With time, your SharePoint environment is bound to undergo changes of different types. This may include the introduction or implementation of new applications, technologies, systems, tools, hardware, processes, or changes in responsibilities and roles. Learning how to manage changes effectively will help you introduce new things in your business operations quickly and that too with minimal service disruption. If your business uses SharePoint Server 2010 or plans to introduce it sometimes soon, here are some of the changes that you are likely to face, and some ways of managing them:
Major Changes
In most of the cases, different teams and different systems are likely to get affected by major changes. For example, say you plan to use Office Web Applications – an integrated SharePoint Service application, which lets users edit and read documents within a browser. In this case, different teams need to work together. The test team will use a test server to load-test the Office Web Applications and get an insight into the expected usage patterns and anticipate how the productions servers will perform. The team of SharePoint Administrators will decide the deployment plan and script the installation, where it’s possible. While assessing security, reviewing known vulnerabilities and minimizing risks is the job of the security team, the network team will check if the additional load can be supported by the bandwidth, and change firewall rules to allow access from the Internet to the Office Web Applications servers, if the need arises. Lastly, the user acceptance team will test the system and offer its feedback for changes or improvements. In other words, your change review meetings should include all the teams that are likely to be affected by the change or involved in the change. It’s also important to assess the effect of the change, test the deployment procedures, and have the contingency and rollback plans ready in case you need them.
Minor Changes
Your IT environment isn’t affected significantly by such changes. For example, you can easily modify some SharePoint security policies without disturbing the entire set up. So, whether you need to change the authentication of providers to allow only a handful of your users authenticated in a web application, or change permission policies related to web application levels, you can do so. However, having a clear idea of how to bring these changes is necessary. Take an instance when you are going to change User Policy. You will need to define the Zone where the policy will be applied. You can apply the change to “All Zones”, or have distinct policies for users accessing the sites through public internet (internet zone) and for those who use the SharePoint sites from the intranet zone (i.e. from your internal network).
Significant Changes
Deploying a new service pack would come under this category. Such changes need major resources to plan, assemble, and implement the entire procedure. So, you should have suitable change controls in place to understand the effect of the change, assess deployment procedures, and have contingency and rollback plans ready.
Standard Changes
Such changes are well understood, performed regularly and are documented. Some examples include configuration of a new SharePoint content source or creation of a new SharePoint site collection. Usually, you won’t require change controls for regular changes as they are documented in SOPs (standard operating procedures).
So, keep these points in mind while managing changes to your SharePoint environment.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
If you want to manage your work flow effectively and streamline your business processes, Microsoft InfoPath 2010 can prove to be an important tool in your hands. Apart from being loaded with rich features like hyperlink insertion, picture buttons, time and date pickers, filtering options etc, this tool can help you to create forms and gather data. Using user-friendly layout sections and diverse styles, you can develop and design interactive XML-based data entry forms with the help of InfoPath 2010. You may even use it to instantly modify SharePoint list forms. Let us take a look at how InfoPath 2010 can help your business:
Design forms
Unlike traditional toolbars and menus that usually require several steps to create forms, you can use the Ribbon interface of InfoPath 2010 to create forms fast. Since the Ribbon uses a tab structure to display commands, which are organized by tasks that are related to a specific activity, creating the forms that you want can be done in quick time. InfoPath 2010 also helps you to craft sophisticated forms quickly without writing any code. You will just need to use a few clicks to add validation, actions or do some formatting to create your own form. Thanks to the InfoPath Filler, people filling out forms can now use a cleaner user interface as compared to the precious versions. If your business needs forms that support digital signatures, forms for SharePoint lists etc, you can use InfoPath 2010 to create them easily. Publishing your forms with a single click also becomes easy with the use of Ribbon Quick Access toolbar or the Backstage view of Microsoft Office.
Create collaborative workflow solutions for SharePoint
If you need SharePoint workflow solutions to be used at the enterprise or departmental level, you can create them using InfoPath with little or no code. You can build these solutions from an existing library or list (modular solutions), add capabilities with code (extensible solutions), and publish them using the SharePoint site template or the Windows SharePoint Services solutions, which can be moved from server to server or from site to site (portable solutions). You can even enjoy richer web forms, thanks to controls and functionality available in InfoPath 2010 browser forms like combo boxes, date and time controls, and filtering. You can also manage your InfoPath forms on SharePoint Server 2010 without any hassle.
Create enhanced forms and connect them to LOB systems
If you need to create forms for specific business-processes, you can employ codes to enhance InfoPath forms using SharePoint Server Sandboxed Solutions and Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Since InfoPath 2010 works well with BCS (Business Connectivity Services) of SharePoint Server 2010, you can link forms with line-of-business (LOB) information, which in turn would help in streamlining development of solutions with deep integration of external services and data.
Use InfoPath 2010 today to streamline your business processes.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
If you are looking for an effective business tool that would help you in collaborating data and offer seamless document management, Microsoft® SharePoint™ 2010 can be the ideal choice. You can use it for creating external and internal websites and even develop specialized applications such as blogs and wikis. Since it is a feature rich platform, you can even go further and use customized web applications to leverage your business. If you are wondering how to do it, here are some cues:
SharePoint Branding, SharePoint Design & SharePoint Master Page Customization
SharePoint 2010 comes loaded with new improvements that let you customize the SharePoint user interface. . Even the new user interface controls like the status and notification area as well as the dialog framework allow you to interact with the user without changing the feel and look of SharePoint, or without disturbing their task. This can be especially helpful in case of business operations that need multiple users to collaborate and communicate in real time.
Customizing Document Sets
SharePoint 2010 has a new feature called Document Sets. The function of document sets is quite similar to folders. If your business needs users to work together on related documents, they can use this feature of SharePoint 2010 to organize unmanaged documents and collaborate on data that have been invested with similar metadata. So, there is no need of creating a new document library or site for the purpose, which in turn saves cost, streamlines the operations, and increases your business productivity.
Insightful Business Intelligence Dashboards
Web developers can use SharePoint ™ 2010 to create insightful business intelligence dashboards using PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint. If you are wondering what PerformancePoint Services is all about, it is a performance management service that can help you to supervise and analyze your business operations by providing flexible, user-friendly tools for building scorecards, dashboards, KPIs (key performance indicators) and reports.
Customized Training
Business requirements related to training management or the needs of the HR department can be handled by using InfoPath 2010 to customize SharePoint 2010 list forms. InfoPath 2010 can help you set validation rules, modify layouts of list forms, or create supplementary views using little or no code. Once the modification of the list forms is complete, you can easily reflect your changes back to SharePoint by using the single click publishing capability that comes with the list form. So, whether the training coordinator needs to add optional information related to the training session (with enhanced rich text coupled with tables, pictures, and hyperlinks), or wishes to create new training opportunities by adding new items, all these and more can be done.
These and some other custom SharePoint web applications can make your business process initiation, tracking, participation, and reporting an easy job and optimize the way people, processes and content interact within and across organizations. So, find out what suits your business objectives the best and then implement the same.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our primary focus is to facilitate organizations achieve their financial and business objectives by using SharePoint more effectively.
By integrating InfoPath 2010 to the SharePoint 2010 platform, you can carry out many business processes with ease and speed. Let us see how your business can get leverage from such an act:
Creating extensible, modular, and portable SharePoint 2010 applications
You can use InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 to create SharePoint applications with little or no code, which can be used either at the enterprise or departmental level. These solutions can be extensible (in case you add capabilities with code), modular (where you create them from existing library or list), and portable (as you can use .wsp format to publish forms and move the application from server to server or site to site).
Making it easier for users to fill out forms
Your users who are filling out forms can now enjoy greater consistency, thanks to the enhanced parity between InfoPath forms in SharePoint Server 2010 and InfoPath 2010 client forms. In both these environments, functionality that are available include numbered, bulleted, and plain lists; combo boxes; multiple-selection list boxes; hyperlink capabilities; picture buttons; choice section and group; filtering functionality; people pickers as well as date and time controls.
Hosting forms on web pages:
Using the InfoPath Form Web Part, you can now host your forms on web pages in the SharePoint Server 2010 easily. Unlike SharePoint Server 2007 where users had to write codes in Visual Studio for hosting their InfoPath forms on web pages, you can now simply add the InfoPath Form Web Part to a particular Web Part page and point the same to your published form. This way, the entire job can be carried out without the need of writing a single line of code. You may even host any InfoPath browser form that has been already published to a SharePoint form library or list. You can also send or receive data by connecting it to other Web Parts on the page.
Managing forms on the server easily:
You can manage InfoPath forms as a true component of SharePoint Server 2010. Thanks to the new SPME (SharePoint Maintenance Engine) Rules, it is ensured that InfoPath forms are created in their farms correctly. An effective way of managing your InfoPath forms is the use of Windows PowerShell as well as the scripting language, which is included in SharePoint Server 2010.
Connect forms with REST web services and LOB
InfoPath 2010 integrates with BCS (Business Connectivity Services) of SharePoint Server 2010, thus making it easier to connect forms with line-of-business information. You can also use REST web services for your business needs as InfoPath 2010 now supports getting XML data from such services. To get the desired data from the REST Web Services, form designers will just need to change the URL parameters dynamically without any code.
Maintaining WCAG 2.0
If your business needs to reach out to users with disabilities, InfoPath 2010 forms on SharePoint Server 2010 can help as they are now compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA. What’s more, such forms powered by SharePoint Server 2010 now work well with XHTML 1.0.
No wonder that the integration of InfoPath 2010 to the SharePoint 2010 platform can indeed make many business processes simpler and faster.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our primary focus is to facilitate organizations achieve their financial and business objectives by using SharePoint more effectively.
If your business plans to use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, it would be wise on your part to have an insight into effective capacity management. This way, you will have adequate knowledge for sizing, planning, and controlling service capacity to make sure that the minimum performance levels as specified in your SLA are exceeded.
Providing IT services to your clients at a reasonable cost and still meet performance levels defined in your SLAs is what good capacity management is all about. Remember that capacity management is an ongoing process, since you will need to change the implementation procedures based on how your content and usage get affected by time. In other words, you will need to plan for change and growth, so that your SharePoint Server 2010 based environment can go on delivering an effective business solution. So, here are some steps that will help you to carry out successful capacity management for your SharePoint Server 2010 environment.
Analyzing the model
You will need to analyze your existing solutions and estimate the expected demand and targets before modeling your SharePoint Server 2010-based environment. You can do this by gathering information about your data requirements, user base, throughput targets, end-user latency etc, which will help you to have a clear idea of the SharePoint Server features that you would like to deploy. You should also have a clear idea of your dataset and expected workload for proper sizing of SharePoint Server 2010. In other words, to implement this solution, you should be able to explain dataset characteristics like content distribution and content size, as well as describe the characteristics of the workload that includes operations used most frequently and the number of users. You may also analyze your IIS Logs to know more about key metrics about an existing SharePoint Server 2010 deployment. This way, you will be able to handle the workload distribution well as you would have the knowledge about how many users are active, how heavily the system is being used by them, kind of requests that are coming in, and the kind of clients from where they originate etc.
Choosing the right architecture
To offer services at reasonable cost and meet performance standards, it’s important to decide on the architecture when you install SharePoint Server 2010. So, based on what your business needs are, you may use a single server or link multiple servers to a SharePoint Server farm, which has clustered or mirrored database servers and offers discreet application servers to handle various services. You should also ensure that clients can access data in quick time through the network. Having proper disk management in place is another important factor. It’s not just enough to have adequate space for your data. Rather, you should also evaluate the on-going demand and growth, and make sure that your storage architecture is not creating bottlenecks in the system or slowing it down.
Testing and Optimization
This is a critical stage of effective capacity management. Before deploying the new architectures, test them to see if they can help you achieve the desired performance and capacity targets. This way, you can also identify bottlenecks, if any, and deal with them before they affect users in a live deployment. When you are upgrading your SharePoint Server 2007 and plan to bring architectural changes, such tests can help you make sure that the new SharePoint Server-based environment works well and can be optimized to its full potential.
Maintenance and Monitoring after deployment
You need to monitor your server to find out bottlenecks fast and maintain system performance. For this, you should understand the key indicators that will help you identify which particular regions of your farm require attention. You should also learn the right way of interpreting these indicators. In case you find that your farm is operating beyond the defined targets, you can adjust your farm by modifying your topology, removing or adding hardware resources, or changing the way data is stored.
So, be ready to monitor your SharePoint Server 2010 environment and modify in its early stages, as and when the need for adjustment arises. Once the environment comes to a stable point, you may use the defaults settings as you will no longer need detailed monitoring.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
To optimize the use of a SharePoint Server 2010 environment, the roles, procedures, and responsibilities related to your business operations should be formalized. Here are some cues to help you implement SharePoint 2010-based solutions to maximize business results:
Document Sharing & Collaboration
In today’s work environment that’s highly connected, documents created and used by multiple users, editors, and stakeholders are becoming the rule, rather than the exception. If your business needs to ensure easy channels of communication and collaboration between end-users but reduce the responsibility on administration required to support it, you can opt for SharePoint Server 2010. You can use the co-authoring functionality of Microsoft Office 2010 with Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, as well as Microsoft OneNote 2010 documents on SharePoint Server 2010. Thanks to co-authoring, collaboration of server-based documents becomes easy and your business overheads, which were earlier linked to traditional document sharing via attachments, decrease. So, if your business needs multiple users to work on the same document, you can now ensure that work is done productively without any user intruding on another’s work or locking the others out. You won’t need any additional server setup to use this functionality as it is the default state for data stored in SharePoint Server 2010. What’s more, administrators can manage the sharing and collaboration functionality with the use of same tools and technologies that they have already used to manage SharePoint. This way, not much impact would be there when you decide to use SharePoint 2010.
Project Management
Your business has got a lot of information scattered everywhere in the form of spreadsheets, documents, e-mails, presentations, and more. Most of the data is usually stored on different computers and at different locations, making it difficult to manage the same. However, with the enhanced document and record management capabilities of SharePoint 2010, you can now manage your projects and data effectively. SharePoint 2010 allows users to put related documents in a set, share workflows, metadata, homepage and archiving processes. So, whether your business need to manage rigid processes like regulatory submissions or deal with informal process management where teams have to merge several file types in same process, you can do all that with SharePoint 2010. Some other features of SharePoint 2010 that will help you manage your projects include allotment of unique document id to files that make it easy to search them, easy process to rate and add notes to documents, defining rules on a folder for further routing of the document, and usage of metadata by combining structured taxonomies and keywords, among others.
Dashboards & Reports
Thanks to SharePoint 2010, you can create rich, context-driven dashboards that help you to put data and content at a place, and get an overall view of your business performance at all levels. In other words, creating business intelligence dashboards and publishing them is an easy task in SharePoint 2010 environment. You can use the Dashboard Designer, which can be launched directly from the browser, and use it to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), reports, scorecards, analytic charts and grids, filters, and dashboards.
Business Process Optimization
SharePoint 2010 has a new service architecture, multi-tenant features, and other improvements that have made it capable of handling larger volumes of content and an increased number of users as compared to its earlier version. You can reduce downtime by using its enhanced recovery and backup utilities as well as its improved support for high-availability features of SQL Server. You can analyze feature usage and find misconfigurations and other problems with the help of improved logging and log analysis tools. The considerably expanded PowerShell interface will help your business handle most administrative procedures, which in turn would encourage standardization and efficiency.
So, say hello to SharePoint 2010 today!
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
Based on some typical tasks and standard procedures that SharePoint administrators need to accomplish daily, a list has emerged that can help you identify some of the best practices for SharePoint environments. If you too are going to implement SharePoint for your business purposes, here are certain things to keep in mind:
Assess the compatibility of your server: The size of your server where you plan to run SharePoint should have the capability to handle the load on the system. It’s also in the interest of business owners to judge the reliability, capacity, and availability of their systems, as these factors will help them keep the unplanned downtime below the levels as defined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Having a clear idea about the future capacity requirements and upgrading your hardware to meet the predicted requirements is another practice that should be accomplished.
Management of change in the IT systems: To make the most of your SharePoint environment, you should have a proper plan in place to control and manage the changes in your IT system. Be it the documentation of changes or that of your assets (hardware and software) and their configurations, testing the platform, application feedback, contingency plans, or management approval to tide over problems, if any, you should make sure that the entire procedure is streamlined.
Handling administrative tasks: Some standard methods for system administration should be outlined. System administration (which includes site administration and database administration) refers to on-demand as well as planned day-to-day administrative tasks, which are required to ensure the smooth operation of your IT system. Having written procedures for the typical system administration tasks would go a long way in making sure that your support staff uses the same standard methods and tools to handle different situations.
Maintenance tasks: To ensure that your SharePoint environment shows a normal behavior and abnormal activity, if any, is detected at the first instance, regular maintenance tasks should be established. Apart from checking the server health and handling daily backup operations, detecting instances such as bottlenecks affecting the server performance or addressing issues like the requirement for supplementary resources in your SharePoint environment should also be handled on time so that your productivity isn’t affected adversely.
Using Trace Logs the right way: Troubleshooting issues related to SharePoint Server 2010 has become easier with ULS – the Unified Logging Service, which is also called by the name of Trace Logs. When your systems administrators need to check and monitor the overall functionality of the environment or troubleshoot an issue, they would simply need to check the lone centralized location where logging error and informational messages related to SharePoint solutions and SharePoint Server are stored. However, since a lot of disk space is quickly consumed by these Trace Logs, administrators should decide which log files should be kept, put some limitation on the disk space that such log files can use, or choose specific events like page load times, search queries etc that they want to be monitored.
Security Audits: To find users who have installed unapproved updates or to reduce the risk of computers from being compromised, regular security audits should be performed. This step will also help you to identify the systems or SharePoint Server that need to have hotfixes or the ones that have missed the installation of the latest antivirus updates or a service pack.
Use some of these best practices to get the maximum advantage from your SharePoint environment.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our primary focus is to facilitate organizations achieve their financial and business objectives by using SharePoint more effectively.
SharePoint is the ideal technology solution for policy management. Its flexible collaborative platform satisfies virtually any business requirement.
- Efficiently manage the lifecycle of your company policies
- Draft, collaborate, discuss, review
and approve policies in a single roles based based web platform
- Easily track the status of corporate policies via a customized user-friendly portal that reflects your corporate brand image
- Quickly and easily communicate new and updated policy information to all applicable constituents
Use our turn key SharePoint Policy Management Portal Template to streamline the creation, review and approval of Policies & Procedures.
http://www.convergepoint.com/sharepoint-templates/Policy-and-Procedures-SharePoint-Site-Template.htm
Learn how Converge Point helped a large financial advisory firm successfully implement a Microsoft SharePoint portal that streamlined the company’s policy management process.
Click here to read this case study.
If you’re trying to streamline your policy management process, consider SharePoint. Click here to request a consultation.
