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SharePoint Architecture: Centralized or Decentralized?

Article originally published 10/6/2010, SPTechReport newsletter, Copyright © 2010, BZ Media LLC. All rights reserved.

An important question to answer when moving to SharePoint 2010 is how to design the new environment: centralized, with a traditional, top-down managed portal; or a decentralized environment, featuring user-driven collaboration? Many companies struggle with this decision, and for good reason: These decisions determine how the environment will be managed, how customizations will be supported, and the level of difficulty of future upgrades.

Most organizations are familiar with the centralized environments of intranet portals. Some of the benefits within a centralized SharePoint environment include consistent use of content types and workflows, reduced metadata duplication, and documented customizations that make system updates and platform upgrades much easier. This model is easier for supporting and training end users, managing business processes, controlling information policies, and providing metrics and key performance indicators.

But there are downsides to the centralized model. It takes a lot of design and planning; requires more upfront work and maintenance; requires an increased reliance on governance and formal change control boards; and has difficulty managing across site collections and portals.

Most end users prefer a more decentralized environment where they can control when and how they collaborate. From an administrative standpoint, there are definite advantages, such as little or no planning, very little upfront effort to deploy, and low time/cost to train end users.

With decreased emphasis on taxonomy and business process management, most decentralized systems work across site collections and portals. These systems more closely mirror the consumer-based collaboration platforms users are accustomed to using, such as social networks and microblogging sites.

The downsides to this approach are that they decrease consistency, increase metadata duplication, and make taxonomy management complex. Decentralized environments are also hard to update, support and train on, manage information policies with, and upgrade.

One of the primary benefits of SharePoint 2010 as a platform is the use of services. By deploying shared services at the enterprise level, companies can utilize the flexibility and collaborative benefits of the decentralized model, allowing end users to collaborate organically while still maintaining some degree of control over taxonomy and metadata, source data, InfoPath forms and critical business processes. Sites and site collections can consume these services as needed, but retain local control over every other aspect of their environments.

There still remain administrative impacts, such as the need to define roles and service owners, as well as the need to define your governance model for these services, but overall, SharePoint 2010 offers the enterprise much more power and flexibility that more closely mirrors the ways modern teams connect and collaborate.

What is a “Granular” Migration?

Among SharePoint migration vendors, you will often hear their tools described as “granular,” but what does the term really mean? Why is granular control more important than drag-and-drop when it comes to migrations? How granular do you need to go?

For most platforms, granular means that the tool allows you to filter through your SharePoint environment, selecting only those components - sites, lists, content, solutions - that you want to migrate. Not all tools provide the same level of granularity. The right migration solution should provide visibility, support iterative activities, and give you complete control:

• Visibility. You should be able to easily navigate your environment, discover your sites and content based on permissions, and apply the necessary filters and rules. While migrating, your tool should provide a view into what is happening so that, should something go wrong, you can quickly identify changes to be made and update.
• Iterations. Migrations are phased activities. They are rarely successful the first time through due to their complexity. Your tool should support an iterative process, allowing you to test, improve, and test again without forcing you back through a complicated UI each phase.
• Control. Ultimately, your tool should give you complete control of your migration. Move what you want and need, when you want to move it, and allow you see what is happening along the way. Control is about planning, and intended results.

echo is the leader in granular migrations, giving our users more visibility into the process, the ability to iterate as many times as you need (no volume-based pricing), and most importantly, giving you complete control over your SharePoint migrations. Let us show you how.

Sign up now for one of our online demonstrations, and see what echo can do for your environment.

Getting the Most out of the Sub Sites Web Part

One of the free tools available on the echoTechnology website is the Sub Sites Web Part. But what does it do, exactly? Well, simply put, it’s a web part that shows you all sub sites under the current level in a tree view control, similar to a site map. The results are security trimmed, of course, so that you only see those sites for which you have permissions.

Here you can see a preview of the web part. By default, it shows the tree view control collapsed, and you can select the nodes to navigate to the appropriate site.

Download a copy today. Enjoy!

Updated echo for SharePoint 2007 datasheet

We’ve refreshed our echo 2007 datasheet and made it available on our website. You can view or download here. The datasheet provides positioning, benefits, and a feature over of the current platform (2010 offering to be announced at TechEd!)

Migrations Are Not Drag-and-Drop

Migration is a roadblock to moving forward with your SharePoint strategy. Search the web and you’ll find plenty of content that seems helpful at first glance, but leaves you wanting. Backup your hardware. Check. Run the out-of-the-box analyzer. Check. Prepare your users. Check. But what these articles fail to provide is any kind of practical guidance.

The truth is, migrations are phased, iterative, error prone, and not your goal:

Migrations are phased. How and what you migrate should not be determined by the technology you use – it’s about matching the needs and timing of your content owners and teams. A migration should be flexible, helping you to move sites and content organically based on those end user needs, not the limitations of the technology.

Migrations are iterative. Your planning should not be limited by the number of migration attempts you make, or by the volume of content being moved. A healthy migration recognizes the need to test the waters, to move sites, content and customizations in waves, allowing users to test and provide feedback.

Migrations are error prone. Drag-and-drop SharePoint migration does not exist in the real world. Maybe for plain vanilla sites without any degree of customization, but these sites are few and far between. There is no “easy” button for migration.

Migrations are not the goal, but proper planning and change management policies will help you to be successful with your current and future migrations. The goals should be a stable environment, relevant metadata, discoverable content, and happy end users.

The echoTechnology team understands the nature of SharePoint migrations and the ongoing change management needs of your business, and has developed a platform that fits within the ebb and flow of your migration lifecycles. The echo for SharePoint platform provides a powerful suite of managers to do your heavy lifting, and flexible enough to meet your ongoing change management needs.

To find out more about echo for SharePoint, click here

Getting the Most out of SharePoint Spy

A couple years back at the Microsoft Office DevCon conference in Australia in a session on "SharePoint Developers Tips and Tricks," the presenter highlighted our very own SharePoint Spy as a great – and free – tool for analyzing your SharePoint environment. While this was some much appreciated free press, he didn't mention all of the other application features. SharePoint Spy continues to be our number one download, and a “Hot Pick” on SharePointreviews.com, and so I thought I’d provide some additional information on the tool to help you get the most out of your download.

The first great thing is that SharePoint Spy not only shows you the object’s public properties, but it also shows you the private properties. By selecting the "Raw View" button at the top, SharePoint Spy highlights those properties that are not exposed through public members. 

To reset the view, simply reselect the object.

Another thing which you may not have discovered is that you can use the SharePoint Spy to retrieve the content of text files, including .ASPX pages. You simply need to navigate to the file you are interested in, expand the node, and then select "File Content."

Now you can copy and review the raw content of the .ASPX pages shown in SharePoint Designer.

Finally, one of the best features of SharePoint Spy is to compare the properties of two objects. This is the primary reason why people download the tool – and it’s a pretty cool feature, if we don’t say so ourselves. Select any object, right click, and then click "Compare this item with ..." You will need to select the other object by left clicking on it, followed by a right click, and once again selecting "Compare with this item." Once you follow these directions, SharePoint Spy will show the properties of the two objects side-by-side so that you can easily compare their properties.

We hope you find this information helpful, and it allows you to get more out of your SharePoint Spy download.

If you haven’t done so already, you can download a free copy from our website here.

Product Update: Outlook PowerTool Plus for x64

The team at echoTechnology is happy to announce that the 64-bit version of Outlook PowerTool Plus for SharePoint 2007 is now available! This FREE download can be found here. For those who have not yet had the opportunity to try out this powerful tool, follow the links below for a quick video demonstration of each feature:

• Move multiple files or line items
• Copy multiple files or line items
• Delete multiple files or line items
• Send links for multiple files or line items by email
• Send attachments for multiple files or line items by email
• Copy links for multiple files or line items, paste into documents or forms
• Check in and Check out multiple files or line items

There are certain capabilities we all take for granted within the Windows environment, such as keyboard shortcuts, context menus accessed by right clicking on objects, and the fact that just about every desktop application integrates with every other desktop application. Within the SharePoint environment, unfortunately, we lose much of this ease of use capability. The key to Outlook PowerTool Plus is the Select Item Checkbox, a hidden feature that is activated automatically, allowing you to quickly and easily grab multiple files and move them across your site collection, or send them as an email attachment to someone who does not have access to your site.

SharePoint natively allows you to do these operations one at a time, but the ability to select a dozen documents or list items at once to move them or to check them out is pretty powerful, and brings the SharePoint user experience closer to the Windows experience. The tool is easy to use -- just select the targeted files, click on a file name to access the context menu, and select your action.

The Outlook PowerTool Plus is available for free download, and is compatible with MOSS and WSS 3.0 deployments. The User Guide can be found here, and a full product video is available here.

echoTechnology Announces Release of echo FileLoader for SharePoint 2007

New File Share Migration Product from echo Provides Powerful Capabilities for SharePoint

SEATTLE, Wash. - January 18, 2010: echoTechnology is pleased to announce the release of the echo FileLoader for SharePoint 2007, offering SharePoint administrators a powerful tool to quickly and easily identify, organize, and move content and folder structures from file shares into SharePoint 2007. With echo FileLoader, administrators have flexibility and control over how content is moved from their file shares, with the ability to maintain, update, and transform their content, metadata, versioning, and folder structure.

According to CEO Garry Smith, “echoTechnology is liberating users from the tyranny of file shares” with the release of the echo FileLoader.

A premium version of the echo FileLoader is scheduled for release by the end of Q1, which will offer multi-threaded task management, support for SharePoint 2003, 2007 and 2010 environments, expanded content types, unlimited sites and rows, and more.

Additional SharePoint administration capability is available through the echo for SharePoint 2007 tool, allowing administrators to manage, migrate, load, and audit their SharePoint platform.

More details on the echo FileLoader, including screenshots and documentation, can be found online at echoTechnology.com/Products. In addition, a product overview video is available here, as well as a deep dive into product features here.

The echo FileLoader must be installed on a SharePoint or WSS front end web server. In addition, users must have administrative privileges on the front end server to use the application. Trials are restricted to making 100 file loads to a portal and are limited to 30 days. To download a trial version of the echo FileLoader for SharePoint 2007, please visit http://www.echotechnology.com/registration/Trial.aspx?PID=16&AID=0