Axceler invites you to an upcoming webinar that will show you how to improve your SharePoint Governance.
Whether you have SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010, you can benefit from attending this session where we will show you how to use ControlPoint to:
- Manage SharePoint Permissions
- Analyze SharePoint Usage and Activity
- Move / Copy Sites
- Clean Up, Manage and Configure SharePoint accounts and sites
- Analyze SharePoint content and storage
- Monitor SharePoint trends
- Set up alerts and Enforce policies
- Audit your SharePoint environment
- Identify governance violations
- And more!
The webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 2nd at 2:00 PM EST. Register today!
One of the most common lines of inquiry at conferences and during online 
demonstrations of our migration product, Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, is why someone would go with a tool when they can just use database attach? The answer really depends on what you are trying to accomplish, the technical abilities (and availability) of your team, and the complexity of your environment. And complexity doesn't necessarily mean you have a lot of content - if you've jumped on the SharePoint "extensibility bandwagon," you'll likely have customizations and configurations that may need extrahand holding.
At a high-level, using Davinci Migrator allows you to plan out your migration, prioritizing sites and site collections, cleaning up and restructuring as you migrate, identifying potential problems before you migrate, and then giving you more visibility and control over the migration. Davinci lowers the risks associated with migration, such as system downtime, surprise issues (usually undocumented customizations) that could extend the project, and the entire attempt-fail-fix-attempt-fail cycle.
At a more detailed level, here is what Davinci offers that database attach cannot provide:
- Davinci allows you to migrate sites and content directly from 2003 to 2010.
- Davinci provides discovery capability, allowing you to query your environment and identify the right sites and content to be migrated.
- Davinci is not restricted to moving one content database at a time. You can migrate all at once, or migrate gradually, site by site, ensuring that all content and features are working properly.
- Davinci maintains navigation elements, formatting (those that are supported in 2010), and migrates supported web parts.
- Davinci offers a unique pre-migration analysis feature, providing item-level analysis of potential problems with your sites before migrating so that you can resolve problems beforehand.
- Davinci allows migrations from mixed environments - no need to consolidate 2003, 2007, and WSS environments before moving to 2010. Davinci migrates from a wide variety of systems and configurations.
- Davinci allows you to maintain or break relationships with current site permissions, navigation, look and feel, and other attributes, allowing for full-fidelity migrations or simple migrations that inherit these attributes from new 2010 templates.
- Davinci allows you to plan out and schedule your migration in waves, based on priority of sites or content databases.
- Davinci has a built in scheduler and is multi-threaded, allowing you to execute migrations in real-time, during off-hours, and even schedule multiple migrations to run in parallel.
- Davinci makes it easy to identify migration failures -- beforehand, during a migration, and post-migration -- providing the data you need to quickly fix problems and iterate.
Hopefully this information is useful to you and your team as you make the decision on how to move forward with your migration. For more details on the unique and powerful features available in Davinci Migrator, you can watch a 15-minute video demo of the product, or contact sales@axceler.com to schedule an in-depth demo or to receive a full-featured trial version.
One of the most important topics for any SharePoint Administrator is having adequate data and reporting on their environment. Understanding the reports that SharePoint offers out of the box is an important first step – but what are the essential reports and analysis that an Administrator requires to manage SharePoint? What are the reporting gaps out of the box, and how can Axceler help Administrators fill those gaps?
Axceler’s ControlPoint has many different types of reports; this blog will cover some in four key categories: Permissions, Usage/ Activity, Storage, and Audit. Here is what you get out of the box, and where you may want to consider expanding your reporting capability using ControlPoint:
Permissions
Reports on permissions are not easily generated with out of the box SharePoint 2007. It can be a manual process to collect and track this data, or may require custom reports using the SharePoint object model. Permissions reporting is critical to your business for a number of reasons – from regular auditing, to maintaining accurate user access, to troubleshooting functionality problems that, commonly, stem from end users trying to perform a task without having the correct permissions.
In ControlPoint, reports on Permissions can be filtered by User, AD Group, SharePoint group, or Permission level. The two main ways to generate permissions reports are by User or by Site. They can also be generated on different scopes of the Farm, for example several Web Applications, Site Collections, or Sites. The flexibility allows users or Administrators to tailor the reports to the needs of the business. This first report shows Permissions by User showing all sites for which the user has access. 
Usage/ Activity
Reports on Usage and Activity can be generated by Site Collection Administrators and Site Administrators (available in Moss 2007, not WSS 3.0). Some examples include:
- Request per day over the past 30 days
- Average requests per day by month for the past 12 months
- List of top pages over the past 30 days
- Unique users graph over the past 30 days
Unlike permissions reporting, there is quite a bit of activity reporting available out of the box with SharePoint 2007, but you must dig to find the data you need. Most reports are available only at the site level, and not in an aggregated view. Most data only goes back 30 days so it’s tough build long term reports.
With ControlPoint, reports on usage can be generated a number of different ways. The reports allow for increased insight into how SharePoint is being used. See who is accessing what, what 
sites are most active, and what are the trends. ControlPoint reports span many SharePoint Sites at once and can be filtered for long periods of time. The second report shows a trend on activity for many months.
Storage
Reports on Storage can be generated by Site Collection Administrators and Site Administrators. These reports show:
- Document Libraries including size, number of items, last modified date, and path
- Documents including type, size, last modified, and path
- Lists including type, name, size, items, last modified, and path
Storage reporting out of the box provides you with the essentials you need for managing your environment. Most administrators augment this reporting by accessing the back-end servers directly and performing analysis and reporting from the SQL Server. Other reports you might consider in SharePoint include quotas management in Central Administration, you can see the current storage used per Site Collection, assigned site quota.
Much like Permissions and Activity, Storage reports in ControlPoint can be generated across many SharePoint sites at once. Analyzing storage is extremely important for growth planning, and ensuring optimal performance. The third report shows trends on Storage for a given time period.
Audit
SharePoint records audit data when auditing is enabled on a Site Collection. Site Collection Administrators can view the following:
- Audit records include data on events that get recorded
- Events detail includes user IDs associated with event, site of event, item type(page, document, list), event date and time, event description (view, check out), and item name and URL
Auditing is a growing area of focus for many SharePoint administrators as SharePoint is more widely adopted and as it becomes more business critical. Audit reporting requirements can also come from data that is subject to different types of compliance. For example, Internal or external audits can require Administrators to produce reports that show all users that accessed a certain item in a given time period.
ControlPoint Audit Log Analysis provides an easy way to filter the SharePoint audit logs. This provides meaningful reports that show who is doing what, where, and when. Audit records can be filtered by date, user, event, scope, site, and URL.
Out of the box, SharePoint 2007 provides you with the essentials you need to manage your SharePoint environment – but comes up short in a number of areas, especially when compared to other enterprise applications under your care. Fortunately, ControlPoint provides rich reporting capability out of the box that allows you to better monitor and manage your SharePoint environment.
Guest author Jamie Aliperti is a
Senior Sales Engineer at Axceler.
Another great event added to the history books, and with a 
weekend to recover, its good to be back in the office and getting some work done. But I thought I’d provide a quick recap and share links to the content I presented at SPTechCon San Francisco last week (February 7-9, 2011).
SPTechCon has a great energy, with David Rubinstein and the BZ Media doing a great job at continually adding new topics, working with new speakers and leading experts alike, and pulling together another fantastic event. Already looking forward to the next one in early June out in Boston (where I’ll be presenting three times again).
For those who missed my sessions in San Francisco, you will find my slides in the SPTechCon online materials, but also out on SlideShare as follows:
All three presentations from prior events, but pretty much the same. I remove most of my images from my SlideShare uploads to minimize the file size, but the meat of each presentation is there. As I mention each time I present, my sessions are no-code and heavily centered around Project Management and Business Analyst topics.
My upcoming speaking engagements through the end of March include:
- SharePoint Saturday San Diego, Feb 26th (sold out)
I’ll be presenting ‘SharePoint’s Social Media Scorecard,’ a review of the leading social computing solutions and how they compare to SharePoint 2010 (deck not available, because the content comes from a forthcoming ebook). I will also be presenting a version of ‘11 Strategic Considerations’ with a live demo of our Davinci Migrator product over in the vendor track.
- SharePoint Saturday Redmond, March 5th (also sold out)
This event is being held on the Microsoft campus at The Commons. I’ll be presenting my ‘11 Strategic Considerations’ topic, and then running to the airport to catch my flight to…
- Australia SharePoint Conference, March 8+9, Sydney
Axceler is a Bronze Sponsor for this event, and I am excited to be in town for this conference -- and to help open our new Sydney office! I will be participating in several Ask the Experts sessions throughout the event, and presenting a new topic entitled ‘Looking Under the Hood: How Your Metadata Strategy Impacts Everything You Do’
- New Zealand SharePoint Conference, March 15+16, Wellington
As with Australia, Axceler is sponsoring, and I’ll be talking metadata strategy and participating in several Ask the Experts sessions around social media, knowledge management, and migration.
- DevConnections Orlando, March 27-30
I’ll be joining MVPs Ben Curry, Bill English, Matt McDermott, Michael Noel, Dan Holme and others in Orlando for this great event. My sessions will include the new ‘Don’t Just Migrate – Transform Your SharePoint Environment’ and ‘SharePoint’s Social Computing Scorecard’
If you plan to attend one or more of these events, please stop by and say hello!
Axceler invites you to today's webinar that will show you the 9 things you should be doing with your SharePoint environment. The webinar will be taking place today, Wednesday, February 16th at 2 PM EST. Register now!
Whether you have SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010, you can benefit from attending this session where we will show you how to use ControlPoint to:
* Manage SharePoint Permissions
* Analyze SharePoint Usage and Activity
* Move / Copy Sites
* Clean Up, Manage and Configure SharePoint accounts and sites
* Analyze SharePoint content and storage
* Monitor SharePoint trends
* Set up alerts and Enforce policies
* Audit your SharePoint environment
* Identify governance violations
* And more!
Don't miss this exciting webinar! Register now.
In previous articles, I’ve addressed the necessary environmental, cultural, and governance shifts in your thinking when considering a move from a structured, centralized SharePoint deployment to a more ad hoc, decentralized model. But one of the key areas for consideration is an understanding of the social informatics shift happening within your organization – and across the current business climate.
Social Informatics is the study of information and communication tools in cultural and institutional contexts. It is a broad, inter-disciplinary analysis of usage patterns that spans sociology, anthropology, psychology, technology, and business. More specifically, it is a study of the way that we do business – the tools we use, how we connect and collaborate, and how we consume and disperse information.
You’re probably asking: what does any of this have to do with SharePoint, and from moving from a centralized environment to a decentralized environment?
It is important to understand social informatics because the fundamentals of how the next generation of your workforce relates to each other, how they work alone or together, and how they use technology has changed dramatically over the past decade. Understanding these changes in how people think about their enterprise applications may help you to evolve your thinking about how to deploy or transform your SharePoint platform.
Within the context of SharePoint are the building blocks of shaping your environment to meet the needs of your evolving end users: metadata and taxonomy, service applications, social computing features, and the first steps into mobile. Some things to consider from an informatics perspective:
- Metadata and Taxonomy
It is important to build and (proactively) maintain your metadata and taxonomy regardless of your SharePoint architecture and future plans, but even more so with SharePoint 2010. Metadata is the building block of collaboration, powering both search and social computing. Build a governance model that allows for fast, flexible, and transparent changes, so that end users can develop confidence that their input is being heard – and so that they can find their content quickly and easily. Review usage patterns (just like you do for Search Engine Optimization of your online advertising) and make adjustments often.
- Service Applications
The beauty of the service application framework within SharePoint is that you can retain centralized control while supporting individual freedom to move about the system. An important paradigm for the next generation is for you to provide guidelines on what needs to be accomplished, but allow flexibility in how those business objectives are achieved. In other words, tell them what to do, not how to do it. The service applications are a huge step in this direction, allowing end users to consume data in a controlled, managed way, but with the freedom to build and deploy rich solutions for themselves or peers, analyzing and disseminating data as they see fit – within the guidelines you set.
- Social Computing
Think of social computing as another layer of search. Aside from the fact that the rich user profiles power many other capabilities than social tools (for example, use these profiles to build workflows), social computing is a core component of the way we now work. Look beyond the consumer-based platforms, and what you see is a real-time web of connections and data that can be searched, analyzed, and connected to create a whole that is better than the sum of its parts. The key to social is understanding the features which your company or team is culturally and organizationally ready to adopt.
- Mobile
SharePoint has taken the first steps toward anywhere-access. While still a nascent technology, Microsoft is making strides in this area which will eventually become a major component of the platform. As with the social features, you need to clearly understand your end user requirements for mobile, the business value of offering mobile solutions, and how these solutions will be introduced and supported within the business. It’s a fine line between anticipating future needs and promoting technology that nobody is asking for.
Informatics is a huge topic to try and fill in a single blog post, but hopefully I got you thinking. How you apply these things depends on a number of factors that span environmental, cultural, governance and informatics considerations. As you develop your SharePoint strategy and move from a more locked down, centralized environment to a more open model, understanding how your end users work and their enterprise application expectations will help you set the right path.
Just wanted to say a quick thank you to the organizers of SharePoint Summit 2011 in Toronto for putting together a great event this week. I also wanted to say congratulations to Max Yermakhanov, IT Manager at ObjectSharp in Toronto, for winning the Axceler giveaway of an iPad!
The prize was announced at the closing remarks -- but Max was nowhere to be found. He was surprised to learn that he had won when contacted by a fellow employee, and had to be convinced that it wasn't all a joke. Luckily, he was able to come back to the venue and pick up his prize before I left for the airport (so I didn't have to carry it back to Seattle with me).
We'll be giving away another iPad at SPTechCon this next week in San Francisco, so please be sure to swing by the Axceler booth to register! I'll also be handing out the much-sought-after CherPoint shirts at the booth and during all three of my sessions. See you there!
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No, that is not the string of profanity you’re yelling at your computer when your SharePoint migration fails. These are the illegal characters for documents in SharePoint libraries.
A big problem is many big companies in the legal, financial and education industries have an ampersand (&) in their name. And thus, many documents on their file system contain this illegal character.
If you need to load files into SharePoint from a file system and you have files that contain any of these characters, your upload will fail.
Axceler worked with a client who started their bulk upload on a Friday evening using the out-of-the-box SharePoint tools. When they returned on Monday, their document library contained only half the content they intended to upload because thousands of their documents contained an ampersand.
The client was faced with the laborious task of changing all document names that contain any illegal characters and restarting the migration. This manual process would have wasted an enormous amount of time.
With Axceler’s FileLoader you can automatically replace all illegal characters with a legal character, like an underscore. Your documents will be successfully and seamlessly uploaded from your file system and into SharePoint.
During the upload, FileLoader will also let you apply content types and metadata, create versions for an item, send documents to multiple libraries at once, and many other time saving bulk operations.
Download a free evaluation copy here
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Guest author Steve Goldberg is an Axceler Sales Engineer.
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