Developing a Business Requirements Strategy for SharePoint Infrastructure (SharePoint Summit Toronto 2014)

Developing a Business

Requirements Strategy for

SharePoint InfrastructureBrian Lalancette, Navantis

-OR-

What You Didn’t Know About

Business Requirements for

SharePoint Infrastructure Is

Shocking!

www.sharepointsummit.org

4

Who Am I?

About me:

� Consultant at www.navantis.com

� SharePoint infrastructure specialist

� PowerShell nerd• AutoSPInstaller

• AutoSPSourceBuilder

� Lazy admin

� Even lazier blogger


5

Audience Poll

Quick poll

� Business Users

� Power Users

� Admins

� Developers

� Executives

*It’s OK to vote more than once

(i.e. admit to being more than one) ☺


Background


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Business, Schmusiness

Why gather requirements?

� Build something that actually fits *

� Save money; spend wisely on areas that count

� Focus on purpose

� Opens the conversation between stakeholders and IT


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First Things Last

“Where does it hurt?”

� What business problem are we trying to solve?

� What gap are we trying to fill?

� Learn a bit about the nature of the business *


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Common Pitfalls

Where does I.T. hurt?

� But tech is cool! Implement it for its own sake!

� “We’d rather not involve the business” *• (Customer have actually told me this)

� Cart before the proverbial horse• IT department makes the call on what tools to use

� Who’s serving whom?

• Business users feel the pain of either:

� Bleeding edge technology

� Legacy, out-of-date platforms


Sample

Questionnaire


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Sample Questionnaire

Overall approach

� Gauge your audience• Technical?

• Decision Makers?

• Power Users

• End Users (wait, what?)

� “Zoom in/out” as required *

� Ultimately geared toward helping to make infrastructure decisions

� Assumes this is on-premises


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Sample Questionnaire

Questions

� Type of site (Intra/Extra/Inter)

� Number of employees• Number of SharePoint users (& growth rate!)

• Concurrency rate (more on this later)

� Where are your employees/users? *

� Employee/user privilege model• Open by default vs. closed by default

� Will they be working with large files? *

� Usage patterns:• Collaboration / Consumption / Mix (ratio)


13

Sample Questionnaire (continued)

More questions� Services & service apps for SharePoint *

• Business Data Connectivity

• Managed Metadata

• Office Web Apps

• Visio Graphics Service

• “We want it all” � Oh really now…

� My Sites / Personal Sites• Fear & Confusion

� Governance

� Capacity Planning

� State of Active Directory?

� Who gets personal sites?


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Even more questions

� Uptime & Availability• How long can business tolerate a service outage?

• At what times (if at all) can they tolerate outages?

• Can they stand to lose any data? How many hours’ worth? *

� BUT• As downtime approaches zero, cost approaches infinity ☺

• Therefore balance a reasonable expectation of uptime with customer’s budget


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“Great, but we’re just upgrading…”

� Not “just” upgrading *

� Take this opportunity to review prior requirements (if they had even been identified/considered)

� DB attach, or manual/automated migration?� Size of databases

� Custom and/or non-upgradeable solutions

� Move your clutter vs. opportunity to start fresh(er)


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Broader organizational concerns

� Risk Tolerance

� Desire for Innovation / Platform Currency

� Data Retention Requirements


Additional

Considerations


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Thoughts on Concurrency

Concurrency is everything!� MS likes to use “total number of users”

• However it’s kind of meaningless as-is… *

• Concurrency is usually expressed as a percentage

• Average number of user sessions at a particular time

• 10% as a rule of thumb (Intranets)

• Internet (public-facing) concurrency much tougher to nail down

• Do we anticipate peak periods of abnormally high concurrency?


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Farm Sizing

Farm size & capacity

� Implications of a farm that’s too small• Poor performance

• Running out of space

• Lots of warnings in CA that tend to be ignored

� Implications of a farm that’s too big• Staff required to operate and monitor

• Patching (downtime, costs, overtime) x number of servers

• Complexity outweights benefits


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Mitigation Strategy (continued)

Plan for:

� Future growth• Monitor performance & load proactively

� Scalability• Virtualization

• Storage capacity (SANs, dynamically-expanding VHDX etc.)

• Farm topologies

• Be ready with tools, scripts etc. that will allow you to scale out the farm

� Staff readiness• Training *

• Leave-behind materials


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Mitigation Strategy

But what if…

� IT has already made some of the decisions (prior to your involvement)?

� Corporate culture or policy makes it unfeasible to interview business representatives?

� You’ve exhausted all avenues?


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Summary

Summary

� Business is the reason we’re in business

� If you can’t think of a business case for implementing x, why are you doing it?

� Think about the goals & purpose behind SharePoint farm size & design (and cost)


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Summary

Don’t…


Q & A


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Contact Links & References

More reading & contact info� Twitter: @brianlala

� Blog: http://spinsiders.com/brianlala

� Blog: http://blog.navantis.com/author/brianlalancette

� Some guest posts:• http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2014/02/01/wee

kend-scripter-using-autospinstaller-and-autospsourcebuilder.aspx

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2010/03/23/hey-scripting-guy-march-23-2010.aspx

• https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/itpro/Pages/Whats-in-Store-for-AutoSPInstaller-v-Next.aspx

Thank you for your attention!This presentation will be available on the Toronto

SharePoint Summit web site a few days after the event.

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SESSION 5.1Developing a Business Requirements Strategy for

SharePoint Infrastructure

Technology

Developing a Business Requirements Strategy for SharePoint Infrastructure (SharePoint Summit Toronto 2014)