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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.

Axceler Ships Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010

Comprehensive New Migration Product Now Available, Reduces Risks Associated with SharePoint Migrations

WOBURN, MA – September 20, 2010 – Axceler, the leader in administration and migration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced the immediate availability of Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, the first new product to be introduced as a result of its acquisition of echoTechnology. Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 offers comprehensive, risk-based control when moving to the latest SharePoint platform. Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 is available now from Axceler on Axceler.com.

Davinci Migrator reduces the risks, lowers the overall cost and shortens the time it takes to complete a SharePoint 2010 migration. By helping administrators with the discovery and planning of their migrations, Davinci Migrator delivers a unique feature set to the SharePoint market by reducing the number of failed migration attempts and dramatically shortening project schedules.

"Davinci is powerful and revolutionary for three main reasons. First, Davinci lets managers know whether the migration will succeed before the migration is done, saving precious time. Second, Davinci provides the granular control that an enterprise needs to prioritize, plan, and execute a SharePoint migration. And third, Davinci provides the deep SharePoint environmental analysis a migration requires to understand what’s involved ahead of time," said Garry Smith, General Manager echoProducts.

Davinci Migrator’s dynamic discovery and detailed planning system allows users to quickly and easily define the scope of their migration, identify problems before they occur, and even determine how long it will take to migrate. This enables them to plan and schedule on their own terms. By supplying migration estimates, reporting templates, and a powerful scheduling engine, Davinci helps users build more realistic migration plans.
Among the innovative features of Davinci Migrator are:

• Detailed pre-migration analysis and rules engine, allowing users to follow best-practices, identify issues during planning, rank them by severity, and recommend actions before moving forward;
• Support for both granular and entire-site migrations from SharePoint 2003 and 2007 to the new SharePoint 2010 platform;
• An optimized architecture for large content databases and complex enterprise configurations that have many SharePoint administrators per farm; and,
• Support for migrating in waves, based on user-defined timetables, priorities and severity of issues found, which reduces team and resource impact.

"Over the next 12 to 18 months, SharePoint administrators will need a reliable, comprehensive solution for managing their SharePoint 2010 rollouts effectively," said Michael Alden, President and CEO, Axceler. "Davinci Migrator and ControlPoint offer a powerful combination that reduces the risks of moving to SharePoint 2010 and streamlines the management of it once they get there."

About Axceler
Specializing in software for Microsoft SharePoint, Axceler has delivered award winning administration products worldwide since 1994. For Microsoft SharePoint, Axceler offers ControlPoint - the best way to get control over a SharePoint environment. ControlPoint gives SharePoint professionals the ability to manage permissions, copy sites, analyze activity and much more. Axceler's ControlPoint was named the Best SharePoint Product of 2009 by the editors of Windows IT Pro. The company’s recently acquired echoTechnology product line delivers comprehensive, best of breed migration solutions for organizations upgrading to newer versions of SharePoint, including SharePoint 2010. For more information visit http://www.axceler.com

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Press Contact:
Pam Foote
Parker Communications for Axceler
pfoote@parkercomms.com
978-691-5572

The San Francisco SPUG Asks the Experts

Following the success of the SharePoint Saturday East Bay event, the San Francisco SharePoint User Group put together a special Ask the Experts session with several of the SPSBAY presenters. The panel included myself, SFSPUG leader Brad Maust, CEO of High Monkey Consulting and popular speaker -- Virgil Carroll, architect at StorSimple and former PM on Microsoft’s SQL/SharePoint Customer Advisory Team -- Burzin Patel, and co-founder of the DC SPUG and architect – Gary Blatt, and of course our moderator and CEO of Kiefer Consulting (who also plays a mean flute) – Greg Kiefer. Missing from the panel was DR/BC expert and one of the architects of the BPOS-D platform, Mike Watson of SeriousLabz, who had to meet with some local customers and could not make the event.

Greg broke up the night by diving the topics into 6 areas  of focus, and kept the dialog flowing with the audience. He only lost control a couple dozen times, so overall it went well. At one point, Virgil and I got into a passionate discussion around social computing and metadata, but eventually decided – against our better judgment – that we were in agreement: failure to plan for metadata and taxonomy, more than any other feature or area within SharePoint, will lead to an unsuccessful SharePoint deployment. This is especially true within SharePoint. I love the fact that Virgil regularly tells people in his SharePoint Saturday sessions that unless they start with a metadata strategy in SharePoint 2010, they should turn off the Managed Metadata Service. Leaving it on without a plan and valid governance model is a huge mistake.

Great audience, lots of participation, and a fun panel overall. I hope to do more of these in the near future, because I always learn a lot from them. Ask the Expert sessions are a reminder that no single person knows everything about SharePoint – especially not SharePoint 2010, where even the “experts” are learning in real-time.

SharePoint Saturday East Bay Snapshot

 

Nothing like releasing a major product in-between hosting two major out-of-state events. This past weekend, I helped coordinate the very successful inaugural SharePoint Saturday East Bay event in San Ramon at the Marriott. We had 30 speakers from around the globe, a beautiful venue, 21 sponsors, all 4 regional user groups, and 2 in-kind technology sponsors on hand from 7:30am until 6pm, and then followed up with a great SharePint dinner and drinks at Izzy’s off of Bollinger, sponsored by Rackspace.

Friday night before the event, the speakers got together for dinner at the incredible Blackhawk Auto Museum. We ate, we networked, we drooled over rare and unique cars.

On Saturday, Michael Noel and I kicked things off in the morning with keynote addresses from Bill Baer, Technical PM for the IT Pro space on the SharePoint team at Microsoft, dialing in remotely. Bill gave a little bit of perspective into the history of SharePoint and scope of the latest platform release. Bill was followed by Owen Allen, who recently left Microsoft as the ISV PM, and who now works with independent software vendors (ISVs) and strategic integrators (SIs) through his own company, SharePoint Directions LLC. Owen talked about the increasing business opportunities around SharePoint (and will be presenting at the upcoming SharePoint Saturday in Los Angeles on 9/18).

With that send-off, the breakout sessions began. My first session was Enabling Social Media through Metadata. The intent of this session was to help users understand

1. what social computing is, and why it is important,
2. that metadata and taxonomy make social computing in SharePoint possible, and
3. what social computing features are available within SharePoint 2010 (and 2007).

Enabling Social Media through Metadata

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

My second session was 11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations, in which I showed attendees that 85% or more of any migration has nothing to do with the actual technical moving of content and bits. Migration is more about planning and transformation. I walked through 11 areas that must be considered before you execute your migration. (I am giving a live webcast of this session on Thursday, Sept 16th. You can register here)

11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

In the afternoon, Ken Allen and I conducted a vendor session, providing demos of the ControlPoint and Davinci Migrator products. As I mentioned in that session, we have live demos happening daily, so please ping me if you would like to see our products up close.

Late in the afternoon, Mike Watson and I co-presented on our newest topic, SharePoint’s Social Media Scorecard, in which we walked through a short history of social computing, and then gave an in-depth review of the leading social media vendors, including SharePoint, scoring each on 9 different dimensions. The purpose of the presentation was to give attendees a broad overview of what is out there, and how SharePoint compares. In most cases, features are apples-and-oranges when up against SharePoint, but our goal is to prepare people for the inevitable questions that pop up when looking at collaboration options. Hopefully people found it informative.

At the end of the event, Michael Noel and I returned to the front stage to thank our attendees, speakers and sponsors, and to raffle off a number of prizes. There was a bit of controversy in that one woman won a new iPod from a sponsor (they drew from business cards) and then also won the iPad. Hey folks, it happens. It was painful, but legitimate. I was so careful to mention that speakers cannot win prizes (a point of contention at some prior SharePoint events) but neglected to include a rule – if you win once, that’s it. Sorry folks!

All-in-all, it was a fantastic event in the east bay, and we hope to repeat it this time next year. There’s also talk about a SharePoint Saturday in San Francisco (down by the airport) and Sacramento, so please keep checking the SharePointSaturday.org website for updates.

echoTechnology Acquired by Axceler, Launching Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010

A couple key press releases went out this morning, in case you missed them, including news that echoTechnology has been acquired by Axceler, based out of Boston, MA. The full press release can be found here

Axceler Acquires echoTechnology To Offer Industry-Leading SharePoint Migration

Combination of ControlPoint and echo Positions Company As the Leading  Provider of SharePoint Administration and Migration Solutions As Enterprises Get Ready to Upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2010

WOBURN, MA – June 1, 2010 – Axceler, the leader in administration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced its acquisition of echoTechnology, the technology leader in SharePoint migration. With the acquisition, Axceler’s software solutions now address two of the most critical areas of SharePoint management —administration and migration — required as customers move to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. SharePoint migration is a natural extension of Axceler’s product portfolio. Both software companies are privately held and terms were not disclosed.

In addition, we have announced the impending release of our Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, a next-generation migration solution that goes above and beyond other tools in its ability to give the user flexibility and control over their migration to the SharePoint 2010 platform. The full press release is available here

Axceler Announces Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010

Comprehensive New Migration Product Provides Intelligent Facilities For Upgrading To the Latest Version of Microsoft SharePoint

WOBURN, MA – June 1, 2010 – Axceler, the leader in administration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced the release of Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, the first new product to be introduced as a result of its acquisition of echoTechnology (please see separate release). Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 offers comprehensive risk-based control when moving to the latest SharePoint platform. Davinci Migrator reduces the risks, lowers the overall cost and shortens the time it takes to complete a SharePoint 2010 migration. By helping administrators with the discovery and planning of their migrations, Davinci Migrator delivers a unique feature set to the SharePoint market by reducing the number of failed migration iterations and shortening project schedules.
Among the innovative features of Davinci Migrator are:

• Real-time collection of important configuration data, useful for discovering and planning migrations with known-risk profiles and timing;
• A robust configuration querying capability using full, industry standard SQL and an integrated Query-By-Example (QBE) interface;
• Detailed pre-migration analysis and rules engine, allowing users to follow best practices, identify issues during planning, rank them by severity, and recommend actions before moving forward;
• Support for both granular and entire-site migrations from SharePoint 2003 and 2007 to the new SharePoint 2010 platform;
• A powerful migration engine, built for both speed and for control, capable of consolidating from multiple platforms;
• An optimized architecture for large content databases and complex enterprise configurations that have many SharePoint administrators per farm; and,
• Support for migrating in waves, based on user-defined timetables, priorities and severity of issues found, which reduces team and resource impact.

It’s an exciting time to be a part of the Axceler team, and we’re especially enthusiastic about showing our customers all of the unique features within the Davinci Migrator at TechEd next week in New Orleans. If you’re planning to attend, be sure to stop by our booth (Booth 400). Or follow me on Twitter for all of the latest news @buckleyplanet

SharePoint Saturday DC Snapshot

I’m sitting here at Gate D29 at the Dulles International airport, reflecting on this past weekend and the SharePoint Saturday DC event (#SPSDC). Great venue, excellent planning by @meetdux, @usher and team, and close to 1,000 participants. Amazing!

I also want to thank @usher and @gvaro for unwittingly becomes the punch line to a couple last-minute jokes in my presentation on Enabling Social Media in SharePoint 2010 through Metadata (now available through SlideShare below), and to @ruveng for stepping up to help demo managed metadata service (MMS) when I was unable to connect to my environment. Overall, great response and feedback. Hope people enjoyed the session.

SPSDC2010 buckley share

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

Taxonomy for Sale

On a swing through Oregon in March, Joel Oleson and I presented to the Portland SharePoint User’s Group on topics surrounding social computing, metadata and taxonomy within SharePoint, and someone asked a great question: why can’t you just purchase a pre-defined taxonomy?

One of the most important aspects of a successful SharePoint deployment is a well-defined taxonomy and metadata library. Taking the time to define your metadata and content types, build out your taxonomy, and set in place a governance model will ensure that your users will be able to find their content (granted they are assigning the metadata!). But defining, building, and governing your system takes a lot of effort – both at startup and as an ongoing activity. So why can’t someone just purchase a canned taxonomy and vast lists of keywords from a consultant to jumpstart their work?

While I’m sure there are consultants who offer this kind of service, providing guidance and expertise on process and best practices, is that really the right thing to do? (I’m not knocking these consultants by any means, just talking about what is right for your business) They cannot offer more than generic taxonomies based on broad industry knowledge, or around competitive product and service verticals. How useful is this information, really? How much time will you spend trying to match this generic taxonomy to the nuances of your business, instead of outlining your own business taxonomy and expanding on what is unique about you?

I go through these questions as part of my presentation on the topic at user groups and SharePoint Saturdays (tomorrow, at #SPSDC). The hard work must be done by those who know your business – you and your team. Of course, there will be plenty of consultants who will be happy to charge you to embed themselves, offering to learn everything about your business and then build out your system. You might get to deployment more quickly this way if you don’t already have the SharePoint expertise within your organization. But what happens when the consultant leaves post-deployment? Where is the expertise to maintain and update what was built to keep your system relevant?

I came across a great quote in the Harvard Business Review by Dan Ariely in ‘Why Businesses Don’t Experiment’ (April 2010, Page 34):

“Companies (and people) are notoriously bad at making trade-offs. There’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides. When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking.”

The net-net: you need to do the hard work of planning out your taxonomy. Get help, sure, but don’t think you can hand it off to someone else. But if you do decide to farm it out, ping me and I’ll send you my consulting rates ;-)

echoTechnology May Events

The month of May kicks off with a major event: Release To Market of the SharePoint 2010 platform!

The echoTechnology team is celebrating this event by sponsoring the SharePoint 2010 Community Launch event at the Nectar Lounge, Wednesday May 12th, from 4 to 10pm. Free food, music, and networking at a great venue! It’s free, and you can register here. Drinks, food, and music provided by Decibel Festival. Music by DJ Alex Ruder [KEXP] and Chris Govella, as well as J-Justice [Sun Tzu Sound / TRUST]. Hosted by Erica Toelle, Joel Oleson, Owen Allen, and our very own Christian Buckley. You can follow the conversation via Twitter using #SPCLSEA

Later this week will be SharePoint Saturday Washington DC and what is looking to be the largest FREE SharePoint event to date. There’s still time to register and attend, with over 80 speakers and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 attendees. echoTechnology will also be onsite with our partners at Axceler, and giving away a Zune HD during the raffle. Christian will be presenting once again on “Metadata Management in a Social Media World: Enabling Social Media through Metadata.” He’ll also be floating around the event in-between sessions wearing one of the “Booth Babes” t-shirts, so be sure to look for him and say hello.

Finally, on Thursday the 20th at 6pm, Christian will be presenting at the Sacramento SharePoint Users Group at the Maidu Center on metadata, governance, and enabling social media in SharePoint 2010. You can find more information on the event here. We hope to see you there!

The Blog as a Collaboration Tool

The concept of blogging is not as new as you may think – only the technology is young. Well, younger than the average teenager, at least. Blogging came into the mainstream conscience by the late 1990’s, but had its beginnings in the early days of the world wide web, back when the internet was the private network of a privileged few.

For a full history of blogging with important names and dates, you can always read up on Wikipedia. My focus here is more on the business applicability of blogs, and their history inside of SharePoint.

Importance of Blogs on Social Communications

Access to information is critical to success in this day and age. Blogs have helped to democratize information, allowing each of us to share our expertise and opinions, and allowing us to tap into the the long tail of information (A couple must-reads are Chris Anderson’s Long Tail – with a link to his original article, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers)

What makes an expert an expert, anyway? While the value of formal research remains at a premium, the opinion of so-called experts has become a commodity. (Why am I, with my MBA and 20 years of industry experience less of an expert than a 20-something research analyst at Forrester?) In a world of 24 hour news cycles, our thirst for more information – specifically, information that meets our social, political, and theological perspectives – has grown astronomically. And with this thirst, blogging has exploded.

The root cause of this explosion is not just about the improvements to the underlying technology – although technology has certainly increased the rate of change – but about cultural changes. The social informatics of the way that we work have been dramatically altered over the last 20 years, and the blogging platform has played a major role in that change.

The Customer Relationship and 2010

Blogs enable dialog between content owner and constituency, quickly and inexpensively, turning one-to-one communication into many-to-many communication, which over time can drive down support costs, reduce product requirements cycles, and improve the overall customer relationship.

From a business perspective, this tight connection with customers allows for constant reflection on what works / what doesn’t. It forces companies to be more vigilant about their brand, allowing them to react quickly to customer complaints or queries. From a capitalist perspective, this also drives healthy competition and innovation, as companies have a direct view into a competitor’s dirty laundry and the known gaps within a product or platform.

Within SharePoint, there was a similar – if not slow – progression in blogging technology. In WSS 2.0 and SPS 2001, the paradigm of blogging had not yet shifted, and site owners who wanted blog-like functionality (it had not yet entered the average user’s lexicon, even if the fundamentals of blogging were in place) were limited to using content web parts and announcements to achieve their desired result of user/site owner content. Much like the static website, they could alter their portal, but this was once again a one-way, broadcast model of communication.

In SharePoint 2007, Microsoft added some basic blogging capability, but the technology fell far short  of the innovation happening within commercial offerings, such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad (my platform of choice). With the 2010 release, SharePoint has finally caught up with the mainstream, and may even surprise you with some of their innovations. Of course, aside from the feature-by-feature comparisons, the true value of blogging within SharePoint is the seamless integration across the platform.

After selecting the blog template (which now shares the template browsing capability of the MS Office-based products), you can simply name your new site and destination URL, click Create, and your new blog is live.

Your blog is accessible through your My Site, and your entries show up on your activity feed. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has simplified blog management, giving administrators the ability to quickly and easily add, modify, and remove posts, comments, links, photos, and change the look and feel of their blog. Readers have the ability to comment, flag as a favorite (I Like It), and to tag and add notes, all of which appear in the user’s My Site activity stream for others to discover.

All I can say is – it’s about time!