Planning for SharePoint Content
2011—The Year for 2010?
Last year Microsoft released the latest version of SharePoint with much fanfare about the product’s feature set and capabilities—including improvements in its core ECM functionality. Although analyst, press and community reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, many organizations were initially cautious to implement enterprisewide plans to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. However, momentum began to steadily build in the latter stages of last year and most industry observers agree that the trend to upgrade SharePoint will accelerate through 2011. One of the criticisms of the 2003—2007 upgrade was the lack of information, advice and expertise to support those who wished to be early adopters of that particular product. This time both Microsoft and their SharePoint partner community have learned from that experience. Whether it is information on upgrading using Microsoft’s out-of-the-box methods or looking for SharePoint 2010 “ready” third-party add-ons, the SharePoint ecosystem has reached a level of maturity to provide an appropriate level of support and a plethora of choice.
There are a number of things you need to consider when planning what to do with your SharePoint content:
1. Analysis. Most of the conversations that we have about moving content initially focus on the volume of content in the old system. There is almost always an acknowledgement that all of the existing content will not be needed in the new system, but the response to this scenario is usually that the end users will be asked to tidy up their content following the move—a nice idea but does it actually happen? A better approach is to include the content owners in the early stages of the migration approach to identify what needs to be moved and what can be left behind, deleted or moved to alternative storage. It may be stating the obvious, but the content creators, owners and consumers know the information best and overlooking their perspective could have a very negative impact on the future success of your new system. Thankfully, the latest generation of content migration tools provide various features to assist with this process—we’re not talking about a painstaking review of individual document libraries on a one-by-one basis.
2. Migration. A number of third-party migration tools (including Metalogix’s own SharePoint Migration Manager range of products) have been helping customers move to Microsoft content management platforms for almost a decade. Some of these applications can do the heavy lifting of moving and transforming the content, but you still need to think about the approach that you want to employ.
One of the drawbacks of the Microsoft out-of-the-box approach to upgrading SharePoint is that the complete content database or databases (the SQL Server container where SharePoint stores content) has to be moved all at once. This is why most of the third-party tools allow for content to be migrated at a more granular level and enable individual departments or pilot groups to be migrated over time.
You also need to consider re-structuring your content to better suit the organizational or operational nature of your enterprise or perhaps even to better suit technical guidelines for volumes of content within particular SharePoint containers. Without this ability you run the risk of repeating, or rather not correcting, mistakes or deviations from best practice.
3. Creation. One of the reasons that the adoption of SharePoint has been so fast has been the ease with which end users can create and share content. A major contributing factor has been the tight integration that SharePoint enjoys with the de facto business content creation tool (Microsoft Office), but another reason is the fact that Microsoft spends huge amounts of time and money investigating and developing a best-of-breed user experience. You will need to take this into account when drawing up your plans for implementing SharePoint 2010, particularly if you will also be rolling out the latest Office client software. Although many users will discover the new features and integration points between both products, a little help finding them will go a long way. (The new contextual Ribbon UI in SharePoint makes it easier to access capabilities but takes a little getting used to).
Outside the new buttons, bells and whistles you also need to think about how the content creation and sharing process has changed over the last few years. The explosion of social networking, for instance, should be something that you look to exploit rather than fear.
4. Storage. In the past, SharePoint was labeled, sometimes over harshly, as a product that could not scale to enterprise levels of content. Re-architecting SharePoint 2010 to be scalable was one of Microsoft’s top priorities and they have succeeded to a large degree. I have spoken to a number of customers recently who wish to move staggering volumes of data (100s of GB and even petabytes) into SharePoint. If you’re in that category, you will need to be careful about how you architect your SharePoint deployment to handle such volume. There are obviously technical considerations that you’ll need to think about, such as a robust SQL Server farm and suitable numbers of SharePoint Web front ends and indexing servers, but again I would like to look at this scenario from the content creator perspective. During the SharePoint 2007 era, a number of vendors created add-ons such as archiving solutions to help overcome the scalability issue, and while they solved the content volume problem from the technical perspective they were often “clunky” for the end user. This is why current thinking is moving toward Binary Large Object or BLOB “remoting” to help SharePoint scale. Simply speaking, this process involves separating the bulk of the file and storing it in some other storage media and only storing its associated metadata in SQL Server. This is completely transparent to end users—as far as they know they are uploading or opening files from SharePoint.
“Content is King”
A former colleague used the above phrase regularly and although his use of it was in a different context I believe that it is an important phrase to remember when planning for a SharePoint 2010-based ECM. It is why companies like Metalogix exist as we have recognized that there is more to a successful SharePoint implementation than the hardware infrastructure, Web parts and site design. Alongside all the other planning and design that you carry out, your existing and future content must be taken into account as it is a key component for the success of your enterprise content management system.
Metalogix is a leading provider of content lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and legacy enterprise content environments. We enable organizations to scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and protect enterprise content whether on-premise or in the cloud. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, privately held, and backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
For more information, visit www.metalogix.com or call 877-450-8667.