The Creative Balance Part II

In The Creative Balance Part I, I explained the different assumptions about SharePoint from the business perspective opposed to the technical point of view. In short, the difference is that the creative folks many times want to make SharePoint sing and dance and the technical team wants to leverage out of the box SharePoint. SharePoint can certainly sing and dance. The often uttered phrase, “I want SharePoint, but I don’t want it to look like SharePoint” most often refers to the aesthetics, not the functionality or the data entry screens. So, how do you explain the trade-offs that come with SharePoint to your creative folks as well as other business folks who have a passion for look and feel? If you find yourself in this tension often with the customers you deal with then there are three topics of conversation which need to be addressed with upper management. They need to understand these three topics at a high level and the tradeoffs. If you have upper management that listens and heeds your advice then you should get what you need to support a SharePoint instance that will “sing and dance.”

I want to preface this post by declaring that SharePoint is not a difficult product to enhance, style or maintain. I believe this dilemma of styling versus maintaing has spawned in how the SharePoint product line has progressed over the last ten years. People are used to SharePoint being a quick and easy way to build solutions and they’ve come to expect this for every instance. This same discussion would be had if we were using Drupal, DotNet Nuke, or WordPress. Organizations not mature in their software development lifecycle (SDLC) experiences may also fall into these conversation more than those organizations with mature SDLC processes.

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Administration

The first topic that upper management needs to understand is administration. Just like any system, the level of complexity requires a deeper level of support and knowledge to keep the system humming. If we’re talking about a system that services public customers or a large amount of internal customers then the expectations from the business for support will be higher. To offer a greater availability of support and knowledge you have to have a person who understands both SharePoint and the custom work that was done on the system. Also, if this is a high availability site with complex customizations or integrations then you should not rely on a vendor to support it.

Many times, companies will hire contractors on a retainer, but that doesn’t always mean that when disaster strikes that same contractor can leave what they’re doing and instantly tackle your problems. They may need to finish with the client they’re working with before they can assist. And let’s say they can’t make it for days or are on vacation. So, they pass it on to a colleague. With a highly complex site it isn’t feasible for that person to learn the system and then tackle the issue. That person may know  SharePoint, but they probably don’t know the custom solutions, timer jobs, content deployment and so on. That is why it is imperative to cross train on highly complex SharePoint sites.

Custom solutions and features can also be complex and not every SharePoint system administrator knows how to correctly handle these. A feature may have files located deep in the “x” hive and deploying a solution demands a person with a keen understanding of deploying features to the correct web application, site collection and site level. I won’t pretend that I know anything about styling or themes in SharePoint. I just received Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design in the mail today to learn and understand more. What I do know from experience with highly styled and customized SharePoint 2010 sites is that the more sleek they are in terms of UI design, the more complicated they are to maintain, update, troubleshoot and deploy (more on deployment later). We now understand from 3 year of SharePoint 2007 experience and now with a 1-1/2 years under out belt with SharePoint 2010 that it is a massive system. We’re only starting to scratch the surface within of all the intricacies it possesses. It is far too much for one person to handle in a large organization, yet I see it all the time. Large deployments with one or no FTE set the organization up for failure as well as the IT group.

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Enhancements

Alright, lets keep complex SharePoint sites in our forethought. When I mention complex, I mean page design beyond what SharePoint normally can accomplish with themes. I’m speaking of customizing the ribbon, the fuctionality of lists, dynamically driven content, etc. I’m talking about custom solutions deployed to a large farm that includes BCS or integrations to Data Warehouses, LOB’s such as a CRM or an ERP. http://www.ferrari.com, http://www.recovery.gov and http://www.chilis.com. Sites such as these have dedicated technical teams, both development and SharePro, that support these sites. When thinking about enhancements you need to take into consideration the audience of the site and the frequency in which enhancements will occur. For a public marketing site, you’re going to want it to be stylistic and carry the company brand throughout. I understand this point of view and encourage it. For 90% of all public marketing sites the frequency of features and functionality stays the same for 6 months or greater. Enhancements will come slowly and deployments less frequent. In this case, branding and custom solutions can make SharePoint sing and dance. It is still imperative to help the business understand the complexities that come with the highly styled and custom developed sites. Again, the same would be said to make Drupal or WordPress sing and dance. Development cycles are always going to increase with complexity and the time to deploy is also expanding. This either means that the site will be unavailable longer for deployment or you must invest in hardware and software to handle failover and redundancy. You can see how this is becoming more complex already. I have been involved in 20 minute deployments and I have been involved in 36 hour deployments. I prefer the 20 minute deployments. The business must be aware and understand that the investment in people and resources is greated depending on their thresholds.

But most frustration comes when the creative folks want to carry the same brand and and custom page layout from the public marketing site into the extranet, intranet/employee portal. This is where function should far outweigh form. Carrying through the company brand is essential and can be achieved on a more basic level. When you have a highly styled public site that does not necesarrily use page real estate the same way as you would if you were viewing large amounts of data (i.e. datasheet view) you have also interrupted the user experience in a negative way. When I want to see all of the columns in a list, but have two gray bars on each side of the page that together steal 150 pixels of screen real estate, then my user experience has been negatively affected. The frequency of enhancements to an internal facing site such as an employee portal will likely be more frequent so you want to bear this in mind when catering to the business needs. Custom solutions should be deployed when necessary but ease up on the custom UI.

What I am saying is that the styling and branding should not overrule the function. Solutions were meant to be built and deployed in SharePoint and with the proper planning and preparation these are painless. Keep in mind the intended usage of the site before you agree to make it sing and dance. If it’s an information working tool keep the branding and styling to a minimal. If it’s a brochureware site, make the user interface sing and dance. Branding and custom solutions both play a roll in the time to deploy enhancements and explaining this to the business is imperative. With custom work comes more quality assurance testing, more user acceptance testing and longer deployment times as well as the staff to sustain this system.

Migrations and Upgrades

In a highly complex SharePoint deployment, turn off Automatic Updates in your production environment! Some organization choose to turn it on in their QA sites or UAT sites since all solutions will be deployed through these environments first it is an easy way to find issues with custom developed solutions. As all IT Pros and developers know you’re going to have to do regression testing when these patches are released. If you’re using out of the box (OOB) SharePoint you can be less concerend about this since Microsoft does a nice QA job for you, but as soon as you introduce custom developed solutions you need to put some rigor behind upgrades and patches that vendors release. Whether it’s a update to the SAN where your SharePoint databases reside or Patch Tuesday in SharePoint deployments where there are custom solutions this is a must and it takes people. What about major releases of SharePoint? SharePoint “X” is right around the corner so take this into consideration when building those custom master pages and solutions. You want to minimize the pain in 3 years whenit’s time to upgrade. Inform upper management that the more you customize it is the more it will cost to upgrade/migrate.

So, what happens if upper management doesn’t listen and forges on? I’ll address that in Creative Balance Part III.

Microsoft SharePoint Designer does not support editing non-SharePoint sites.

After installing SharePoint Designer 2010 I received the error below when trying to open a SharePoint 2010 Team Site. The error text said, “Microsoft SharePoint Designer does not support editing non-SharePoint sites.” Microsoft’s KB describes a way to fix this, but I had already performed the step in this KB through Central Admin. The error persisted in Designer. What fixed the issue was simply closing Designer and then reopening it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981223

Reporting with SSRS and SharePoint 2010

We had a customer who decided to create 30 lists in SharePoint and try to convert it into a relational database. Before we knew it, they had over 2 gb of data in these lists and had the desire to run weekly reports based on certain criteria. In this case, it had to do with purchasing real estate and securing charters for a for-profit charter school management organization. They wanted a sort of KPI in report format that they could run on a weekly basis, print it off and take it to a meeting where they would discuss the current state of a particular piece of real estate and the charter that was scheduled for that piece of real estate. Because this information was in various lists as well as contained criteria for which they wanted we searched and found this slick tool from Enesys Software. Enesys Software is a French company and their tool is unique in that it allows you query multiple SharePoint lists based on criterion in from each list.

There is no plug in or feature to deploy in SharePoint. This is a SQL Server Reporting Services plug-in so the footprint in minor and the results have large implications. Cost is broken up by features, the number of developers that will need to license it and the number of servers you plan installing it on. For all intensive purposes, the Standard Edition should get most organizations what they need for $3,000 and that includes maintenance.

After the reports are built, users can either access Reporting Services to run the report or you can publish them to a document library. None of the SSRS features are removed. I’ve found that most of the limitations I run into are when users want a view of the data to analyze the data, not when they want to do data entry. This tool allows you to create reports with the data your customer needs and still take advantage of the SQL Services Reporting Server features so you can even style the reports and “dress” them up.

The support is pretty good, but you’ll have to get used to French accents.

http://www.enesyssoftware.com.

The Creative Balance in SharePoint Part 1

As all SharePoint enthusiasts know there is a sweet spot that comes after you install SharePoint. That sweetspot is the lists and features that SharePoint does well. Team collaboration is where SharePoint shines. From a technologists standpoint, you blow out a team site for a customer and they are enthused with how fast it all comes together. Gather a few requirements from them and build a robust list with some neat views and you’ve sold that customer on SharePoint for all of their team collaboration needs.

Three months later, that customer comes back and wants to know if she could setup an approval workflow for a tasklist on her teamsite. “Sure” you say. “No problem!” And a day later your customer is being productive with that new feature.

Your customer is now creating her own lists and getting some functionality out of lists that you believed an end user would never be able to do. Now, that same customer comes to you a year later with another project. This time she wants a new site and she is going to use this site to publish content to the rest of the company. You’ve now crossed over to publishing. And because we’re going to be sharing this with 4,000 people we better dress it up. Over the years, you’ve come to fear this phrase when it’s used in conjunction with the word SharePoint. I’m a system admin you say? I don’t know anything about “dressing up.” I wear 15 year old jeans to work every day along with this flannel shirt my mother got me in 10th grade. Don’t make fun, it’s very comfortable. I’m proud I can fit into these jeans from 15 years ago. What do you do when your customer says, I want to “dress it up”?

Your first reaction is to say, “No!” because you don’t understand that side of SharePoint to give a straight answer. You haven’t even heard what the customer means when she says, “dress it up?” Maybe it’s just colors and you can achieve this in the Look and Feel section of the Site Settings. I know this happens because it’s my knee jerk reaction as well.

What happens when your marketing group wants to get involved with your intranet and customize SharePoint beyond themes? They want custom navigation and those discussion boards that SharePoint provides just are pretty. Lets dress those up too. This is where I get squeamish. Not in all cases do I get squeamish. This gut wrenching feeling comes for me when it’s sites that have fast release cycles from many user advocates. If your using SharePoint for your public marketing site, go bananas. DRESS IT UP! Customize those discussion boards and bring in that third party navigation because I know that he release cycles will be few and far between and I only have one customer tugging at my coat sleeves for enhancements.

But, with your intranet,  your servicing many customers and are receiving many requests from different business units. You also want to keep the same navigation across all the sites and the same user experience. Don’t get me wrong, I think the user experience is huge and should be consistent. But, we’re talking about making productivity tools and sharing information across business units. I doesn’t have to have custom navigation and sleek discussion boards unless…it gives you a unique competitive advantage.

So, here is the conclusion. 90% of your internal customers needs can be met with out of the box SharePoint look and feel. 80% of your customer’s needs can be met with out of the box SharePoint functionality. That is, without busting out Visual Studio. Sure, you can use SharePoint Designer and build custom workflows. That’s out of the box.

Any time you deploy features that have custom code such as navigation or altering the way SharePoint functionality works out of the box you increase deployment times, user acceptance, quality assurance. This compounds when you have 10 business units tugging at your coat sleeves for new projects and want custom solutions. Guess what, you’ve got to do regression testing so you don’t break everyone else’s customizations. The beat goes on and on from here.

My next post will assert how you get your customers to understand this in laymen’s terms.

SharePoint Users Group for Educators

I had the opportunity to present what we’re doing in SharePoint 2010 to a group of educators. This is the SharePoint Users Group for Educators, which is new as of January 2010. The user group is sponsored by Microsoft, but run by the user group. It truly is a user group. The only vendor there is Microsoft, and the gentleman that runs the group is Scott Thompson. He’s doing a great job of letting the group be user run. If you’re an educator and interested in joining the group please feel free to contact me using the comments section below. I will get you signed up.

NHA OLE at the SharePoint Users Group for Educators

The SharePoint Keep-Alive Job

Andrew Connell pointed out a “must have” for the SharePoint 2010 sites. Whether your demo’ing sites to customers or you just want your customers to experience a fast page load first thing in the morning you need to deploy this. Hats off to Andrew for this post. Like I said, it’s a “must have.”

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2010/03/27/introducing-the-sharepoint-site-collection-keep-alive-job.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 Expiration set at 180 Days

If you’re not aware, there is a expiration date set on the SharePoint 2010 beta 2. It will stop working after a certain point in time. I haven’t found an answer for it yet. We are in the early adopter program with Microsoft, but we have not had any contact with them. It’s all done through our partner. Unfourtunately, the EAP is not what I expected and you do not get the support you think you’re going to get.

We have three site collections created, two of them give us an error when arriving at the default.aspx page. The third site collection is highly customized but it still works fine. The other two sites are out of the box Publishing site templates.

I can think of something that would have beneficial as part of the early adopter program and that would have been to know the other companies that were part of the program and how we can connect with them to share ideas and warn them of these types of incidents. I am trying to connect with Dan Holme to see if he’s encountered this with the Olympics site that he did in Beta 2. If anyone is aware of a reg hack or something that will fix this let me know. When I find out I will post the fix.