SharePoint “15” App Model – Introduction Web view03.07.2014 · Information architecture is often recorded as a hierarchical list of content, search keywords, data types, and

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 -

Information ArchitectureVerified Against Build #15.0.4128.1014

Prepared by

Sriram BalaSharePoint

Practice

Governance and Information Architecture 2

Table of ContentsWhat is information architecture?...................................................................................................3

Goals............................................................................................................................................ 3Information architecture resources.................................................................................................4Information Architecture for Target setup (Medium / Large Farm)..................................................5Plan sites and site collections in SharePoint 2013..........................................................................8Sites and site collections planning principles..................................................................................9Methods of site and site collection organization.............................................................................9

Inventory your farm...................................................................................................................13To inventory a SharePoint farm by using Windows PowerShell..............................................13

Plan document libraries in SharePoint 2013.................................................................................14Overview of managed navigation in SharePoint Server 2013.......................................................15Overview of site navigation in SharePoint 2013............................................................................16Plan managed metadata in SharePoint Server 2013.....................................................................17Plan search in SharePoint Server 2013.........................................................................................18Plan for information management policy in SharePoint Server 2013............................................19Plan records management in SharePoint Server 2013..................................................................20Plan eDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2013..................................................................................21Plan for Internet, intranet, and extranet publishing sites in SharePoint Server 2013....................22Site Types: Web Templates and Site Definitions...........................................................................23Plan document versioning, content approval, and check-out controls in SharePoint 2013...........24Plan content approval and scheduling in SharePoint 2013...........................................................25Plan for information management policy in SharePoint Server 2013............................................26Plan for social computing and collaboration in SharePoint Server 2013.......................................27Plan for My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013.................................................................................28Plan for OneDrive for Business in SharePoint Server 2013...........................................................29


What is information architecture?Information architecture determines how the information in that site or solution—its webpages, documents, lists, and data—is organized and presented to the site’s users. Information architecture is often recorded as a hierarchical list of content, search keywords, data types, and other concepts.Goals

Good information architecture supports the following goals:

Manageable Can the IT team effectively implement and manage the information? Meets requirements Does the information architecture meet regulatory requirements, privacy

needs, and security goals? Increases business effectiveness Doe’s the architecture add to your organization’s

effectiveness?

Determine the rules or policies that you need for the following types of items: pages, lists, documents, records, rich assets, blogs and wikis, feeds, anonymous comments, anonymous access, terms and term sets, and external data (Business Connectivity Services).

As a good information management practice, consider the balance among the following factors:-

Availability Content needs to be available when users need it and where they can get to it. Access Consider who has access to the content. If it should be secure, is it? Redundancy Shared copies reduce redundancy and provide one version of a document.

Questions to be asked with customer during discussions:-

Designing a site or solution Information management: permissions and audiences IT governance: access

Consider your priorities for different content by thinking through questions like these:-

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee661740.aspx


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219700.aspx


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261982.aspx



Which of these factors is the highest priority for each type of content? Is availability more important than access? Is access more important than redundancy? What would make it so difficult for users that they would be tempted to use a different solution? What trade-offs are possible or desirable?

Information architecture resourcesTo plan … See …The structure of sites and subsites Plan sites and site collections in SharePoint 2013Document libraries Plan document libraries in SharePoint 2013

NavigationOverview of managed navigation in SharePoint Server 2013

Overview of site navigation in SharePoint 2013Metadata Plan managed metadata in SharePoint Server 2013Search Plan search in SharePoint Server 2013Content expiration Plan for information management policy in SharePoint Server 2013Records management Plan records management in SharePoint Server 2013eDiscovery Plan eDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2013Publishing and managing pages

Plan for Internet, intranet, and extranet publishing sites in SharePoint Server 2013

Templates Site Types: WebTemplates and Site Definitions

Content approvalPlan document versioning, content approval, and check-out controls in SharePoint 2013

Plan content approval and scheduling in SharePoint 2013Information management policies Plan for information management policy in SharePoint Server 2013

Social computing

Plan for social computing and collaboration in SharePoint Server 2013

Plan for My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013

Plan for OneDrive for Business in SharePoint Server 2013

Information Architecture for Target setup (Medium / Large Farm)Overview

Technology Landscape


SharePoint Farm

Web applications

Web Application | Mode | Method | No. of Site collections |Content db. Size | No. of users

Authentication Mode / Method , Claims-based – SAML – Tokens Guideline on Site Collection Vs. sites

Site Collection

Site Collection Name / Quota/Collection admin/features/services Site Collection Name /Master pages/layout applicability Site Collection Hierarchy (tree structure)

Sites

Site Hierarchy Permission groups Group Name | Permissions Templates Site planning – navigation Metadata (and meta data navigation) Retention policies (Site level and/or division/dept. based/content type/doc. Type) Search – refinement

Document Management

Document library guideline – Library structure/lib. Features to be enabled/IRM

Content Management

Content- content mgmt., Content type decisions, workflow/retention/records mgmt../archival


Workflow Recommendations

OOTB or VS workflow or third-party (or combination of some/all of these)

Search

Enterprise search- external source – federate, faceted search

Web Content Management

Publishing features – approval process, which sites or type of sites to be enabled with publishing options

Enterprise Content Management

E-Discovery decisions

Collaboration

Collaboration features –recommendation (blogs/surveys/Newsfeed/discussions/likes/rating/need for newsgator)

Non Functional Requirements

NFR – usability / look & feel/ device support/browser support – which user/device will be used for which functionality

Information Flow

Information flow – across systems

Monitoring


Monitoring/auditing/logging

Integration

List of LoB applications

For each LoB- mention type of integration (BCS/web service/interfaces) and explain the functional points

Tools

Existing / Third-party tool decisions

Benefits – Pros/Cons of this Approach

Features/Aspects Not covered

References

Conclusion


Plan sites and site collections in SharePoint 2013

Every SharePoint 2013 site belongs to only one site collection and a site collection is made up of one top-level site and all sites below it.

As shown in the following figure, a site collection is the top level of organization in a SharePoint 2013 web application. The number of site collections you can have in a single web application depends on the capacity of your server infrastructure

Figure: Structure of a site collection in SharePoint 2013

Topics to discuss

Sites and site collections planning principles Methods of site and site collection organization Inventory your farm

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263267(v=office.15).aspx#section3




Sites and site collections planning principles

In general, use these rules to plan your sites and site collections:

Use one web application per farm to support all your site collections and sites. Keep you’re internally facing (intranet) SharePoint 2013 solution in a separate SharePoint 2013

farm from your externally facing (Internet) solution. Use host-named site collections instead of path-named site collections and place them in the

default zone. For more information about how to design host-named site collections Use path-named collections when you need to use alternate access mappings (AAMs).

Methods of site and site collection organization

There are many ways your sites can be organized. Having a plan in place to help govern your site deployments will help you avoid random, unorganized site growth, enable better management of your SharePoint infrastructure, and provide a better user experience.

Understand business needs

The first step in planning your site structure is to inventory the business problems and needs that you are using SharePoint 2013 to address. Then map your business needs to the site type best suited to meet them. This mapping will tell you the types of sites you will need. At the highest level, you will need sites that fall under the Collaboration category, the Enterprise category, the Publishing category, or the Custom category..

Models for site collections

After you determine which types of sites your solution requires, the next step is to plan how these sites are implemented across site collections. A site collection is a hierarchical set of sites that can be managed together. Sites in a site collection have common features, such as:

Shared permissions Galleries for templates Content types Web Parts Often share a common navigation scheme

The main goal of site collection planning is to put a structure in place that your organization can grow in without creating unnecessary management overhead. Here is a generic model for an intranet SharePoint 2013 farm that will meet many needs.

Figure: Model of an intranet SharePoint 2013 farm


Internal Collaboration and Publishing You can create a site collection to host your internal team sites. These can be broken down into two major categories. One branch can be organized around your company’s internal hierarchy, with divisional portals hosting subsites for the individual long standing teams to use to store their content, collaborate, and publish their work out to the rest of the organization. Another peer branch can be for ad hoc or v-teams or project teams. These teams have members from across the long standing teams and need to have a collaboration and publishing space for a limited period of time.

Internal Enterprise Applications You can create a site collection to host sites and resources that everyone in your company will use. For example, your company intranet, enterprise search, My Sites, and records repositories. It is best practice to keep document center sites and records center sites in separate site collections.

Internet Presence It is best practice to place your company Internet presence in a separate SharePoint 2013 farm. Site collections of this type host resources that are available to anonymous users on the Internet. For example, you might use an Internet presence site to provide news articles or reviews that are tagged with metadata to categorize articles so that users can search or browse for information. For more information about how to design SharePoint 2013 for an Internet presence, see Overview of publishing to Internet, intranet, and extranet sites in SharePoint Server 2013 and Plan the logical architecture for cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013.






All sites in a site collection are stored together in the same SQL database. This can potentially affect site and server performance, depending on how your site collections and sites are structured, and depending on the purpose of the sites. Be aware of the following limits when you plan how to allocate your content across one or more site collections:

Keep extremely active sites in separate site collections. For example, a knowledge base site on the Internet that allows anonymous browsing could generate lots of database activity. If other sites use the same database, their performance could be affected. By putting the knowledge base site in a separate site collection with its own database, you can free up resources for other sites that no longer have to compete with it for database resources.

Because all content in a site collection is stored in the same content database, the performance of database operations — such as backing up and restoring content — will depend on the amount of content across the site collection, the size of the database, the speed of the servers hosting the database, and other factors. Depending on the amount of content and the configuration of the database, you might have to divide a site collection into multiple site collections to meet service-level agreements for backing up and restoring, throughput, or other requirements. It is beyond the scope of this article to provide prescriptive guidance about how to manage the size and performance of databases.

Creating too many sites below a top-level site in a site collection might affect performance and usability. The maximum recommended number of sites and subsites in a site collection is 250,000 sites.

Once you have your site collection plan in place, you can move on to planning the organization of the sites in those site collections.

Plan sites by organizational hierarchy

Plan the basic sites that you need based on the scale and structure of your organization. Some sites for larger divisions or projects can also aggregate information that is found on all the smaller subsites that are devoted to smaller long standing teams or v-teams that are responsible for time limited projects.

Use the following guidelines when you plan sites that are based on your organizational structure:

Divisional or team sites Plan to create one site per team under a divisional rollup site. In large organizations, there might be several levels of sites, with each site focusing on the content that is created and managed at its level of the organization.

You can design a site for members of your organization to collaborate on content related to your business or organizational goals. These can be self-contained or they can work with other sites as part of a publishing process. Often, these sites will have a mixture of collaborative content that is used internally and content that is intended for publication to an audience.

Rollup sites A rollup site surfaces content that is stored on other subsites. It makes it possible for users across divisions to find information, and experts. It often contains sites that are related to the overall organizational information architecture and that are usually mapped to the structure of the divisional or project sites.


Plan application sites

An application site organizes team processes and provides mechanisms for running them. Application sites often include digital dashboards and other features to view and change data that is related to the site’s purpose. The information that is presented in an application site usually comes from diverse sources, such as databases or other SharePoint sites.

For example, the human resources organization could design an application site to provide employees with:

Access to general information, such as employee handbooks and career opportunities. Ways to do common tasks, such as submitting timecards and expense reports. Dashboards to view personalized information, such as an employee's salary and benefits history.

As another example, the internal technical support group in an organization could design a Help Desk application site to provide technical support to members of the organization. Features of the application site could include the following:

Access to a knowledge base of past support incidents and best-practices documentation. Ways to do common tasks, such as starting a support incident or reviewing the status of an ongoing

incident. Integration with communications features that support online meetings and discussions. Personalized views of data. For example, support managers could view dashboards that provide

views of their team members' productivity and customer satisfaction ratings. Support engineers could view their current unresolved incidents.

Plan publishing sites

By using a publishing site, authors can create and modify content in the form of web pages and documents, and they can use an approval process to make the content available to users who have the appropriate levels of viewing permissions. The publishing process involves creating content and then submitting it for approval. After content is approved, it is made available, or published, to the website for readers. This publishing occurs according to either a default schedule or a customized schedule, based on the needs of the project. Publishing sites can be used as intranet, extranet, or Internet sites, depending on the audience.

For example, you might use a publishing site for an Internet site that publishes press releases. The public relations team creates press releases, uses the publishing workflow to approve new content, and specifies when it should be made available to consumers. As another example, you might use a publishing site for a corporate intranet site, where company news is made available to employees. Page authors can specify the target audience for their content, which makes the content viewable by only the members of the designated groups.

You can use one of two ways to make published content available to users: author-in-place, or cross-site publishing. With the author-in-place method, you use a single site collection to author content and make it available to readers of your site. With the cross-site publishing method, you use one or more site collections to author content, and one or more site collections to control the design of the site and the display of the content. For more information, see Overview of publishing to Internet, intranet, and extranet sites in SharePoint Server 2013.




Plan other sites

You can plan to make it possible for site users to create additional sites. For example, you can plan to give a My Site to each team member who uses a site. A My Site is a team site that is based on SharePoint Server 2013 and has public and private views. You can also make it possible for team members to create other sites, such as Document Workspace sites, when they collaborate on documents and other projects. Similarly, you can give users of an Internet site access to collaboration sites as part of a web-based service. For example, you can give them permissions to create Meeting Workspace sites and participate in online meetings as part of their experience of using your site.

For information about the kinds of sites that you can create, see Overview of sites and site collections in SharePoint 2013.

Inventory your farm

To help you in your site and site collection planning, the Windows PowerShell command-line will inventory your entire SharePoint 2013 farm and get the properties of each site collection and site. It saves the results in a comma separated file (CSV). Use this inventory to identify what your site collection and site hierarchy are in each web application, and then plan where you want to add new sites.

To inventory a SharePoint farm by using Windows PowerShell

1. Verify that you have the following memberships:o Securityadmin fixed server role on the SQL Server instance.o db_owner fixed database role on all databases that are to be updated.o Administrators group on the server on which you are running the Windows PowerShell

cmdlets.o In the Farm Administrators group

An administrator can use the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet to grant permissions to use SharePoint 2013 cmdlets.

Note:

If you do not have permissions, contact your Setup administrator or SQL Server administrator to request permissions. For additional information about Windows PowerShell permissions, see Add-SPShellAdmin.

2. Open the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell.3. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command:

Copy

Get-SPWebApplication –IncludeCentralAdministration | Get-SPSite –Limit All | Get-SPWeb –Limit All | Select-Object URL, Title, Description, ParentWeb, AssociatedOwnerGroup, SiteAdministrators, WebTemplate, UIVersion, QuickLaunchEnabled, TreeViewEnabled, Language, Locale, Author, HasUniquePerm | Sort URL | export-csv <file location and name.csv>

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607596.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607596.aspx




Where:

o URL is the address of the site.o Title is name of the site as configured in site settings and displayed on the title bar of the

site.o Description is the value in the description field in the sites properties.o ParentWeb is the site immediately above the inventoried site in the hierarchy.o AssociatedOwnerGroup is the group that owns the site.o Site Administrations are the current users who are listed as the sites primary and secondary

site administrators.o Web Template is the type of site template that the site was created from.o UIVersion is the SharePoint 2013 version of the site. This can be either 2013 or 2010.o QuickLaunchEnabled indicates if the site has the Quick Launch enabled in the vertical

navigation.o TreeViewEnabled indicates if the site has the tree view enabled for the Quick Launch.o Language is the language the site was created in.o Locale is the locale of the site.o Author is who created the site.o HasUniquePerm indicates if the site inherits permissions from its parent site or implements

unique permissions.

Refer Information architecture resources for the below headings


Plan document libraries in SharePoint 2013


Overview of managed navigation in SharePoint Server 2013


Overview of site navigation in SharePoint 2013


Plan managed metadata in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan search in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan for information management policy in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan records management in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan eDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan for Internet, intranet, and extranet publishing sites in SharePoint Server 2013


Site Types: Web Templates and Site Definitions


Plan document versioning, content approval, and check-out controls in SharePoint 2013


Plan content approval and scheduling in SharePoint 2013


Plan for information management policy in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan for social computing and collaboration in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan for My Sites in SharePoint Server 2013


Plan for OneDrive for Business in SharePoint Server 2013

Documents

SharePoint “15” App Model – Introduction Web view03.07.2014 · Information architecture is often recorded as a hierarchical list of content, search keywords, data types, and