Challenges faced by Nuqul Group in SharePoint Implementation

Advisor:
Dr. Mutaz Debei

Prepared by:
Enass Arabeiat

MBA 703: Management Information Systems Course

Fall Semester 2010/2011
Challenges faced by NG in SP implementation TAG Graduate School of Business

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary....................................................................................................................................... 3

Research Scope ............................................................................................................................................. 4

Objectives ..................................................................................................................................................... 4

Target Audience ............................................................................................................................................ 5

Research Methods ........................................................................................................................................ 5

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 6

Background ................................................................................................................................................... 6

Literature Review ........................................................................................................................................ 9

Implementation Challenges ....................................................................................................................... 10

Case Study: Nuqul Group ............................................................................................................................ 20

Results and Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 28

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 29

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: SharePoint Platform Services ......................................................................................................... 7

Figure 2: SharePoint Technology Convergence ............................................................................................ 9

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Many businesses struggle to close critical gaps that can stall all efforts to supply the business with the
intended benefit, increased productivity and revenue. Those gaps are focused around adoption and
implementation in both business and technical perspectives. As SharePoint goes, we tried to cover all
issues that should be considered when it comes to SharePoint adoption to lead to success and standing
up a healthy environment by discussing and investigating the challenges that some enterprises have
experienced to help you define the areas that may require more focus and attention and hopefully assist
your enterprise with understanding the whole picture as it relates to the entire business.

In this research we walked through the common challenges that Nuqul Group faced with SharePoint and
their solutions and workarounds to let you understand SharePoint implementation and management
challenges to increase your success and avoid pitfalls.

SharePoint can offer your company a competitive advantage if you were committed to implement and
introduce it properly to your business environment.

This research came up with following Implementation issues to be considered:

Main Challenges:

 Data integration
 Security integration, single sign on (SSO)
 Heterogeneous systems to serve all
 Infrastructure problems
 Deployment problems
 User adoption and perception
 Content Migration Limitations
 Content Deployment Rollups
 Managing Lists and Libraries with Thousands or Millions of Items
 Challenges of SharePoint extranets
 Upgrading issues and bugs
 Issues with Sites

Also, you should consider the following issues:

 Business needs
o Identify the real business needs
 Environment
o Environment Metrics
 Portal Hierarchy

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 Provisioning & Site Directory

 Upgrade
o Upgrade Planning from Existing Sites
o Portal Upgrade (Document Management, Web Parts)
o Virtual Server and Home Page Customization Loss
 Architecture & Farms
o Regional Topology
 Aggregated Search, Site Directory
 Central Server Architecture; Storage Area Network
o Regional Challenges
 Single vs. Multiple Personal Sites
 Consolidation
 Clustering/SAN Support
o Farm Mode
o Extranet Challenges
 Authentication Method and Security
 Load Balancing
 Account Provisioning for Partners
 Manual Site Provisioning
 Operations & Support
o Backup: Database Backup for Disaster Recovery, Per Portal Backup with SPS Backup, Site
Collection Backup
o End User Ownership Update
o Quota Increase Requests
o Web Part Troubleshooting

Set a strategy that align business needs with SharePoint functionality, put an organizational strategy and
communicate it, design a successful SharePoint information architecture, workflow and user interface to
best leverage taxonomy and metadata and make your content easier to find and use.

And bear in mind that the most successful SharePoint projects spend dedicated time planning and
documenting with stakeholders a detailed roadmap of features and phases for implementation, so give
it a fair space and time to plan for Capacity, Infrastructure, Information Architecture, and Governance.

And don't forget the user perception is the most important issue all the time.

RESEARCH SCOPE

OBJECTIVES

Any tool is only as good as the implementation, and the technology alone does not solve problems. This
research investigates the challenges that may face any enterprise throughout their SharePoint
implementation process.

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Microsoft SharePoint is fast taking hold as the choice platform and application to help businesses
organize their data, streamline processes, and enhance communication with employees and clients,
etc... As with most of platforms, you can’t just install it and start watching productivity rise and your ROI
unfold in front of your eyes. As challenges and pitfalls go, the more you know about them the more you
can plan and avoid them.
This research aims to let you understand SharePoint implementation and management challenges from
Planning, Content, Branding, Compliance, and ROI perspectives. Throughout this research we discussed
and analyzed Why SharePoint projects fail sometimes and all the possible issues that may face you
during SharePoint implementation whether you are considering SharePoint for your organization and
your business starts to look to the benefits of SharePoint, upgrading to a new version and expand your
SharePoint environment, or want to improve the existing implementation, in order to increase success
and avoid pitfalls

In the beginning we introduce SharePoint and what are the challenges faced enterprises that adopt it
worldwide. Then we move to Nuqul Group to see what challenges that faced them while implementing
SharePoint technology at their enterprise, as they are one of the largest leading enterprises who
adopted SharePoint system and business solutions, in order to give the chance to any other organization
who are considering SharePoint to learn from their experience and knowledge and to be aware of any
obstacles and challenges that may arise and how to overcome them to successfully plan and architect a
SharePoint implementation and get over implementation challenges successfully and smoothly.

TARGET AUDIENCE

This research is intended to help guide both business and technical stakeholders involved in SharePoint
implementations to do better implementations. It is specifically targeted to (it is directed towards) the
role of information architect, whose responsibility it is to determine how an organization may best
employ the features and functionality available within the SharePoint platform and enable IT efficiency
to positively impact their business, empower decision makers and improve organizational effectiveness.
This role is typically a hybrid, and usually associated with infrastructure managers, developers, business
analysts, and information workers, decision makers, IT Pros, IT implementers.

RESEARCH METHODS

CASE STUDY

A case study methodology is used mainly to conduct this research by analyzing the implementation and
customization processes of SharePoint for Nuqul Group.

DATA GATHERING

Data gathered mainly from the interviews that are conducted with the technical and business
stakeholders that were involved in SharePoint implementations at Nuqul Group.

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INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND

WHAT IS SHAREPOINT?

SharePoint technology is a family of software products developed by Microsoft. This family includes
many products: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Search Server, Microsoft SharePoint
Foundation, Microsoft SharePoint Designer and Microsoft SharePoint Workspace.

SharePoint technology seeks to provide any enterprise a lot of features in one server. This family of
software products is hosted on a central server, it runs on Microsoft Windows Server, and requires the
.NET framework to be installed and a Microsoft SQL Server database. It can be accessed by end-users
directly via Microsoft office or using a compatible web browser.

SHAREPOINT FEATURES

SharePoint provides all features that enable you to consolidate all your enterprise solutions into a single
manageable platform, here are some feature areas of SharePoint:

 Collaboration: Docs/tasks/calendars, blogs, wikis, e-mail integration, project management,

Outlook integration, offline docs/lists
 Portal: Enterprise Portal template, Site Directory, My Sites, social networking, privacy control
 Content Management: Integrated document management, records management, Web
Publishing and Web content management with policies and workflow
 Search: Enterprise scalability, contextual relevance, Customizable UX, rich people and business
data search
 Business Forums and Processes: Rich/Web forms based front-ends, Self-Service Forms, Real-
time Data Val., LOB Integration, LOB Actions, Pluggable SSO
 Business Intelligence: Server-based Excel spreadsheets and data visualization, Report Center, BI
Web Parts, KPIs, Dashboards

In addition to the platform services such as Workspaces, Management, Deployment, Site Model,
Security, Storage, Topology Extensibility

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Figure 1: SharePoint Platform Services (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc537498%28v=office.12%29.aspx)

WHAT IS MOSS?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is one member of SharePoint family, it is an integrated suite
of server capabilities which allows better control and insight over content, search capabilities for
information that is important to the enterprise processes, as well as access, share and publish
information for better business insight, furthermore, providing an integrated platform to create, deploy,
and manage intranet, extranet and internet applications and sites across the enterprise. SharePoint can
connect people and make collaboration so much easier, it helps people across the enterprise to
collaborate and work together and improve their personal productivity.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, this "product full name 2010 provides for a number of installation
scenarios. Currently, these installations include single server with built-in database installations and
single-server or multiple-server farm installations." Microsoft Office System and Servers Team, Getting
started with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, November 2010, p: 10/53.

HOW CAN SHAREPOINT SAVE MONEY?

You can save your enterprise money when you adopt SharePoint technologies in your enterprise; it can
help you maximize ROI and reduce TCO for your organization solutions, by:

• By reducing the cost and complexity of IT by managing all the documents, rich media and web
content across the enterprise on a single integrated platform
• By reducing the operation cycle time
• By reducing the development, deployment, and maintenance costs
• By simplifying the management processes, decision making, and training
• By enhancing the effectiveness of customer service and sales teams
• By increasing the employees' productivity and innovation by saving their time and efforts and let
them focus on higher business priorities

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SharePoint provides enterprises with better control over its resources, collaborative solutions, improve
the organizational productivity and effectiveness, streamline and accelerate business processes, rapid
response to changing and specific business needs with custom solutions.

SHAREPOINT HISTORY

As the volume of intranet content was growing, the need to manage the huge volume of information
has increased. Therefore, Netscape aggregated the growing intranet content into a manageable
framework (Portal). Vendors created many packages that allow customers to aggregate their intranet
content into corporate portals. And like most of these portal products, SharePoint came to allow users
to create their own custom views of the websites. The customizations vary in complexity depending on
the product. Also, SharePoint provided a powerful collaboration model integrated with Microsoft Office
2003 suite.

The merging of collaboration and aggregation functions has led to the SharePoint Portal Server 2001
(SPS). Then the Portal Server has been upgraded to run on the .Net framework, and now is referred to as
SharePoint products and technologies. The product here is the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) and
the technologies are Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

The first portal application developed by Microsoft was the Digital Dashboard. This product has
introduced the “Web Parts” concept, but the technology behind the Digital Dashboards couldn't make it
out of the beta stage.

At the same time, as the need was growing for the contribution to a single document by many users
who may are working from different locations, Microsoft was working on a collaboration solution which
came up with the SharePoint Team Services (STS), which is a web based solution that allow many users
to access the worksheets and documents at the same time and make changes to the site via a web
browser.

Nowadays, the current version of SharePoint “SharePoint 2010” is its third.

In brief, Microsoft has launches 3 versions of SharePoint products and technologies so far, each newer
version has new features and capabilities and enhancements on the existing ones:

1. Microsoft SharePoint 2003

a. SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003
b. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0
2. Microsoft SharePoint 2007

a. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server (MOSS) 2007

3. Microsoft SharePoint 2010

a. SharePoint Server 2010
b. SharePoint Foundation 2010

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For instance, SharePoint 2010 is the Business Collaboration version for the enterprises and the web that
enables you to connect and empower people through an integrated rich set of features that can be
deployed in an Intranet, Extranet or Internet-facing solutions.

Figure 2: SharePoint Technology Convergence,

(http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Presentations/07_Shows/EBC_Office%20SharePoint%20Server%202007%20Overview.ppt)

LITERATURE REVIEW

SHAREPOINT IMPLEMENTATION

If you consider SharePoint for your enterprise, and to get started with the implementation, you need to
ensure SharePoint’s success in the first place, obtaining the full value from Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server requires more than just configuring the servers and doing other technical tasks, because
SharePoint is an application platform and without good study and upfront planning for its
implementation and without ongoing management, your SharePoint environment can range from
useless to completely out of control.

To get value from the platform, you should understand your SharePoint business goals and where this
technology can best impact your organization, then document them in a roadmap for your enterprise,
also, you need to ensure that your team has the knowledge required to meet them and has fair
knowledge about all the components required including: (Architecture Design, Topology and Site

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Navigation, Workflows, Personalization, Site Design, Search, Content Management, Publishing Process
and Governance, Security, Administration and Maintenance, Training).

In other words, you need to ensure a solid technical base that can perform business analysis, technical
design, deployment, testing, training to transfer Knowledge into your team, also, developing an initial
implementation based on best practices and good governance, healthy process and management
practices, in order to achieve a successful implementation for a complete solution.

If you ensure that, you will get many advantages for a successful SharePoint implementation, such as: a
strategy for your implementation plan, transfer the required knowledge about the architecture and the
design into your staff, rapid implementation processes, assessment for the implementation and
deployment processes for better decision making. You should make critical planning decisions which
deliver and maximize business benefit with MOSS, providing you with an implementation roadmap that
can save your project and ensure success

IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES

REQUIREMENTS:

A successful deployment of SharePoint is built on a foundation of planning, and determining what

business needs you want SharePoint to cover, as a first step; you should reveal your business needs,
whether you want SharePoint for (Document Management, Portals, Collaboration, Business Intelligence,
etc…), one of them, mix of them, or all of them.
Planning is the key foundation for success, so, you should conduct researches or network with your
peers, to define the business requirements and build the roadmap.

Some organizations cannot determine clearly what they want to accomplish through adopting this
technology. Some of the may intend to have (internet, intranet, or extranet solution, collaboration
solution, content management system, knowledge management system, application development
platform, or business process automation) and some of them intend to have mixture of all of these
solutions.

 The challenges of collaboration and information reuse with SharePoint:

Making the most of SP is one of the challenges that organizations face with SP, that they tend to put a
lot of info into SP, yet don’t organize the repositories well, and then complain they can’t find the
information. They say we have so many SP repository and workspaces that we can’t find anything.

The challenge is many times they are using SP for the wrong purpose, if you r using it as a collaborative
workspace, this means that a lot of people will be creating these applications and collaborating and
creating knowledge but not necessarily putting that knowledge into format that will be easily reused in
the organization.

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For example, repositories are for knowledge reuse, so collaborative workspaces are not necessarily
meant for knowledge reuse, repositories are meant for knowledge reuse!

The problem the organizations have, they are using SP for wrong purposes, they have too many
workspaces, they are not well managed, not well organized, they are not governed, and obviously that
stuff will be out of control.

The answer to this is to understand the purpose for these workspaces, to manage them properly, to
govern them properly, and then, to take content and promote that content to repository to reuse, so
understating the content life cycle, understanding the content can be created in a very …..environment,
there are people coming together, working to solve problems, and once they finished, we put it on the
shelf, and SP repository, so they are for reuse, so organizations should design SP for the right purpose,
they should understand the content life cycle and the value of different types of content, so they can be
created in the right place and then promoted to a reusable content object or reusable object and can be
accessed in the right place.

 Another challenge is when stakeholders have varying interpretations on what the problem actually
is and what they really want to solve or what their business requires and what they need from
SharePoint

 Planning Problems:

at the initiating and planning phases, you should understand the problem or the needs, gather and
analyze the information, in order to do this, you need to well define your scope, Infrastructure and
reach a level of organizational maturity, maturity to be aware and adopt the best practice
methodologies and know their current situation and what they achieved and what they want in the next
phases.

The organizations that lack this level of maturity use such potentials in a try and solve all of their
problems at once, without fair planning, searching, analysis that would make them understand their
problems better.

So you should ensure your enterprise readiness; it’s scalable, available, and manageable

 Managing Lists and Libraries with Thousands or Millions of Items:

One challenge for a document management system built on SharePoint 2007 is scaling lists, it’s needed
when you consider upgrading and optimizing your environment, you should consider large lists sooner
than later… but there are some impacts such as:

1. It may slow down indexing

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2. It may affect performance of the list, site, database, network and servers
3. It may affect adaptation and user perception
4. It may cause you to reorganize and restructure your content causing headaches and business
issues due to poor planning or misunderstanding
5. It may affect your ability to scale your application

 Content Migration Limitations in SharePoint 2010

Another challenge you may face is moving content around when you consider migration, so preserving
your content is the key here.

 Challenges of SharePoint extranets in SharePoint 2007

You may face 3 challenges:

1. Getting the authentication and secure infrastructure deployment put together

2. The actual service provisioning which very often is some type of workflow or portal for
provisioning sites
3. User management

DESIGN:

Understand your needs and challenges around both content and technology perspectives, review your
needs and information about your organization pertinent to the SharePoint implementation, evaluate
your information architecture (search, metadata, taxonomy, UI) needs and challenges

SharePoint Strategy

You have to set a strategy that align business needs with SharePoint functionality, prioritize resources
and develop actionable plans for implementation. Align team members across departments with a
unified SP vision for the organization, and translate that vision into detailed functional requirements for
budgeting, planning and development purposes. Deliverables from this strategy can include:

 Current state assessment & gap analysis

 Application review
 Content inventory & audit
 Implementation roadmap
 Use cases & personas
 Governance

 SharePoint Design (Information Architecture, Workflow, UI):

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SharePoint has a particular set of challenges related to usability and find-ability, given the vast amounts
of information that ends up in sites and libraries.

You have to design a successful SharePoint information architecture, workflow and user interface to
best leverage taxonomy and metadata and make your content easier to find and use. The deliverables
can include:

 Use cases & personas

 Content architecture (content types, metadata requirements)
 Taxonomy
 Search configuration recommendations (best bets, thesaurus, search UI)
 Wireframes
 Workflow design
 User experience design

After understanding the purpose of the platform for your business, you have to understand the required
architectural intelligence for your needs. What does your server count look like, how do you size the
server farm, what are the best load balancing strategies, how should you cluster your databases, how do
you leverage caching for best performance, etc…

Since most of the times the goals to be achieved from deploying SharePoint technology are not clear,
then the overall planning for the design of your SharePoint environment affected, in order to do a
successful design planning, you should understand the following:

 Your organization's user base

 Content requirements
 The topology and from where the users will access the environment
 Data sources and other applications that may interface with SharePoint, such as: BDC and KPIs
 The businesses expectations regarding SharePoint availability

 Infrastructure and budget issues

The result of product complexity depends on the organizational maturity, planning, design and sizing a
solution that will do everything, when the requirements are not well defined, they will have to design an
infrastructure to accommodate possibilities. SharePoint’s complexity may cause in a significant
infrastructure cost, and the more the scope is demanding, the harder is to plan for a cost effective
infrastructure. Therefore, in the organizations that lack good maturity, the infrastructure will be costly
which ruins their budget and time estimates, at the end they may try to reduce the cost in order to save
the project and worse to save face with the project sponsor or senior management, rather than that the
solution they came up with doesn't achieve the real needs and maybe away from the scope.

If you faced such a budget issue, you should investigate the reasons behind it, and why there is such a
disparity between the estimated and actual cost.

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PLAN:

You should consider planning for your implementation to ensure that you will make the right
information architecture decisions early in the process, and to increase the confidence that your staff
understands the key variables in MOSS, and that their decisions will maximize the value of the
technology, which may accelerate the time required to deliver value for your organization
SharePoint Server has become the default collaboration platform for many organizations, and although
the platform is technically easy to implement, configuring MOSS to meet your business needs is
complex. Organizations need to make decisions about site navigation, portal navigation structure,
metadata and taxonomy, site collections, content types and search configuration, Content migration,
governance, automation business processes and workflows. These decisions require business unit
participation so that the end results will meet user requirements.
Organizations get one shot at implementing high visibility intranet applications; if the implementation
doesn’t deliver value, it is immediately dismissed by users.
With the goal of producing a MOSS Implementation Roadmap, you should also educate and guide your
team through the process of implementing MOSS, so you can ensure you have an approach to manage
metadata and taxonomy in SharePoint, good understanding of workflows and how to build them, a high
level work plan for your implementation, a guidance for key governance and policy decisions, a detailed
MOSS roadmap, a technical and organizational feasibility assessment for implementation goals, by all of
this you ensure planning for maximum business value.

During the planning stage, IT professionals have different needs depending on their role within an
organization. for designing a solution; determining the structure, capabilities, and information
architecture for a site, you may need information that helps you determine which capabilities of WSS to
take advantage of, and help you plan for those capabilities and tailor the solution to your organization
needs. And for the hardware and network environment for your solution, you may need information
that helps you structure the server topology, and plan authentication methods.

SharePoint is complex and the products it relies on are also complex, therefore, in the wrong
infrastructure and architect hands, this can cause costly problems, a lack of product skills among
architect and infrastructure staff can impact negatively the project metrics of time and budget.
However, in the project planning process, it is common that several infrastructure oriented tasks are
under estimated due to a lack of appreciation of what is involved. Some notable ones are:

 Capacity planning
o Being document centric, it is the scenario that puts the most pressure on your
infrastructure in terms of disk IO performance and growth due to the added overhead of
version control, full text indexing, backup and recycle bin requirements. It is also
impacts –also is impacted by- the information architecture and logical architecture
design of SharePoint because of the architectural limitations of the product.
 Impact on existing infrastructure
o For example, a client gave utterly no thought to how adequate their existing backup
system was for accommodating the database oriented nature of SharePoint. As it turned
out, it was completely inadequate as it was, before the complexity of SharePoint was

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added to the mix, and to rectify the problem, it is required a new backup system that
costs them a high budget.
o Extranet requirements may unappreciated also
 Information Architecture
o such as design decisions around the set-up of web applications, site collections, sites,
site content types, libraries, lists, workflows, forms, navigation, user profiles, etc…
 Governance (procedures, standards, guidelines, change control, configuration management)
o You should factor it into you SharePoint project planning.
o Project teams still underestimate exactly what is required for governance.
o If there is a lack of discipline around change management, configuration management,
procedures, standards and guidelines to administrators, users, site owners and
developers. Failure to maintain this discipline would occur, and the ongoing reliability of
the system would be minimized slowly.
o You should use the Governance Checklist by Microsoft for your project plans, and
ensure you cover all the sections applicable to your SharePoint deployment.

You should plan for your SharePoint environment whether it is a single server deployment or a large
server farm. It is very important to architect for the environment, in order to:

 Acquire the needed hardware for implementing the physical architecture of the environment
 Know about all the possible options for suitable physical and logical configuration
 Design and implement your solid and reliable platform at the right point of time
 Plan for your new SharePoint platform deployment efficiently

You have to consider SharePoint as a service for your enterprise and plan for the design and
implementation of its platform very well because it is a critical one, if you didn't do this, you won't have
a scalable and reliable platform

Another thing, one of the goals of SharePoint is make all your enterprise information available through
it, but some enterprises make some information be managed by other systems interface with
SharePoint and some information by SharePoint itself, the point here is, it is more beneficial to use
SharePoint for all enterprise information, it is one purpose of it, otherwise it won't achieve its goals
perfectly and you won't benefit from it as much as you can.

Capacity Planning and Sizing

Implementing a new SharePoint Products and Technologies environment demands that you undertake a
thorough capacity planning exercise. This provides you with the information that you need to select the
appropriate architecture and to size the hardware for capacity, performance, and availability. However,
capacity planning is an ongoing process, because no implementation remains static in terms of content
and usage. You need to plan for growth and change, so that your SharePoint environment can continue
to deliver an effective business solution. And to maintain a good understanding of the capacity needs

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and capabilities of your deployment, you should analyze the performance and volume data. Also, review
the major application impacts that affect capacity, including content characteristics and usage.

Sizing a SharePoint technologies implementation requires that you bring the results of all your capacity
analyses together to identify the best solution for your organizational requirements.

You should consider the following when you plan for SharePoint solution:

1. Most SharePoint implementations have more than one front end server. Plan for your solution
to be able to spread across multiple servers, and make sure that when it does, it loads balances.
2. Performance; Use caching techniques to improve page loads.
3. Remember when caching that some things should be cached on a user level, and some can be
on the application level.
4. Develop for deployment. Make sure you plan a WSP package, and document well the list of all
the things that will be required that cannot be deployed using a WSP package.
5. Code Access Security.

The most successful Office SharePoint Server projects spend dedicated time planning and documenting
with stakeholders a detailed roadmap of features and phases for installation.

DEPLOYMENT

Content Deployment Rollups: In SharePoint Server 2007, it was a challenge to deploy SharePoint using
the Content Deployment features and there were some bugs in code. And a rollup was required to
deploy SharePoint using these features, they had to install the fix, and it's included in the next service
pack.

Governance is a key component to ensure the success of your SharePoint 2010 deployment,
represented by a set of established processes, procedures, and stakeholders, a well designed and
implemented governance plan promotes adoption, ensures participation, and maximizes ROI. By using
the governance techniques, best practices, and recommendations available below, you can align your
policies for using SharePoint 2010 with your culture and goals while still enabling teams and individuals
to effectively collaborate and share information.

Before you begin deployment, ensure that you have met all hardware and software requirements:

1) Hardware Requirements: Make sure the server meets or exceeds the minimum hardware
requirements for installing MOSS

An installation of Office SharePoint Server can range from a single computer (stand alone installation) to
many computers (server farm). The requirements for your installation will depend on the availability and
scale requirements for your solution.

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To deploy a server farm, you need at least one server computer acting as a Web server and an
application server, and one server computer acting as a database server.

2) Software Requirements: Make sure your environment meets or exceeds the minimum software
requirements for installing MOSS

3) Database hardware and software requirements: Before you install and configure the databases, you
should prepare the Data Base server, be sure that your database servers meet or exceed the minimum
hardware and software requirements.

Despite all the advances in Windows 200x, IIS, SQL Server, fancy multi-layered security, richer object
model via ASP.NET Version x and the like, every developer has it in his power to render even a tightly
managed SharePoint farm. A lack of a simple null check can render a site un-viewable. Choosing the
wrong way to execute a query on content can consume huge amounts of CPU and memory. An incorrect
design decision can cause a good idea to be lost in the frustration of the user experience. When it all
comes down to it, it is the end user acceptance, adaptation and evangelism that determine whether a
project will be a success or failure.

SharePoint Integration with Enterprise Search

SharePoint is often used as team tool; and this creates particular challenges in meeting enterprise goals
for sharing knowledge. Many organizations also have commitments to high power search engines that
cut across multiple content repositories, so you need to configure them to access SharePoint
documents, with appropriate attention to taxonomy and document tagging, so you can make all your
distributed SharePoint documents accessible through a single enterprise search platform, by finding an
appropriate solution design, governance, and system integration

During operations stage, you should focus on day-to-day monitoring, maintenance, and tuning of your
environment, to maintain your system performance, you must monitor your server to identify potential
bottlenecks, using the provided Performance tool, which allows you to monitor generic and application-
specific components.

UPGRADING

The upgrade process is not as simple as inserting a CD and running Setup. You need to plan your
upgrade approach carefully, anticipate any issues that might come up during or after the process. You
might have other requirements or additional goals that you want to accomplish when you perform your
upgrade, so you need to consider it, and consider your specific environment, your system must have the
appropriate processor power and memory to run the upgrade process, make sure your system meets
the requirements, otherwise, you may run into issues during the upgrade process.

Be sure you are following the capacity planning guidelines from the old and new versions before you
attempt the upgrade. If you have exceeded the guidelines for best performance, the upgrade process
might take longer, or it might not succeed.
It's preferred to use a trial upgrade to find potential issues, also to estimate how much space will be
needed and how long the upgrade process will take, because every environment is unique and includes

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different hardware capabilities and different site characteristics, the amount of space and the length of
time needed to run an upgrade will vary greatly depending on your environment and the particular
characteristics of your implementation. So you need to perform a trial upgrade pass, also you need to
estimate how long the activities during the pre upgrade and post upgrade phases will take, and then
review the sizes and times.

Also, you need to make database migration decisions. You should back up your database and estimate
database space and time needed for the upgrade. You will find most of your challenges in database
migration around custom web parts and pages, un-ghosted files, and custom site definitions to name a
few.
Very large document libraries and huge databases can contribute to longer upgrade times, and if you
have a very large database (more than 100 GB) that you cannot break up (because the majority of
content is in a single site collection), you may also want to reconsider your upgrade approach.

Issues with Sites

It is important that you train users about the effects of either preserving the look and feel of existing
SharePoint sites or upgrading all sites to the new user interface. Educated users are prepared and know
what to expect, which will minimize helpdesk support and frustrations.
If you upgrade all sites to the new user interface, inform users about changes and new features, such as
the ribbon, the new page editing interface, and interactive calendars. Also, let them know about
possible issues that they can expect. For instance, they might have issues with customizations, such as
pages not displaying correctly.

You have to understand the issues that might arise when you upgrade sites that have customized pages
and custom SharePoint solutions. By understanding the problems that might arise and taking proactive
steps to resolve them, you can manage the smoothest possible transition to migrate sites from Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Foundation 2010 and
SharePoint Server 2010.

Upgrading to SPS 2010

Companies should carefully plan their migration to the new user interface of SharePoint 2010 and this
migration should involve some end user training, because the user experience for executing many
common tasks becomes dialog box driven in SharePoint Server 2010, and might take some time to
become familiar with. Although the new user interface has obvious long term benefit, it can also have a
short term effect on user productivity.

In addition to the need for users to get up to speed on the new user interface, there is also the issue of
page customizations and custom components that were designed and tested for Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Companies that are migrating sites that have customized
pages or that rely on custom components such as Web Parts should take proactive steps to ensure that
these page customizations and custom components appear and behave correctly when used in the new
user interface of SharePoint 2010. In some scenarios, customized pages and custom solutions designed

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for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 might have to be updated
before they work correctly in the new user interface.

The user interface introduced by SharePoint 2010 is a great step forward for the SharePoint platform.
However, the dramatic change in the user experience can have a short-term effect of lowering user
productivity. The Visual Upgrade feature is designed to lessen this effect on users by decoupling farm
and content migration from migration to the new user interface. Visual Upgrade goes further by
enabling user interface migration from version 3 to version 4 on a site-by-site basis. This level of
granularity enables different teams within a company or organization to move to the new version 4 user
interface at their own pace, independently of any other team.

For larger deployments, several people with different roles can be required to perform the upgrade
tasks, server administrators, site collection owners, site designers and developers, site users,
sponsors and other stakeholders, so you need to create a communication plan. It is critical that you
have a solid plan to communicate the progress of the upgrade to all team members so that everyone
knows when it is time to perform their particular tasks.

Once you have outlined and fully understand the different components of your existing deployment, the
path to upgrade becomes much clearer. Building targeted test plans to ensure migration success is a key
to any SharePoint upgrade. As with most complex application upgrades, all the issues from the upgrade
are not always readily apparent. A targeted and well executed test plan can save you a lot of valuable
time on the backend.

INFORMATION SECURITY

One of the most common requirements of any system is reporting. It is usually listed as a top five must
have requirement by stakeholders and yet seldom makes it to the final list of deliverables due to time,
cost, or application functionality. Relegated to a later phase, most reporting never happens. Office
SharePoint Server arrives with significant out of the box reporting that requires little to no configuration.

ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY AND SENIOR MANAGEMENT

Put an organizational strategy and communicate it: a well crafted and executed strategy can have a
significant effect on the organizations' success if it's executed well, also, it's a critical part to execute
your strategy in a way that engages with your employees and they own it. Failure to do this sets up
many projects to fail before they even begin.

Also, as a manager, you should focus on your corporate culture, because it has a high impact on the
organizational maturity, which affects project success, the bigger the project, the greater chance of
failure.

Product complexity, organizational maturity, infrastructure complexity, information architecture

complexity, governance complexity, that is a lot of considerations! Therefore, dialogue and shared
understanding among stakeholders is required.

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TRAINING AND USER PERCEPTION

SharePoint end users skills vary greatly. Their core daily use includes basic navigation, search, and
document management. Transitioning from a traditional file server based network to a SharePoint store
is a significant paradigm shift and some users can encounter difficulties with change. Beyond basic user
interface, the focus should be on understanding lists, user interfaces, navigation, workflows, upload,
offline, and interaction with client applications.

SharePoint Server is not merely an install-and-walk-away deployment. What ensures its success is the
way the people who use it. Understanding how an organization consumes and distributes its data is
critical to how Office SharePoint Server is enabled and configured. Early in the discovery process,
consider gathering representatives from across the organization to form a stakeholder’s group. These
members will be your guide not only to a successful deployment, but also to getting the word out and
generating real interest company wide.

While the Office SharePoint Server user interface should be considered user friendly and presents a
small learning curve for anyone familiar with Web use and the Internet, remember that its new concepts
and sheer number of options can appear daunting to many corporate users who are steadfast in their
use of corporate file shares. Many users are personally attached to their corporate mapped drives.
When deploying Office SharePoint Server, be sure and include a training program not only for the
administrators and developers, but also the designers and information workers. Your ability to help
them understand the company strategy and vision will directly impact adoption.

When training users, consider creating a demo environment where each user completes activities in
Office SharePoint Server in an environment which mimics production. Compel users to perform role
appropriate tasks such as creating a site, creating a list, and adding their favorite co-workers to the site’s
contact list. Whatever Office SharePoint Server functionality considered core to corporate goals should
be provided as a hands-on in training or many corporate users will never explore beyond their simple
own daily tasks.

As challenging as it may be at times, always consider users when planning an Office SharePoint Server
deployment. Everyone who uses Microsoft Office Word or Excel is also interacts with Office SharePoint
Server.

CASE STUDY: NUQUL GROUP

NUQUL GROUP AND SHAREPOINT

Established in 1952 Nuqul Group is a conglomerate of 30 companies and one of the Middle East's
leading industrial groups. The Group is characterized by industrial diversification, vertical integration,
regional expansion and synergy. It is currently present in diverse sectors such as: automotive,
construction, plastic pipes, stationery, converting and paper mills, packaging and printing, and many
others.

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Nuqul Group's headquarters located in Amman, Jordan, in addition to many branch offices and
manufacturing plants located in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine, it brings together
more than 5,500 employees. The Group's broad manufacturing base and its proactive marketing
strategy have enabled them to extend their operations into more than 45 markets worldwide.

A company review shows a growth resulting from company acquisitions and historical transitions in IT
leadership, and the investment in its information architecture is significant, as a part of its efforts to
realize full business potential by adopting the latest technologies in the market across its Business Units
in the MENA region.

One of Nuqul Group's Information Technology Solutions they have adopted, is Microsoft Office
SharePoint, they adopted it since 2006, and experienced all this product versions, when Microsoft
launch newer version of this product, they keep to upgrade to the latest, as they keen to deploy
advanced services and solutions to enhance their employees productivity and efficiency and empower
them with knowledge

When implementing SharePoint Solution, and since they have around 30 Business Units scattered in the
MENA region, they faced challenges not only to the Group's internal culture, but to overall business
units and communications in general. These challenges begin with the most basic of physical locality
challenges and international bandwidth limitations, passing by technical challenges, and ending with
user adaptation and perception challenges.

DATA PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS

In this research, we have analyzed the information collected through the interviews conducted with
responsible officers at Nuqul Group, we aim to show through the following analysis some facts and the
results we came up with in order to achieve our objectives from this research, such as what is the main
obstacles and challenges in SharePoint implementation, what are the reasons behind them, how to
overcome such obstacles and pitfalls successfully, and how to architect a successful SharePoint
implementation plan. Here we go:

NUQUL GROUP AND SPS 2003

In year 2003, Nuqul Group used to manage traditional service and line of business applications including
e-mail, file sharing, finance, and custom applications specific to departments' needs. It met with limited
success in integrating their departments, business units, into that existing architecture. Therefore, they
started to consider a solution, in an effort to decrease their infrastructure management impacts.

And till 2006, they conducted researches, did their studies, considered their budget, financial situation,
studied their requirements, business needs, environment and infrastructure, especially that their
infrastructure was not consolidated at that time, but, in 2006, Nuqul Group headquarter moved to a
new building which has better infrastructure, and they became more into WAN and connected all their
business units into one central application.

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After moving into the new location, conducting researches on companies adopted that version of
SharePoint inside and outside Jordan, studying a lot of proposals, studying all relative perspectives,
analyses, evaluating all technologies that were in the market at that time, getting advices and
consultation from vendors, and after intensive investigations between both business and technical
stakeholders, they made their decision and agreed on bringing their business units into a Microsoft
SharePoint platform.

Thus, they started to implement SharePoint Server (SPS) 2003 in year 2006. They adopted it for the
following goals basically:

 Provide a centralized location where users and managers can quickly locate corporate data needed for
daily job performance, Consolidation for all their news, News central announcements
 Content management, Sharing documents,
 Version Control, Corporate memory.
 Portals
 Ensure that the corporate brand and culture translates into a standardized user experience.
 To build a platform for the next phases and to contribute in achieving their vision
 To get more benefits for the organization in Intranet solutions and have more reliable infrastructure.
 To low TCO and increase ROI through reducing the cost and complexity of IT, enhance decision making
and management processes, and employees' productivity.

Furthermore, they found this solution is not expensive as other solutions in total cost, also it provides
high integration with other applications such as Microsoft Office.

They started to implement Microsoft SharePoint in 2006 with "Blue Energy for Advanced Technologies"
company (BEAT) as a vendor for the platform, BEAT is one of well-known Independent Software Vendors
(ISV) in Jordan, they implemented SPS 2003 for Nuqul Group, and they did the branding, governance,
customization, etc for them, and they got the consultation externally. Studying the infrastructure and
preparing it for the implementation done internally by their operations department as they prepared it
to connect all their business Units regionally and locally and for all their systems not only for SP, but also
for ERP, CRM, etc as well.

The Group's infrastructure in 2006 was already fit for SharePoint requirements, they didn't need to
made any changes on it, especially that the new location infrastructure and the Hardware requirements
was already fit in terms of connection with Business Units (BU), WAN, services, etc…

The challenges in this phase were mainly about Change Management and user perception:

What ensures this platform success is the way the end users use it, not all employees accepted the new
system easily; it requires them to change their way of doing business, and even the concentrate on
knowledge transfer; they conducted trainings and presentations for all employees to educate them

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about it, its features and how to use it, but the user acceptance was very low (confusion about why we
need SPS2003).

Their core daily use for end users includes basic navigation, search, and document management. The
transition from a traditional to a SharePoint is a significant paradigm shift and some users encountered
difficulties adopting it, end users skills vary greatly. Beyond basic user interface, the focus should be on
understanding lists, user interfaces, navigation, workflows, upload, offline, and interaction with client
applications.

Another challenge was Security integration, Anonymous Access, single sign on (SSO):

In order to get value from RMS which is integrated with SharePoint and Group Standard Manual (GSM),
you have to publish it on the portal, but at the same time you should ensure it is protected, and non
authenticated users can't access it, because not all departments have the privileges on those
documents.

Stakeholders need to ensure maintaining their private departmental sites only available to departmental
members. Each department takes ownership of its own site. However, it is important that corporate
branding remains consistent throughout the portal site. For this reason, specific site templates were
created for both corporate department sites and private department sites. This ensured that the colors,
logos, and other branding elements would remain under the control of the portal site administrators,
even though each department would have explicit control over its content.

This completes the topology for the Nuqul Group corporate intranet. Departmental stakeholder
requirements have been gathered, prioritized, and scoped as a foundation and corporate branding and
user interface enabled the planned topology to be finally built and deployed. After branding is
completed, metadata planning helped them in defining global content types and workflows.

Nuqul Group invested heavily in creating strong brand awareness in the market. Its corporate logo and
unique color palette are associated with its excellent reputation. This brand identity is not only external,
but is a critical part of the employee culture as well. For stakeholders, it is of paramount importance
that the brand identity extends to all corporate applications. The corporate Office SharePoint Server site
should be communicating the corporate presence as well and ensure it is a Nuqul Group's Web property
in the end users' minds, and this is what has been achieved.

An interface team identified, and became familiar with the new Office SharePoint Server controls and
Web Parts. While ASP.NET 2.0 functionality plays a significant role in how branding is deployed, Office
SharePoint Server 2007 navigation, search controls, and themes which are critical in how a customized
look and feel are applied.

Out of the box site layout as it currently exists reviewed, because in many cases, out of the box master
page functionality is robust enough to warrant only minor cosmetic changes, such as those to colors and
headers.

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NUQUL GROUP AND SPS 2007

In 2007, Microsoft launched a new version of SPS, which has enhanced features and new important
features. In the third quarter of 2007, Nuqul Group decided to upgrade to the newer version.

After reviews and studying the new version and conducting some stakeholder interviews, it became
clear that the current version of SPS is not sufficient for their business needs and the new version's
features brought concern from stakeholders and expected to meet more needs of the Group and the
outcome of this was the decision of upgrade.

So they started the upgrading process, they completed upgrading from SPS 2003 to SPS 2007 in the first
quarter of 2008, they chose to upgrade because SPS 2003 didn't cover all their business needs, while the
newer version supposed to cover many of them, such as:

 Workflows

 Integration features

 Content management

 Simplicity

 Some features in Branding

 Look and feels

 Business Intelligence features, such as: KPIs, Business Data Catalogs (BDC)

The user adaptation for SPS 2003 was not high because of the lack for these features also, it didn't serve
a lot of the Group's needs, and even internally they got user complaints

Throughout the upgrading process from SPS 2003 to SPS 2007, they found 2 bugs:

First bug: The taxonomy or site hierarchy has been affected:

When they did the upgrade, the site collection has been taken alone, and each one of the top levels sites
became a separate site collection by its own. Hence, the number of sites collection increased, and this
affected the hierarchy, inheritance, and even the security.

Second bug: Backup issue

When the user uploaded a document through drag it and drop into windows explorer, this step
overrides a flag in the Database which due to not let the file be included in the backup, so if you took a
backup from the file, it is lost, as if it's not exist, thus will not find that file in the backup, it's missing.

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They escalated this problem to their partner and Microsoft, but they couldn't solve it, so they escalated
it to the Software Assurance in Eastern Europe and verified that reason in cooperation with them, and at
the end they fixed it manually.

Another challenge in the upgrade was a branding issue:

In order to make their own design and apply their own look and feel, and apply their Corporate Identity
(CR) on the new portal for branding purposes, they chose to use a theme because they can make any
changes if required easily, but it was not easy to apply a theme, so they made it in cooperation with
their partner and it took a considerable time because the lack of experience in such a thing at that time.

After Upgrading and start using SPS 2007, the main challenges in this phase was about:

User perception:

As in using SPS 2003, they face the same issue again; even they used to use SharePoint since 2006, but it
still the major issue, especially that their culture is really huge.

Worth mentioning, that they didn't cover all heir business units in the region till now, but in progress to.
In 2003 they started in the head office in Amman, Jordan, and covered all business units in Jordan in
2009.

Also for this version of SharePoint, they conducted trainings and educate employees about the new
features and what's new in this version, but again, user adaptation and perception still low, because end
users skills vary greatly and necessarily some users encountered difficulties adopting it.

In SPS 2007, Complexity in workflows, no escalations, delegation, only Out of the box templates and you
weren't able to build your own design.

Automation workflows in 2007:

Nuqul Group has Customer Complaints system, under their CRM system, which they have with certain
business units. Customer complaints workflow idea came from that the Group has business units in
many countries, under converting business (retailers and wholesalers), so they wanted a system to
follow up customer complaints. The system needed to be centralized and governed, so the workflows
had the same procedures for all business units, and the cycle is governed and all business units are
audited whether they work upon the standards or not. Therefore, they got higher customer satisfaction
and better performance and could make better decisions.

Considerations for planning for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server deployment was the site topology
(taxonomy or site hierarchy), how the Group would best traverse their sites and locate its content to
contribute greatly to a sense of location and in turn increase the perception of usability. Also, they take

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into their consideration the corporate structure, stream of work within the enterprise, security, and user
affiliations.

Nuqul Group has tens of business units scattered in many countries such as UAE, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran,
etc… since they want SharePoint to support all users located on all countries, additional complexities
apply, such as:

 Apply multilingual deployments, in order to support users who speak different languages,
especially for Iran

 The connectivity, the speed was too slow, especially the units in the far locations

When the distance between a hosted SharePoint Server site and the end user allows for adequate
bandwidth and latency, a single corporate instance of SharePoint Server can be more than adequate. As
a rule of thumb, if a user can gain reasonable access to retrieve and save acceptable document sizes,
then location need not be a concern as with many offices located within different countries. Apart from
basic accessibility, geopolitical concerns such as localized working groups or governmental boundaries
may insert themselves as requirements.

Not all business units found the access to bandwidth smoothly especially those outside Jordan such in
Iran and some of Jordan business units such which located in Airport Road, etc… consequently, other
locations may require a separate solution, or maybe hosting additional instance(s) of Office SharePoint
Server at the other unit(s) is another option that satisfies the requirement for reasonable access to
retrieve and save files, but in this case you should connect it to its parent site at the corporate
headquarters, and the administrators of both locations must coordinate access to allow both parent and
child sites to index the other’s content accordingly, and then navigation points from the parent portal
site down to the child portal site must be added manually.

Languages in and of themselves are not functional limiters when planning a hierarchy, as each individual
Office SharePoint Server site maintains discreet language control. Peer, child, and parent sites allow for
language templates at any point of site creation within the site collection. In our case, Nuqul Group,
Jordan based headquarter apply the exclusive use of English, the web site hosted in other countries use
other languages may allow for other languages.

NUQUL GROUP AND SPS 2010

In 2010, Microsoft has launched a newer version of SharePoint; it's the latest one so far, with enhanced
features and more new important features.

Once again, after reviews and studying the new version and conducting some stakeholder interviews, it
became clear that the latest version of SPS is supposed to be more sufficient for their business needs

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and the new features brought their concern and fit more into the Group's business need, so they made
their decision of upgrade to the newest version.

They started the upgrading process from SPS 2007 to SPS 2010, in September 2010, and completed
upgrading in November 2010, the newer version is supposed to cover the following:

 Achieve better look and feel using (Media Repository, Ribbons, Themes, Silver Light)

 Provide better customize list that that exist in SPS 2007

 Provide better workflows and automation

 Provide enhanced Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as: Drill down, Reports, excel, Business
Data Catalogs (BDC), KPIs, etc…

Nuqul Group started to focus on Business Intelligence since 2007, and since BI in SPS 2007 was very
simple, and SPS 2010 provides many good features and tools for BI, then it was a big motivator to adopt
it early and upgrade to SP 2010.

Nuqul Group reached a mature situation which allows them to use such tools and rely on to make some
decisions on both operational and financial levels.

Upgrading challenges:

They found a lot of bugs because of compatibility issues, they figured it out using a tool called "Health
analyzer" comes with the SP, since it is a short time since they upgrade to SPS 2010, many cases they
faced aren't solved yet, and they don't know the reasons behind them, but currently they are working
on them with cooperation with MCS (Microsoft consulting services).

The major bugs were in "Search center", it shows some failure sometimes. Also in the Database, after 10
days from the upgrade which is supposed to be done successfully and no action required for the
database, the database shows a status as its status before upgrading. It is still under investigating.

SP 2010 challenges:

The supposed BI tools and features in SP 2010 don't match all their business needs, so they are
escalating them to Microsoft to solve them

They are trying to apply requirements using BI, but it does not exist, so they are escalating them to
architects in Microsoft to solve these problems.

And they still investigate SP 2010, because it is not a long time since they completed upgrading into it,
just in November 2010.

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RESULTS AND CONCLUSI ON

In an effort to narrow down the possible challenges and issues that may face any enterprise in
SharePoint, the following considerations can help them to optimize their SharePoint implementation
and adoption processes:

Main Challenges:

 Data integration
 Security integration, single sign on (SSO)
 Heterogeneous systems to serve all
 Infrastructure problems
 Deployment problems
 User adoption and perception
 Content Migration Limitations
 Content Deployment Rollups
 Managing Lists and Libraries with Thousands or Millions of Items
 Challenges of SharePoint extranets
 Upgrading issues and bugs
 Issues with Sites

Also, you should consider the following issues:

 Business needs
o Identify the real business needs
 Environment
o Environment Metrics
 Portal Hierarchy
 Provisioning & Site Directory
 Upgrade
o Upgrade Planning from Existing Sites
o Portal Upgrade (Document Management, Web Parts)
o Virtual Server and Home Page Customization Loss
 Architecture & Farms
o Regional Topology
 Aggregated Search, Site Directory
 Central Server Architecture; Storage Area Network
o Regional Challenges
 Single vs. Multiple Personal Sites
 Consolidation
 Clustering/SAN Support
o Farm Mode
o Extranet Challenges
 Authentication Method and Security
 Load Balancing

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 Account Provisioning for Partners

 Manual Site Provisioning
 Operations & Support
o Backup: Database Backup for Disaster Recovery, Per Portal Backup with SPS Backup, Site
Collection Backup
o End User Ownership Update
o Quota Increase Requests
o Web Part Troubleshooting

Set a strategy that align business needs with SharePoint functionality, put an organizational strategy and
communicate it, design a successful SharePoint information architecture, workflow and user interface to
best leverage taxonomy and metadata and make your content easier to find and use.

And bear in mind that the most successful SharePoint projects spend dedicated time planning and
documenting with stakeholders a detailed roadmap of features and phases for implementation, so give
it a fair space and time to plan for Capacity, Infrastructure, Information Architecture, and Governance.

And don't forget the user perception is the most important issue all the time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 http://sharepoint.microsoft.com

 http://www.microsoft.com

 http://www.endusersharepoint.com/

 http://office.microsoft.com/

 http://www.partnersdps.com

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee428287.aspx

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx

 https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx?product=1&competency=SharePoi
nt%20Workspace

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

 http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=23

 http://www.cleverworkarounds.com

 http://www.nuqulgroup.com

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