SharePoint Online Planning

This section of the deployment guide describes the SharePoint Online deployment planning tasks and processes. Information in this section comes largely from the SharePoint Online Planning Guide for Office 365 for enterprises, which you may want to review in its entirety.

The SharePoint Online Planning and Administration site also provides useful information for small and enterprise organizations. Refer to this site for additional information related to SharePoint Online.

For planning information about developing custom solutions for SharePoint Online, see the following resources:

 SharePoint Online Developer Resource Center

 SharePoint Online: An Overview for Developers

Note: SharePoint Online is currently not available for purchase by Office 365 customers with more than 20,000 users in their Active Directory. This temporary limitation on the number of users applies to organization purchasing SharePoint Online as part of the Office 365 service suite or as a standalone service. An updated to the SharePoint Online service is planned that will enable SharePoint Online provisioning for organizations with up to 100,000 users in their Active Directory.

3.9.1 About SharePoint Online

Built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Online provides a single, integrated

location where users can efficiently collaborate on tasks, share documents, create project-focused sites, manage content and workflow, search for and find organizational resources, and leverage business insight to make better-informed decisions. For additional details, see the Microsoft SharePoint Online Service Description.

Figure 10 illustrates the capabilities (also known as work areas) of SharePoint 2010.

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Figure 10

Details about the SharePoint 2010 capabilities are presented in Table 13.

Table 13. SharePoint Capability Descriptions Capability Description

Sites SharePoint 2010 Sites provides a single infrastructure for your business websites.

This capability allows for sharing information with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers.

Communities SharePoint 2010 Communities provides a full set of collaboration tools—from wikis to workflows and team sites to tagging. A single, flexible platform makes it easy to manage these tools and design the right collaborative experiences for different business needs.

Content SharePoint 2010 is designed to simplify content management with features like content types, retention polices, and automatic content sorting—and then let people work naturally in Microsoft Office.

Search SharePoint 2010 Search provides a unique combination of relevance, refinement, and social cues helps people find the information and contacts they need to get their jobs done.

Insights SharePoint 2010 Insights gives everyone access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications. Help people locate the information they need to make good decisions

Composites SharePoint 2010 Composites offers tools and components for creating do-it-yourself business solutions. Build no-code solutions to rapidly respond to

Capability Description business needs.

3.9.2 Available Features

In your planning, it is important to consider the available SharePoint Online features and how they may differ from those available in an on-premises implementation of SharePoint Server 2010. For a comprehensive comparison of feature availability between Office SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Online solutions, see Appendix B of the Microsoft SharePoint Online Service Description. Features are compared across the major SharePoint work areas: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, and Composites.

Table 14 offers a high-level comparison of SharePoint Online features across Office 365 user subscription plans.

Table 14. Feature Comparison of SharePoint Online User Subscriptions For Small

For Small

Site Collections Single Site Collection

Administrator Yes. Within Single Site Collection

No Yes. Tenant level. Yes. Tenant level.

Support Community 24x7 phone

support for Admin

Before you begin your SharePoint Online configuration, you should be aware of the following limitations:

 Migration of existing SharePoint data. Office 365 does not migrate data from your organization’s existing on-premises SharePoint sites to SharePoint Online. Third-party products are available to help with this task.

 Mail-enabled lists. SharePoint Online does not support mail-enabled lists due to the multi-tenant architecture of the service. Mail can be sent from SharePoint Online as a result of a workflow or other event, but not to SharePoint Online. As a result, mail-enabled list usage should be reviewed in a pre-provisioned environment for solution alignment.

 Search restrictions. Microsoft Office document file types and .ZIP and .PDF files are enabled for search in the SharePoint Online environment. It is not possible to extend Search to support new file types. A best practice is to review Office document meta tags and search taxonomy for search requirements prior to migration.

3.9.4 Capacity Planning

Table 15 describes the SharePoint Online feature specifications that you should consider for capacity planning in your SharePoint Online deployment.

Table 15. SharePoint Online feature specifications

Feature Specifications

Storage (pooled) 10 gigabytes (GB) base customer storage plus 500 megabytes (MB) per enterprise user

Storage per Kiosk

Worker Zero (0). Licensed Kiosk Workers do not bring additional storage allocation.

Storage per external

user Zero (0). Licensed external users do not bring additional storage allocation.

Additional storage Available per GB per month; no minimum purchase Site collection storage

quotas Up to 100 GB per site collection My Site storage

allocation

500 megabytes (MB) of personal storage per My Site (once provisioned) (Does not count against tenant‘s overall storage pool.)

Site collections per

tenant Up to 300 (non-My Site site collections) Total storage per

tenant Up to 5 terabyte (TB) per tenant Storage per external

user Zero (0). Licensed external users do not bring additional storage allocation.

For additional information on SharePoint Online capacity planning, see SharePoint Online:

software boundaries and limits.

3.9.5 SharePoint Online Planning Guide

The best way to learn how to use SharePoint Online in your organization is to review the SharePoint Online planning guide for Office 365 for enterprises. This comprehensive planning guide consists of a series of articles that guide site collection administrators and site owners through the steps involved in setting up and using SharePoint Online sites. The guide is divided into the following seven sections or “steps.”

 Step 2: Plan sites and manage users

 Step 3: Plan content on sites

 Step 4: Plan customizations and solutions

 Step 5: Create and customize the public-facing website

 Step 6: Train and support users

 Step 7: Plan to monitor and maintain site collections and sites

We recommend that you read all of the articles in this guide before you proceed with setting up SharePoint Online. You will need to know how SharePoint features work together in order to make decisions about setting up your sites.