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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.

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.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference Recap

Ah yes, nothing better than traveling across the country with a serious chest cold. Makes for some interesting adventures, let me tell you. While I was able to conduct both of my sessions at the conference, what I was not able to do was spend a lot of time talking with members of the SharePoint community – which is one of my favorite parts of attending these events. Thankfully, I am just about healthy and getting ready for a 3-event swing through California and Massachusetts. I’ve included links to my latest slide shares below:

BPC10 BuckleyMigration-share

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

BPC10 BuckleyMetadata-share

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

Speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2010 – Washington, D.C.

If you follow me on Twitter (@buckleyplanet) you’re probably aware that I have two sessions at the upcoming Best Practices Conference being held in Washington, D.C. from August 24th through 27th  I thought I’d provide a bit more detail about my sessions:

11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migration
Audience: Admin, IT Pro
Session Level: 200-300

Abstract: Migration is a roadblock to moving forward you’re your SharePoint strategy. Migration is phased, iterative, and error prone. But migration itself is not the goal – an optimized and user-friendly environment is your goal. Beyond the Microsoft-provided overview of how to plan for an upgrade and migration, there is a lot of room for error. This presentation outlines 11 critical strategies for migration planning that no project should move forward without.

Enabling Social Media through Metadata
Audience: Admin, End User
Session Level: 100-200

Abstract: Many companies, whether considering further investment in their SharePoint 2007 deployments or planning upgrades to SharePoint 2010, are reviewing their social media strategies. Many users are chomping at the bit to deploy and use the new, natively supported social media features in SharePoint 2010. But most administrators do not fully understand the taxonomy and data governance issues within SharePoint that are associated with these kinds of solutions. The intent of this presentation is to walk participants through the taxonomy and governance implications of the social media capabilities within SharePoint 2007 and 2010, to provide them with the information they need to prepare their organization for these tools, and to provide guidance, best practices, and working examples on how to approach setting up and managing metadata, aligning these tools with their broader corporate content management strategies, and to maintain manageability of their SharePoint environment through governance.

 
For those who have never attended (this is my first, as well), this is one of the biggest SharePoint related conferences of the year. You can find some of the industry’s best speakers and many invaluable sessions on all sorts of SharePoint topics -- all centering around best practices. As the site says:

Best Practices is about doing things the right way: the most efficient, effective ways to achieve goals, distilled into adaptable, repeatable procedures you can use.

If you’re planning on attending, please look for me. When not presenting, I can be found in the exhibit hall at the Axceler booth, giving demos of our latest product: the Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010. See you there!

How to Jump Start Your Governance – Part 2

Originally published on EndUserSharePoint.com

In a previous article, I identified one of the most common questions surrounding the process of implementing a governance mode in the enterprise: How do you begin?

Because SharePoint tends to be a user-driven technology, many companies find themselves in a position of having to retroactively apply metadata rules, refine (or, if they haven’t done so already, define) their taxonomy, and roll out some kind of governance model in an effort to take back control of a quickly expanding (like a wildfire!) SharePoint environment. In the article, I recommended some basic but critical first steps to implementing a governance model:

1. Create an internal SharePoint user group. Gather a group of those who run SharePoint, who are interested in learning about SharePoint, and those who know your business. Meet weekly, monthly – whatever makes sense as you start to put together your plans. Bounce ideas off one another, share responsibilities, but most important of all – incorporate the various perspectives into your plan so that your governance model better matches the culture of your group and company.
2. Clearly define roles and responsibilities. Outline the necessary functions to deploy and govern. Figure out what you need at the enterprise, organizational, and site level. Put a process in place (like OARP) to help the decision-making process.
3. Outline your taxonomy, communicate it, and iterate. The point here is to get started. Don’t wait for perfection – outline what you know, roll it out, and let your users refine it as they go. It’s an iterative process that needs ongoing management, so just do your best and let the process work.

Sounds easy, right? It’s all common sense, right? And yet many companies struggle with these concepts. Following on the theme of common sense, I’d like to provide some additional guidance and best practices around jumpstarting your SharePoint governance.

My intent here is not to prescribe a process or outline specific steps, but to give you some ideas, get you thinking, and hopefully add good things to what may already be in motion. Consider the following:

• Have a plan. That’s right – a plan! Listen to the experts, comb through the relevant articles, consider those best practices, and develop a plan based on your organizational and project needs. Help your management team and end users to understand the full scope of the project – that it’s not just about a technical implementation, but that it is also a business process change.
• Understand any regulatory or compliance concerns. Are there any rules or procedures having to do with legal or financial guidelines that may dictate how you setup and/or manage your SharePoint environment? Do you need to maintain audit trails? Reporting? Workflows? Metrics? These items would fall into the scoping and sizing of your project during the planning phase. 
• Be aware of how your metadata, content types, and social media components are to be managed. What is the actual process involved with managing these things? Who owns it? What is the change process? Are you going to try and maintain SLAs? This might be overkill for small businesses, but is critical for larger businesses. A major impact to end user adoption is a long turn-around time for system changes. Some of these activities are simplified within SharePoint 2010 through Managed Metadata Service and Enterprise Term Stores, which allow you to create top-level taxonomy for your entire organization, with sites consuming this taxonomy as a service. Then each site can create its own taxonomy – which other sites may or may not consume as a service. But just remember, SharePoint 2010 does not decrease the need for governance. If anything, the ability for end users to apply their own metadata  will create more work for site and site collection admins, if metadata is to be managed properly.(Microsoft refers to top-down as a ‘taxonomy,’ and a bottom-up or user-define as a ‘folksonomy’) SharePoint 2010 has made strong advances in managing taxonomy and metadata for the enterprise, but it still requires upfront and ongoing work to ensure you have the latest, greatest data.
• Create a governance site. Make your policies visible. When people ask questions, point them to an ever-expanding FAQ list (Use SharePoint! Don’t create yet another document). Update the site regularly. Make it functional, not just a one-time dumping ground for rarely used process documentation. And be sure to constantly refresh your governance site. This should not be a static site, but a working platform from which you manage your process, take suggestions, and change as needed.
• Enlist your portal users and content authors. This goes beyond my advice for creating a user group, and relates to all end users. Give them a voice in the process. Get regular feedback from your business units and content authors. To capture this data, use search metrics, discussion threads, and polls. Once again, capturing data at regular intervals should be part of your initial project planning, as this will also provide a mechanism for reporting back to management on the progress – and success – of your SharePoint deployment. 
• Migrate your content, leverage your metadata. Depending on where you are with your SharePoint environment – just rolling it out, or in the process of revamping/cleaning up your existing system – you may have different tasks in front of you. There are a number of approaches to upgrade or migration, either manually or using third-party tools. Whatever the approach, be sure to follow your newly-defined taxonomy. You’ve taken all that time to outline your taxonomy and complex metadata structure, it’s only fitting that you actually use it. Update as you go, propagate your changes, and keep the feedback loop with your end users running.
• Learn and evolve – Nothing is set in stone. Portals evolve – and so will the taxonomy. You’ll rarely get it right on the first try, but you’ll lose time and productivity the longer you sit idle, so the key is to take action and iterate, iterate, iterate. 

Hopefully this guidance is useful, and helps you to take action. My advice on how to move forward remains the same: keep your governance model simple, let your processes grow and develop organically, and keep your end users in the loop. If they understand the governance model, they’ll use it. If you are transparent about the process, and can quickly respond to user requests and changing business needs because you’ve kept it simple, they’ll trust it. And if they’re using the application and trusting the change process, your management team is more likely to view your overall SharePoint efforts as a success.

Good luck.

SharePoint Saturday – Hello California!

Just wanted to post something quickly to push people toward these two events that I am helping to bring to fruition: SharePoint Saturday East Bay and SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles, both taking place in September. These are free events for SharePoint newbies and seasoned developers alike, and I welcome everyone to register and attend.

What is SharePoint Saturday? SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics. SharePoint Saturday is always FREE, open to the public, and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint.

Sponsorships are just about filled up in Northern California, but wide open (as of this posting) in Southern California.  Registration is now open for both, and we’re still looking for speakers in LA. Details below:

SharePoint Saturday East Bay (website)
San Ramon Marriott, 2600 Bishop Drive, San Ramon (info)
Register here
Facebook fan page, Twitter tag
Sponsorship form (still looking for raffle sponsors!)

SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles (website)
Hilton LAX, 5711 West Century Blvd, Los Angeles (info)
Register here
Twitter tag
Sponsorship form, Speakers form

Managing Your Metadata

Published through EndUserSharePoint.com

When setting up your new SharePoint environment, one of the questions you’ll need to answer is centralized or de-centralized? Do you want to tightly control your environment, as you do with your external-facing portal, or do you want to enable the full capability of SharePoint and allow people to collaborate, ad hoc, as they see fit? Or maybe you want to do something in-between?

Unfortunately, the same question pops up again around managing your metadata, regardless of your environment management decisions. You can have a locked-down, controlled site creation model within your organization, and people can still “run amuck” with how they assign (or don’t assign) metadata.

To help with your planning, let’s review some of the pros and cons to both centralized and decentralized models:

Centralized

In a centralized model, the site architecture is centrally controlled, and metadata is always applied to content – usually as required fields when uploading or modifying content. Site Columns and Content Types are created at the site collection root, and lists get “bundles” of columns.

There are a number of advantages to this model:

• It improves consistency
• It reduces metadata duplication
• Because everything is controlled, it’s generally easy to update
• It’s easy to support and train on
• It allows document-level DIP, Workflow, Information Policies, and document templates

The downsides to metadata management in a centralized model include:

• It requires a lot of planning to ensure you get it right up front, as well as make the right ongoing, global changes
• It requires upfront work. It’s a much more complex deployment
• It’s difficult to manage across site collections and portals, as you need to work with various teams and organizations to find consensus on enterprise designs and templates
• From an end user perspective, they have less ownership over their environment and have to wait longer for changes, making adoption slower and decreasing “stickiness”

Decentralized

In a decentralized model, the site architecture is ad-hoc, with teams and individuals able to create sites and pages as needed. Metadata may not be well-defined, or applied to content at all. Columns are created on lists, and are combined in an ad-hoc basis on each list.

The advantages to this model are:

• It requires no metadata planning
• It requires little upfront effort – deploy SharePoint, and let people self-manage how (and if) they assign metadata
• It works across site collections and portals

The downsides to this model include:

• A lack of consistency across your environment
• It increases metadata duplication
• It’s difficult to update
• It’s hard to support and train on
• It only allows list-level Workflow, Information Policies and document templates
• It is difficult to reverse

There is no “right answer” to how you manage your metadata policies. However, few companies will find themselves at the far ends of this range, but somewhere in-between. The important step is to define your policies up front – decide how you want to manage your environment and metadata, publish those policies so that people understand them, and then be consistent. Your end user will appreciate it, measurable through increased adoption of your SharePoint environment and overall usability.

What Drives Social Media in SharePoint?

From EndUserSharePoint.com

Ask a crowd of people whether they believe social computing is important within the enterprise, and you usually see  -- at best -- an even split of yes and no answers. More often than not, the majority of people answer no. As I present on the topic at various conferences and SharePoint Saturday events, most people attend my session not because they believe social computing is critical to their business, but because they want to understand why they should care.

With so many people ambivalent to social computing, why is it that one of the top technology trends is the expansion of social computing features across enterprise applications? One problem with perception is that people tend to focus on the consumer social media applications without considering the underlying application of the technologies that power them, and how those features and capabilities might improve the enterprise.

So why should you care about social media in SharePoint? Well, let’s take a look at some of the problems you may be experiencing within your environment:

• You’ve spent months migrating content into your shiny, new SharePoint environment. You’ve moved your information silos from your old, proprietary portal or file shares to SharePoint. NOW WHAT???
• You were sold on the idea of search, but you can’t find anything.
• You can’t tell who owns what.
• You can’t tell what’s new, what’s old, or what has changed.
• You realize that all of your data is now disconnected.

How do you solve these problems? The answer is managed metadata, thoughtful taxonomy, and a solid governance model. The answer is to roll out social computing tools within SharePoint to improve search and provide additional methods for surfacing data within your environment. Think of it as a software stack:

Metadata powers both structured (taxonomy) and unstructured (ad hoc) collaboration, which is then filtered by the various social media tools, which is an extension of search, which makes your team site, portal, and content relevant to end users. Across all of these pieces is your governance model, ensuring all of the moving parts are working together.

 

Metadata is the key to making social media work inside the enterprise. It makes social media work within SharePoint, it makes your content visible to end users, and it powers search. Metadata makes your environment useable, linkable, relevant. Metadata is the building block of social media within SharePoint.

When thinking through your own social media strategy, its important that you recognize this connection between social computing, metadata, and search. It will help you to sell your team and management chain on the powerful impact of social media in the enterprise, and, more importantly, help you realize the full potential of your SharePoint investments.

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 ;-)

SharePoint Saturday Charlotte

I’m heading over to Charlotte, NC this afternoon to participate in another great SharePoint event – SharePoint Saturday Charlotte. I’ll be speaking again on “Metadata Management in a Social Media World” with new slides based on input and great conversations with Joel Oleson around our recent presentations to the Portland and Bend, Oregon SharePoint Users Groups last week.

The gist of my presentation: social computing is what unearths your content in SharePoint, and is the key to unlocking your metadata – especially in 2010. Metadata is what powers social media, and it needs to be managed. SharePoint 2010 adds new features, but the planning and management does not go away.

Some of my slides from SharePoint Saturday Boston are available here. See you in Charlotte!