backups will take, and the impact that will have on your environment.
So what’s the solution? The key is a combination of technology and education.
From a technology point of view it is important to plan your architecture in order to scale to an amount of data that could be potentially uploaded into SharePoint. There are a number of boundaries and limitations that you should be aware of in terms of capacity, but with the correct design and configuration SharePoint can support a very large amount of data.
It’s also important to have clear visibility into how your environment is growing and to be aware of objects that near those boundaries and thresholds. You might want to take a look at our SharePoint management solution ControlPoint which has lots of reports and alerts for monitoring storage across the SharePoint platform.
ControlPoint collects lots of data from SharePoint that give greater insight into the usage of the environment, which will allow for smarter infrastructural decisions around capacity planning.
Putting together a governance strategy around storage optimisation is also important, and if you have done so then you should be preforming regular reviews to check that the policies are being adhered to, and make amendments where necessary.
For example, you may have chosen to enforce storage quotas across you departmental team sites but find that the Marketing site needs far more storage than the Finance site due to the large, graphic heavy, content that Marketing upload into SharePoint. Therefore, you may need to increase quotas where it makes business sense.
You may also want to consider a Remote Blob Store (RBS) if you are going to be uploading large files into SharePoint. Using SQL content databases to store large files is not cost effective when the data could be externalised in non-transactional storage.
So this leads on to the educational side. If you have devolved administration of sites to power users then ensure that you educate them as to how the site should be used and configured. For example, only enable versioning were necessary and do not enable audit logging unless absolutely necessary.
For end users, educate them as to what content should be uploaded into SharePoint. I was speaking with a customer recently that discovered that their My Sites were growing rapidly due to the large amount of video files that were being uploaded.
So to summarise, your storage strategy should take into consideration:
- What content should your users be storing in SharePoint?
- Where should this content be stored (SQL/BLOB)?
- Should site quotas be used?
- What level of auditing and versioning should be implemented?
- How do I go about monitoring storage and planning for future growth?
To see how Axceler can help with your Storage optimisation check out our management solutions.