SHAREPOINT UPGRADE REQUIRES SHARP FOCUS ON PLANNING, USER PREPARATION KEEP THE SEARCH, META- DATA-DRIVEN NAVIGATION SIMPLIFY STRUC- TURE IN 2013

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Developing a SharePoint

Collaboration Strategy

That Gets Results

Many companies are considering whether it is time to upgrade to a

newer version of SharePoint now that SharePoint 2013 is available.

Creating a manageable and adaptable strategy is crucial for supporting

business goals and encouraging innovation and collaboration.

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EDITOR’S NOTE SHAREPOINT

UPGRADE REQUIRES SHARP FOCUS ON PLANNING, USER PREPARATION SHAREPOINT SEARCH, META-DATA-DRIVEN NAVIGATION SIMPLIFY STRUC-TURE IN 2013 KEEP THE SHAREPOINT BACKUP PROCESS ON TRACK: HOW TO AVOID THE PITFALLS

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EDITOR’S NOTE

SharePoint 2013’s Release Brings

Upgrade Considerations to the Fore

With the release of SharePoint 2013, IT, collaboration and content man-agement professionals have to consider whether the time is right to upgrade existing implementations of the software to better support overall business goals. That might not involve moving up to the new version; in many cases, companies that are still using SharePoint 2007 are finally thinking about up-grading to SharePoint 2010. The question of whether to upgrade is another issue to take into account in designing a SharePoint strategy that can help improve business processes. The goal: saving time for end users and gaining new ideas and innovations through increased collaboration. This handbook offers advice from consultants and experienced SharePoint administrators who offer guidance on cre-ating a strategy for the software that is manageable, agile and adaptable. First, freelance writer Christine Parizo reports that upgrading to a new ver-sion of SharePoint can be put on the road to success by an investment in ad-vanced planning and SharePoint farm housecleaning. She also details other valuable suggestions for smooth upgrades from consultants and users alike. Next, consultant Shawn Shell takes a look at the search-driven navigation functionality in SharePoint 2013 and describes how the new feature works. And finally, contributor Brien M. Posey describes how to keep the Share-Point backup process on track. If there’s a specific SharePoint topic you’d like to learn about, let us know—send me an email. Jonathan Gourlay

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SharePoint Upgrade Requires Sharp

Focus on Planning, User Preparation

Now that SharePoint 2013 is on the shelves, preparing end users to handle all the new features added to the collaboration software is a must for ensuring a successful move to the latest version. And that requires heavy amounts of up-front planning by IT and collaboration teams, according to consultants and administrators experienced with a SharePoint upgrade. Upgrading to the new version has its advantages. With SharePoint 2013, companies can expect a significantly improved user experience, said Mark Gilbert, lead SharePoint analyst at research and consulting company Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. “SharePoint has been criticized—people will talk about sites as being very ‘SharePoint-y’ and not [offering] a flexible, rich user experience,” he said. But the enhancements in SharePoint 2013 include a better user interface, addi-tional social networking features like microblogging and activity streams, and more functional mobile capabilities using HTML5, Gilbert added. The richer social networking functionality enables end users to tag other users, making it easier to reference discussions in the collaboration platform, said Jennifer Mason, a SharePoint consultant at Rackspace US Inc.’s Share-Point911 unit in Maineville, Ohio. SharePoint 2013 also offers an easy-to-use button for sharing content with peers, she said. The latest release includes other features as well—for example, Mason cited an option that lets users preview a document before opening it by sim-ply hovering over its icon with a mouse. “As releases go, [SharePoint 2013] is more interactive with [support for] different devices and ways to access con-tent,” she said.

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UPGRADE PLANNING

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UPGRADE PLANNING

PREPARE USERS FOR THE CHANGES

Because of all the new features, though, IT and collaboration managers in charge of upgrades should anticipate a lot of planning, said Sharon Weaver, knowledge management technology director at Black & Veatch, an engineer-ing and construction company in Overland Park, Kan. Weaver helped usher in an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 at the company.

As with SharePoint 2013, the 2010 release significantly expanded the avail-able features in the software. “When you’re looking at 2010,” Weaver said, “the biggest thing is that it has a lot of options.” The key to managing a successful SharePoint upgrade, she added, is to examine the new version care-fully and determine how it will be used internally and how the governance model will work. “It’s vital that the IT management understands what the needs of the or-ganization are before rolling out full functionality,” agreed John Schaefer, se-nior manager of digital content at Black & Veatch. Because of all the capabilities and tools built into SharePoint, rolling out unneeded functions to the business will be a big waste of time, he said. In particular, IT managers and Share-Point administrators need to make sure that end users are ready for the changes, whether an upgrade is to SharePoint 2010 or 2013. “Communicate how you’re moving [to the new platform] and what the value is for them,” said Jason Parks, a principal at Higgins & Parks LLC, a Web design and marketing services firm in Buffalo, N.Y. Parks, a former national practice director for a global IT consultancy, suggested starting the upgrade with a kickoff meeting laying out the purpose, timeline and other details. He said the upgrade leader should also explain the responsibilities of the IT department and various business units typically called upon to assist with mi-grating required content to the new version.

IT managers and

SharePoint

admin-istrators need to make

sure that end users

are ready for the

changes, whether an

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UPGRADE PLANNING At Houston-based oil and gas company Linn Energy LLC, the upgrade team documented changes for users well before an upgrade to SharePoint 2010. “The best thing we did to prepare the users was communicating with them and making sure that they understood the new features,” said Erich Braent-ner, a supervisor at Linn. Another organization that upgraded to SharePoint 2010 is the Regional Municipality of Niagara, a group of 12 towns and cities in southern Ontario that is testing SharePoint 2013. “There’s not a lot of hard training required [as part of a SharePoint upgrade],” said Paul Di Felice, associate director of IT consulting and analysis for the regional body. But he added that IT staff and SharePoint admins should be available for questions, comments and even rants throughout the transition and afterward so that users will feel like their needs are being met. “Just letting people vent, question and learn is a big deal in terms of adop-tion,” Di Felice said. “A small [problem] will grow if you’re not there to deal with it.”

DOCUMENT YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE

A company’s technology infrastructure also needs to be prepared for upgrad-ing to a new version of SharePoint, and as part of that process it’s important to document the existing features and services in a SharePoint environment as well as the new ones that will be deployed in the upgrade, said Brad Shan-non, an application services engineer at eGroup, a technology consultancy in Mount Pleasant, S.C. “If you don’t know what you have in your environment, you’re going to find out the hard way,” Shannon said, explaining that the more detailed the documentation of the current environment is, the better an organization can prepare for the SharePoint upgrade. Companies should also start with a clean SharePoint farm, Shannon ad-vised. “That means you don’t have anything on the farm you don’t need,” he said. Sometimes SharePoint systems will include items used for testing pur-poses that were never fully deployed or removed. Leaving them in place can

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create more work for SharePoint administrators, Shannon said. Above all, make sure the business knows what it wants before an upgrade and build that into your plans, said Black & Veatch’s Weaver. Trying to go back and make changes later on is difficult after workers have adopted new processes, she said. “So if you’re trying to reorganize [your SharePoint environment], be clear about the structure, architecture, scalability and sup-port going forward. Set it up the way you want to grow in the next couple of years.” —Christine Parizo

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UPGRADE PLANNING

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APPLICATION FEATURES

SharePoint Search, Metadata-Driven

Navigation Simplify Structure in 2013

One of the enduring challenges for most Web content management tools is the conflict between the physical nature of storing content and the logical relationship between much of that content on a website. The SharePoint col-laboration and content management platform is no exception. End users have always had to create physical sites and libraries to store SharePoint content. This physical hierarchy also represented the foundation of navigation and the information architecture of any SharePoint-powered Web application. While it is generally considered a tried-and-true approach, there are many circumstances where physically locating content in a specific navigation branch causes problems. For example, on product sites, various product pages need to appear under different navigational headings because they can be associated with multiple product categories. In such cases, the content can and should be logically associated with multiple branches. SharePoint 2013 helps make that possible by combining the updated SharePoint search engine (which borrows primarily from FAST Search Server technology that’s not completely integrated into the new re-lease) with Microsoft’s Term Store Manager. Anyone who has used the Term Store Manager, introduced in SharePoint 2010, can attest to the feature’s usefulness when tagging content. It enables the creation of a controlled vocabulary that can be applied as values for vari-ous metadata fields. That works equally well for documents and Web content and improves overall content “findability” when combined with an enterprise search tool. By mixing the two technologies, SharePoint 2013 enables you to use the term store to define the hierarchy of your site and create multiple branch affinities for content.

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APPLICATION FEATURES When SharePoint 2013 site creators want to set up a navigation frame- work, they’ll see a number of options. It’s possible to choose the more tradi-tional physical approach and create navigation paths from the site hierarchy. Or if more flexibility is needed (and you want to take advantage of “friendly” URLs), you can use a new Managed Navigation option. Site creators who feel particularly adventurous can take a mixed approach, using the best of both methods.

GETTING READY FOR NAVIGATION

Setting up navigation for a site using the new version of the platform is rela-tively easy. Like SharePoint 2010 , the 2013 release has a “publishing site” ca-pability that comes with all of the appropriate features enabled. Once a site has been provisioned, go to the Site Settings page; the navigation setting op-tion is located in the same place it was in SharePoint 2010, right under the “Look and Feel” heading. Once at the navigation settings interface, SharePoint 2013 site creators will see similar options to those in 2010. The big difference is there’s also a third option, which is managed navigation. Choosing it enables you to reuse an ex-isting term set or create a new one to represent your site; on-the-spot term set creation is enabled through an editor linked to a button beneath the term set viewer. One key configuration option to note is the default navigation setting be-low the term set display. By default, SharePoint will automatically create navigation paths based on the names of pages. In some cases, this approach to SharePoint search might be desirable for default pages in a section of your site. But for most pages, turning this option off will allow you to manually create term affinities for individual pages and better control the way the nav-igation develops.

CREATING PAGES AND ASSOCIATING TERMS

Like SharePoint 2007 and 2010, SharePoint 2013 uses a Pages Library for

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storing most webpages. On a site, all pages get created in the library, and de-Home Editor’s Note SharePoint Upgrade Requires Sharp Focus on Planning, User Preparation SharePoint Search, Metadata-Driven Navigation Simplify Structure in 2013 Keep the SharePoint Backup Process on Track: How to Avoid the Pitfalls OPENER 3 lines is max title length. Style title. Then use hard return to push last line of title to sit on this baseline.

pending on your navigation settings, friendly URLs may also be created. In either case, in SharePoint 2013 friendly or term-based URLs are managed us-ing a new option in the Page ribbon (viewable when on a page). As its name suggests, clicking on the new Page URLs button gives admin-istrators access to the interface for manipulating URLs. Users then can create the affinity between a page and one or more terms. Again, this is a very dif-ferent model for a site’s information architecture. It is possible, and easy, to display navigation to any page through multiple navigational paths. Not only does this better encourage page-level content reuse, it also enables better site management by reducing the steps needed for changing and adding naviga-tion paths in your site to better suit your audience.

SHAREPOINT SEARCH POWER

What is most compelling about this new model is it’s powered by Share-Point’s search functionality. Search-powered navigation is nothing new, but it’s a big step for Microsoft. That’s because every Web content management product the company has developed over the last decade or more has relied exclusively on a physical structure. Further, a new “continuous crawl” mode for SharePoint search enables Microsoft to overcome search-powered naviga-tion and content publishing challenges that traditionally plague the approach such as search indexes becoming stale between crawls. Using continuous crawl means neither new navigation nor content would be excluded from the site between scheduled crawls. It’s unclear how widely used the new search-driven features will be. Share-Point 2013 is still very new, having been released at the end of last year. And many larger user organizations are just now completing upgrades to Share- Point 2010. Yet making this organizational approach available might lead ad-ministrators to create more SharePoint-powered sites. —Shawn Shell

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APPLICATION FEATURES

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BACKUP PROCESS

Keep the SharePoint Backup Process

on Track: How to Avoid the Pitfalls

Because of SharePoint’s complexity, backing up and restoring the con-tent management and collaboration platform sometimes can be quite challenging. One reason is there are so many varied aspects to the Microsoft technology; as a result, it can be difficult to figure out the components of an effec-tive SharePoint backup strategy. In fact, there are numerous types of backup procedures for SharePoint 2010, ranging from ones at the database level to SharePoint Server farm backups and from duplications of applications to backups of individual searches. Though there is no single step for getting SharePoint backups and resto- rations to work correctly, there are certain issues that tend to repeat them-selves time and again. We’ll take a look below at the most common problems associated with backing up and restoring SharePoint and offer some practical steps for avoiding the pitfalls. SECURITY ISSUES Most backup applications require a software agent to be installed on the SharePoint servers that are being duplicated. The agent is used to facilitate the backup process, and though the concept of deploying a backup agent probably seems simple enough, there is at least one issue tied to the process to watch out for. Backup agents can only facilitate the backup of a SharePoint server if the agent can gain access to the various SharePoint components. Most backup agents run using either the Local System account or a dedicated service account. In the case of SharePoint, however, sometimes this approach is inadequate.

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BACKUP PROCESS Microsoft’s best practices for SharePoint 2010 call for using several differ-ent service accounts. That way, no single individual service account ends up with excessive permissions that an attacker or malware could then poten-tially exploit. Depending on what backup software is being used, it might be necessary to manually grant the agent permission to back up SharePoint. For example, Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 Service Pack 1 and DPM 2012 backup tools include a special utility called ConfigureSharePoint.exe. This utility must be executed on a front-end Web server to give DPM permission to back up a SharePoint farm. Further- more, this utility must be executed any time the SharePoint farm administra-tor’s password is changed.

BACKING UP SITE COLLECTIONS

When it comes to performing site collection backups for SharePoint imple-mentations , some administrators opt to use Microsoft’s Windows Power-Shell command-line task automation environment instead of—or in addition to—a typical backup utility. SharePoint 2010 contains a lightweight Power-Shell cmdlet called Backup-SPSite that can be used to back up or restore an entire site collection. The backup is written to a folder on the SharePoint server’s hard disk. After the site collection backup has been completed, the contents of the folder can easily be written to tape. The command syntax looks like this:

Backup-SPSite –Identity <site collection name> -Path <Backup path> [-Force] [-NoSiteLock] [-UseSqlSnapshot] [-Verbose]

Though Microsoft makes the Backup-SPSite cmdlet relatively easy to use, there are some things SharePoint administrators should watch for. First, un- like a typical backup application, this method forces the entire site collec-tion into read-only mode for the duration of the backup. Because of that, some admins are quick to circumvent the process by using the [-NoSiteLock] switch, which goes in the command syntax after [-Force]. But using that

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BACKUP PROCESS parameter causes the site collection to remain in read/write mode throughout the backup. That means the entire backup can be corrupted if a modification is made to the site collection while it is in progress. Another problem related to the Backup-SPSite cmdlet occurs at restora-tion time. When a site collection recovery is performed, the recovery farm must be running the same version of SharePoint (including service packs) as the server farm in which the backup was made. VSS ERRORS A SharePoint backup can also fail because of writer errors in Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service technology, or VSS for short. Shadow cop-ies created by VSS augment the storage administrator’s tape backup. Because SharePoint makes extensive use of da-tabases, VSS snapshots help make sure that the databases remain consistent during the backup process. The snapshots make use of com-ponents called VSS writers. Each VSS writer is responsible for one specific aspect of the backup process, and all of them work together to create the backup. But if even one VSS writer fails, it can cause the entire backup to fail. If your SharePoint backups are failing and your backup software cites VSS-related problems, you should try to troubleshoot the underlying VSS writers. The easiest way to do this is to open a Command Prompt window and enter the following command:

VSSADMIN List Writers

This command will bring up a list of all of the VSS writers that exist on the system. More important, Windows displays each writer’s state (which should

If your SharePoint

backups are failing

and your backup

software cites

VSS-related problems, you

should try to

trouble-shoot the underlying

VSS writers.

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BACKUP PROCESS be listed as stable, if there are no problems) and the last error the writer produced. Using the VSSADMIN command won’t solve your problems, but it will usually show you which VSS writers are causing them, which will make it much easier to resolve the situation. While the issues explained here do not make up an exhaustive list of the things that can go wrong during SharePoint backups, they represent the most common. Hopefully, by reviewing these, you’ll have a better understanding of what might occur so you can be prepared to sidestep the customary chal-lenges during your next SharePoint backup procedure. —Brien M. Posey

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHRISTINE PARIZO is a freelance writer specializing in business and technol-ogy. She focuses on feature articles for a variety of technology and business-focused publications, as well as case studies and white papers. She’s based in West Springfield, Mass. Email her at [email protected].

SHAWN SHELL is the founder of Con-sejo Inc., a consultancy based in Chicago that specializes in Web-based applica-tions, employee and partner portals and enterprise content management. Email

him at [email protected].

BRIEN M. POSEY is a Microsoft MVP with two decades of IT experience. Be-fore becoming a freelance technical writer, Posey was chief information of-ficer for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities and a network administrator for insurance companies and the Department of Defense. Email him at [email protected]. Developing a SharePoint Collaboration Strategy That Gets Results

is a SearchContentManagement.com e-publication.

Jason Sparapani

Managing Editor, E-Publications

Jonathan Gourlay

Site and News Editor

Melanie Luna

Managing Editor

Craig Stedman

Executive Editor

Linda Koury

Director of Online Design

Mike Bolduc Publisher [email protected] Ed Laplante Director of Sales [email protected] TechTarget

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