A Business Perspective on Building SharePoint 2013 Solutions on Windows Azure

Christian Buckley, Director of Product EvangelismJohn Puopolo, Chief Technology OfficerAxceler

A Business Perspective on Building SharePoint 2013 Solutions on Windows Azure

What I’ll cover today:

• The changes that are coming to SharePoint due to Microsoft’s plans for the cloud

• How the cloud will impact business applications

• How Axceler is using Windows Azure for our next-generation products

• The opportunities for individual developers and partner with SharePoint and Azure

AboutChristian Buckley, Director of Product Evangelism at Axceler

• Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server

• Prior to Axceler, worked for Microsoft, part of the Microsoft Managed Services team (now Office365-Dedicated) and worked as a consultant in the areas of software, supply chain, grid technology, and collaboration

• Co-founded and sold a software company to Rational Software. At E2open, helped design, build, and deploy a SharePoint-like collaboration platform (Collaboration Manager), onboarding numerous high-tech manufacturing companies, including Hitachi, Matsushita, Cisco, and Seagate

• Co-authored ‘Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real-World Projects’ link (MS Press, March 2012) and 3 books on software configuration management.

• Twitter: @buckleyplanet Blog: buckleyplanet.com Email: cbuck@axceler.com

Get the Book

Published 2012 by Microsoft PressOrder your copy at http://oreil.ly/qC4loT

Tackle 10 common business problems with proven SharePoint solutions:• Set up a help desk solution to track service

requests

• Build a modest project management system

• Design a scheduling system to manage resources

• Create a site to support geographically dispersed teams

• Implement a course registration system

• Build a learning center with training classes and resources

• Design a team blog platform to review content

• Create a process to coordinate RFP responses

• Set up a FAQ system to help users find answers quickly

• Implement a cost-effective contact management system

Axceler Overview

Improving Collaboration since 2007• Mission: To enable enterprises to simplify, optimize, and

secure their collaborative platforms• Delivered award-winning administration and migration

software since 1994, for SharePoint since 2007• Over 3,000 global customers

Dramatically improve the management of SharePoint• Innovative products that improve security, scalability,

reliability, “deployability”• Making IT more effective and efficient and lower the total

cost of ownership

Focus on solving specific SharePoint problems (Administration & Migration)• Coach enterprises on SharePoint best practices• Give administrators the most innovative tools available• Anticipate customers’ needs• Deliver best of breed offerings• Stay in lock step with SharePoint development and market trends

What is a business guy doing presenting to a group of developers on the topic of Azure?

• Degree in marketing• Not a dev• PM / BA background• All slideware, all the time• Definitely not a dev

Definitions

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft is “all in” on the cloud

At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto in July 2012, Kurt DelBene, President of the Microsoft Office Division announced that Office 365, including SharePoint Online, is growing at over 8x their predictions, and is likely to eclipse SharePoint as the fastest growing Microsoft offer ever.

SharePoint is also “all in” on the cloudDuring his keynote presentation at SPTechCon in February 2012, Jared Spataro, Director of SharePoint at Microsoft, announced that SharePoint 2013 was being developed using a “Cloud First” strategy, and that Office 365 customers could expect to have access to the benefits of the new release sooner than on-premises deployments.

43%

$6.1 billion

48%

$9 billion

Total spend last year

Expected growth of enterprise spending on cloud in 2013Spend expected this year

Growth of enterprise spending on cloud in 2012

Why partners and developers should care about SharePoint in the cloud

As SharePoint continues to expand its footprint, companies are demanding flexible architectures to help them better meet internal and external collaboration needs

• Reducing costs

• Reducing headcount

• Doing more with less

• Focusing less on traditional IT activities and more on activities that will help drive the business forward

The Shift Toward the Cloud

Changes to SharePoint

(My key messaging to Business stakeholders and Information Workers)

WCMFeatures

• Cross Site Publishing• Video & Embedding• Image renditions• Clean URLs• Metadata navigation• Variations & Content

Translation• Search Engine

Optimization

Benefits

• Built for the internet• Built for mobile• Supports the tools and

workflows designers use

SocialFeatures

• Community• Social tagging• Easily share content

and activities• Follow documents,

people, sites, tags, and activities

• Improved activity streams

• Improved My Sites• Save locally

Benefits

• Build more robust metadata• Make content more findable• Link people, teams, content

and activities

OfficeFeatures

• Web-based access to the Office applications

• Drag and drop from the desktop to the platform

• Exchange integrations• Improved notifications

Benefits

• Online and offline editing• Improved end user

experience• Aggregated view into the

entire desktop

SearchFeatures

• FAST integration• Hover panels• Search by metadata• Search result

customization• Improved analytics

Benefits

• Manage user permissions• Comprehensive security

reports• Recommendations for

permissions clean up

Online 1st

Features

• Nearing parity between online and on prem

• Robust integration between the desktop and the platform

• Speeding up the delivery of new features

• Built for the cloud

Benefits

• Faster realization of the benefits of the cloud

• Access to tools and data anytime, anywhere

Change is coming to all of your enterprise applications

Data anytime, anywhere. It's under your desk, it's across town, it's across the planet,and it doesn't matter.

Pick your tools, any tools.The right tool for the right job.It’s all about self-service.

Bring your own device.Your data and tools should be able to reach you wherever you are, whatever platform you use.

It's social, baby. It’s not about corporate Facebook, but enabling applications and systems to share data and social experiences across environments.

Built for the business user, not the IT organization. Simplified inputs, through forms, workflow, and easy to navigate, intuitive interfaces.

Evolution of the Cloud

The nature of how we collaborate has evolved

Electronic Data InterchangeE-commerceTelecom advancesSOAP and XMLService-Oriented ArchitectureRESTVirtualizationInexpensive hardware

Alternativesfor control, cost, & capability

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Advantages to SharePoint in the Cloud

Common Scenarios Rapid provisioning of new workloads in the cloud while maintaining existing on-premises workloads

Organizations migrating workloads from an existing on-premises environment to the cloud over time in a phased approach

Organizations wanting to supplement their cloud environment with additional features or customizations which are currently only possible on-premises [think app model]

Compliance or data sovereignty reasons which might stipulate certain data be hosted in a particular location

Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365, Microsoft

Microsoft Windows Azure provides:

SQL ServerSharePointActive DirectorySQL DatabaseVM roles from Windows Server 2012 and LinuxSupport for PowerShellMonitoringGeo replicationWizard-based provisioning90-day free trial

AdvantagesA professionally managed data center with 24x7 support and advanced network security and intrusion detection

Separation of identity and content for externally-facing workloads vs. on-premise internal-facing environments

Rapid provisioning with little or no upfront costs for hardware and software

On-demand scale-out to meet variable capacity demands

Disaster Recovery

Failover

Pay per usage

Axceler Overview

Established in 1994, creating administration and governance tools for Lotus Notes

Axceler brand launched in 2007, split off to focus on the SharePoint space

Focus on visibility, governance, and management across collaboration platforms

Utilizing Azure to scale across hybrid environments, and offer pure cloud offerings

Axceler and Azure

Using a good portion of the platform:• Web roles• Worker roles• SQL Azure• Message queues• Table storage• Caching• Plan to use content delivery network in the future

to push static content to edge devices

Axceler and Azure

We are using the platform today for• ViewPoint Enterprise• ViewPoint for Yammer• ControlPoint for Yammer• and other forthcoming solutions

ViewPoint for SharePoint

Areas where developers might focus their efforts utilizing Azure

Opportunities for Azure

The ability to manage permissions across both SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint online (Office365) content, the Yammer platform, and anywhere that collaboration happens, whether dedicated or multi-tenant, public or private

Opportunities for Azure

Visibility into your Information Architecture and the Managed Metadata in SharePoint across all farms, or granularly within individual children (sites), help with the replication of taxonomy across platforms

Opportunities for Azure

Tracking of storage usage, with reporting that provides visibility into the content databases of environments to ensure capacity is not reaching its limitations.

Opportunities for Azure

Auditing and compliance monitoring capability, providing detailed reports that examine everything from document and user activity, .aspx hits, and native SharePoint audit log activity to see what is being accessed and by whom.

Opportunities for Azure

Reporting on various aspects of what is deemed important across all environments, as well as granular, customized trend analysis reports to view activity, storage, and site count for each individual site, comparing differences.

Opportunities for Azure

Social monitoring, who is commenting and how users are interacting, helping orgs determine just how much goes on, which farm is more successful in user interaction, and therefore how well collaboration is achieved.

Opportunities for Azure

Migration planning guidance around storage, content database reports, most/least active sites, inactive users, user migration (from AD domains, for example), and cleanup of orphaned users.

Opportunities for Azure

Ability to set management policies and procedures that span the various systems, allowing organizations to organize and automate complex preventive and responsive actions.

Evolution of the Cloud

Developers are testing the waters, but still tentative on the model

Analysts agree that adoption is slower than expected

Where Azure succeeds:Platform is comprehensive

Supports all of the mechanisms to build internet-scale, enterprise (and consumer) applications

Leverages existing .NET skills

Azure SDK ships with .NET-compatible wrapper to make migrating to Azure “natural” for the MS-savvy stack developer

Azure Service Bus can be used to call back into on-prem code

Where Azure needs help:Auto-provisioning would be useful

There is no built-in mechanism for elasticity

While there are 3rd party solutions, e.g., AzureWatch, it would be valuable to have this “baked in” such as Amazon’s Elastic BeanstalkAzure Scaling Block helps, but is not as turn-key

Cost-estimation is near-impossible. How do you estimate the number of “compute cycles” a particular workload will take?

More people on the platform means more feedback, more case studies, a hardening of the solution

What partners can do:

Think of apps as stateless entities that can scale horizontally, and gracefully degrade under error conditions

Understand that distance and geography matter among servers and processes

Understand the different security requirements and models at play in the cloud, and that they are necessarily different than those for on-prem

The future of AzureExpanded capabilities along the mobile, media, phone route

More robust features in the queuing and messaging systems to more closely match legacy products like MSMQ

Reduced cost as the infrastructure is leveraged across more applications

Auto-scaling and auto-provisioning

A Skynet-like intelligence that will result in nuclear holocaust when the system finally becomes self-aware

or maybe

Thank you!

Contact me

Order your copy at http://oreil.ly/qC4loT

Christian Buckleycbuck@axceler.com @buckleyplanetwww.Axceler.comhttp://tiny.cc/buckleypresentationshttp://tiny.cc/buckleybloghttp://tiny.cc/buckleybookhttp://tiny.cc/buckleygovernance4hybrid