Tag: SharePoint 2016

SharePoint Hybrid “Sync Gaps” and how to bridge them

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This post was originally published on the Contentandcode.com blog.

Introduction

More and more organisations are moving to a cloud-first strategy for their IT systems, but many need to retain some workloads on-premises due to compliance concerns, data residency, or technical limitations. This has given rise to an increasing number of ‘hybrid’ SharePoint implementations. Organisations store some information on-premises in SharePoint Server 2013, but still wish to utilise SharePoint Online in Office365 in order to reap the benefits of agility and cost-saving that the cloud brings.

Hybrid

However, SharePoint hybrid implementations result in a number of problems around data divergence and user experience consistency. These are what I call “sync gaps”. In my opinion, addressing these sync gaps is one of the biggest challenges (and opportunity spaces!) in SharePoint today.

There are a number of areas where an organisation implementing hybrid SharePoint might want to sync data between SharePoint Server on-premises and SharePoint Online in the cloud. Below, I address the more common ones that we have come across working with our clients at Content and Code.

Search

The biggest hybrid sync gap is one that Microsoft are already about to address: Search. Currently, it’s very difficult to provide a unified search experience across O365 and SharePoint 2013 because there is no way of creating a single search index. This means that you end up with search results from O365 being displayed in separate results blocks on SP2013, and vice versa. It’s basically the same experience as creating a federated content source for SharePoint search. There are ways to fudge it with some clever dev, but it’s generally a pretty poor experience.

Search is the biggest and most problematic sync gap, and luckily Microsoft have already taken steps to bridge it with the Cloud Search Service Application. My colleague Ben Athawes blogs about it here. The CSSA will be released as part of an update to SharePoint 2013 later in the year (2015) and baked into SharePoint Server 2016.

Cloud search service application
Picture taken from Microsoft Ignite slide pack

User Profiles

The second-most common hybrid sync gap is for User Profiles. Users should not be expected to re-key their profile information in both SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online. In addition, there are often compliance requirements around where certain pieces of profile metadata are mastered. The typical scenario sees profiles mastered (i.e. editable) in SharePoint 2013 on-prem, and pushed to the cloud. This is partly because it is much easier to connect to other sources of profile metadata (such as HR systems) from SharePoint Server, but also because Azure Active Directory sync (formerly DirSync) only allows a core set of AD attributes to be populated to O365 profiles direct from Active Directory. In other words, any organisation wanting to have more than bare-bones user profiles in O365 is going to have to build some custom mechanism of importing data regardless of whether they are in a hybrid scenario.

Content and Code have implemented this functionality for several clients now. My colleague Chris O’Brien blogs about it here in more detail.

Taxonomy/Term Sets

Another very common scenario we see is a requirement to synchronise term sets (or taxonomy) between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online. Our clients tend to invest a lot of time and effort into creating a good, consistent Information Architecture (IA) that allows them to classify information with key terms. It’s important that these terms are unified across the cloud and on-prem so that information can be classified and retrieved in a consistent manner. Term sets are also often used to drive global navigation. Providing a consistent navigation experience in a hybrid deployment is very important, meaning this sync gap is a problem most implementations of this type face.

Luckily, this is also something C&C have done several times now – you can read about it in Chris’ blog.

Other sync gaps

Outside of the ‘big 3’ sync gaps (search, profiles, and taxonomy), we are seeing an increasing number of other scenarios where consistent data is required between SharePoint Online and on-prem. These include:

  • Branding: providing a consistent look and feel between the cloud and on-prem so that users have a joined up experience and do not necessarily realise they are traversing between two separate systems.
  • Content Types and Site Columns: an extension of the taxonomy sync gap. Having a consistent set of metadata and content types is important from an information classification and retrieval perspective.
  • Records Management: what happens if you classify an item as a Record in SharePoint Online? How will it get sent to your on-premises Records Centre?
  • Customisations: Keeping customisations consistent between on-prem and O365 is an important challenge to address in order to maintain a single user experience. It’s also worth noting that you should think carefully about any customisations you make on-prem, as it is often much harder (or even impossible) to achieve them in Office365. As for apps (add-ins), authentication will often need careful planning in a hybrid implementation.
  • eDiscovery: If your organisation is audited, can you perform a legal hold across both on-prem and the cloud?

Conclusion

Hybrid implementations of SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online are becoming increasingly common, and this is giving rise to all manner of new requirements around user experience consistency, integration, and data parity. If your organisation is looking to go down the hybrid route, careful planning is required to ensure you don’t end up with a poorly adopted system or a major information management headache. Addressing common “sync gaps” is a key step towards achieving a world class hybrid implementation of SharePoint.

This post was originally published on the Contentandcode.com blog.

SharePoint Operating Model

SharePoint Operating Model: Part 1 – Introduction

nathanwells20142 Comments

Introduction

Most SharePoint projects focus on building the solution. This covers the information architecture, user experience, interface design, apps/add-ins, and system integrations that come together to form an effective SharePoint implementation. Fewer still define an effective strategy and business change approach for the project. But – in my experience at least – hardly any projects give much heed to how to run SharePoint once it goes live in the organisation. Having a well-defined Operating Model is crucial to ensuring the on-going success of the platform and can help to ease the difficult transition from project into service.

What is an “Operating Model”?

“An Operating Model is the organisational design that makes it possible to deliver the business strategy”. – Ashridge Business School

My interpretation of an Operating Model is that it’s a set of guidelines for how SharePoint aligns with people, processes and other technology to deliver the business strategy. The Operating Model defines the necessary level of process integration and standardisation to allow your SharePoint service to thrive and grow. It provides a general vision of how your organisation will enable the long-term business benefits of the platform. It drives the foundation for executing the SharePoint strategy.

I’ve also heard it described as “governance on steroids” in that it provides some definition to roles, responsibilities, processes and procedures. However, governance typically focuses on information management, application management, and IT ops. This is necessary work that all organisations looking to use SharePoint should be doing, yet SharePoint often requires something more holistic to get the most out of it long-term. This is where the Operating Model comes in.

There are two overriding dimensions that drive an operating model. These are:

  1. Standardisation; and
  2. Integration.

Standardisation is about defining how a process will be executed so that it runs smoothly no matter who is enacting it. This delivers efficiency and predictability around who is doing what, and helps align the platform across different divisions in the company, as well as third party suppliers.

Integration is about linking efforts through shared data, capability and knowledge. It ensures that new capabilities or initiatives delivered in SharePoint can be smoothly integrated with the pre-existing functionality.

A Sample Operating Model

The diagram below shows a sample high-level Operating Model:

Operating Model
A sample Operating Model for SharePoint.

The thinking behind this model is to divide SharePoint into five operational pillars: Content, Adoption, Enhancements, Support, and Operations. An overarching strategy supplements these pillars, and governance policies and processes underpin them.

 Strat3 Strategy defines the direction for the platform. It ensures everyone involved in operating the system is singing from the same hymn sheet and pushing for the same outcomes. It provides direction and impetus for action and helps to guide future investments in the platform.
 Cont2 Content encompasses all information stored on the platform. It covers the configuration possible without formal change control or lifecycle management.
 Adopt2 Adoption covers the on-going training, communications and business change aspects of running SharePoint. It ensures employees engage with and use the platform.
 Enhance2 Enhancements is how to deal with change in the system. This could range from adding small features to much bigger, strategic programmes of work.
 Support2 Support is all about how incidents, problems and service requests get raised against the system. It also covers who deals with them, and how to categorise and prioritise them.
 Ops2 Operations covers on-going maintenance tasks. These activities ensure the smooth running and optimisation of the system over time. You will typically find that on-premises implementations will be much heavier from an ops perspective. This is because you have little control over much of the IT operational tasks in SharePoint Online, as Microsoft looks after these for you.
 Gov2 Governance underpins the core operational pillars. It fleshes out the policies and procedures that must be followed to run SharePoint.

Together, these elements form a holistic Operating Model that can deliver standardisation and integration across the different pillars, and ensure that SharePoint can thrive within an organisation.

This series

I’m going to write a series of blog posts focusing on defining an operating model for SharePoint. I’ll do one post for each of the 5 operational pillars, plus one each for strategy and governance. I’ll also do an extra post on organisation design, and how to put together the right teams, roles and responsibilities to run SharePoint. I hope this blog series will provide some useful reference material for organisations who want to maximise their return on investment with SharePoint.

Thanks for reading.

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Part 1 – Introducing the SharePoint Operating Model

Part 2 – Strategy

Part 3 – Content

Is SharePoint Dead? My thoughts on Microsoft’s Latest Announcements about SP2016.

nathanwells20144 Comments

I recently read an article by Dan Holme on IT Unity, in response to Microsoft’s blog post outlining the strategy for SharePoint and O365. Sometimes when I read or hear a particularly good line, I get that amazing feeling of something ‘slotting into place’; that feeling you get when something that’s been in your subconscious for a long time (but you have never quite been able to articulate or form some coherent thinking about) suddenly reaches clarity. This is the line:

“After a decade, I still struggle to answer the question, “What is SharePoint?” because I have to start by asking questions like, “It depends… what are you trying to do as a business?” SharePoint has always been too big of a story to tell. Ask me what OneDrive for Business is, or what PowerBI is, or what Yammer is… I can tell you. The granularity helps a lot.”

Nobody can succinctly explain what SharePoint is, what it does, and the benefits it brings to a business because it is just too big. When a friend or family member asks me, “So, what is SharePoint?”, I usually roll out some analogy about a box of LEGO bricks, or start using buzzwords from the SharePoint Pie of Despair. The person usually ends the conversation more confused than they were at the start. I don’t think this is a particular reflection on my ability to articulate concepts either (well, I hope not), because I have never heard anybody give a good explanation or definition of SharePoint. It’s just too intangible as a concept; too hard to envision for people who have never seen or used the platform.

Microsoft’s approach to break down the services and capabilities provided and supported by SharePoint into smaller, bite-sized “experiences” makes perfect sense, and makes my life a lot easier to boot. It’s much simpler to explain and articulate the business value of an individual use case than it is to do the same with SharePoint as a whole. As a consultant, it means I can focus on guiding customers towards the experiences and portals that provide the most benefit to their users without having to explain, “We’re giving you SharePoint, but we’re only doing 20% of what it’s theoretically capable of at this stage of the programme”. It means that we can look at Office365 in a more holistic way, rather than SharePoint requiring a completely different project approach to the rest of the products in the suite. Strategic roadmaps are easier to define, explain, and obtain executive buy in for. It means organisations can better identify their requirements and aspirations when going out to tender. It helps to stop the blurring of the lines between different concepts in SharePoint (such as publishing portals versus team sites/collaboration spaces), increasing our ability to govern the solution and aiding user adoption. And it may, at some point in the future, allow Microsoft to give their customers more granular licensing for individual areas of functionality or features that currently come under the SharePoint umbrella.

So is SharePoint dead? Well, no, but as a concept and a brand, it is probably terminally ill. The functionality it provides will carry on and continue to evolve, and the skills/people needed to implement and support it will be in just as high demand as ever. I’m really excited to see what the next 12-24 months holds for SharePoint, and I am fully behind Microsoft’s “experiences” vision.