The Shift from Centralized to Decentralized #SPSVB

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cbuck@axceler.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.com

The Shift from Centralized to Decentralized

Christian Buckley

cbuck@axceler.com@buckleyPLANET

SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach

January 8th, 2011

My Background

Christian Buckley, Director of Product Evangelism at Axceler

• Most recently at Microsoft

• Microsoft Managed Services (now BPOS-Dedicated)

• Advertising Operations, ad platform API program

• Prior to Microsoft, was a senior consultant, working in the software, supply chain, and grid technology spaces focusing on collaboration

• Co-founded and sold a collaboration software company to Rational Software. Also co-authored 3 books on software configuration management and defect tracking for Rational and IBM

• At another startup (E2open), helped design, build, and deploy a SharePoint-like collaboration platform (Collaboration Manager), managing deployment teams to onboard numerous high-tech manufacturing companies, including Hitachi, Matsushita, Seagate, Nortel, Sony, and Cisco

• I live in a small town just east of Seattle, have a daughter in college and 3 boys at home, and I just celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary

Axceler Overview

• Improving Collaboration for 16+ Years– Mission: To enable enterprises to simplify, optimize, and

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

software since 1994– Over 2,000 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

How do people use SharePoint today?

• Limited only by the controls put in place• Short-term, ad hoc collaboration• Structured, procedural activities• Glorified file share• Workflow, dashboards, productivity solutions

SharePoint is like a goldfish – it will only grow as big as the tank you put it in.

Definitions

This is your SharePoint deployment

Centralized

Decentralized

Ad HocOrganized

Based roughly on the idea of a Gartner “Magic Quadrant” diagram, but these data points are completely made up

Tier 1 site collections based on business units or product areas

Top level portal

Tier 2 sites that follow specific structure

One Side of the Scale - Centralized

• Benefits of a centralized SharePoint environment:– Consistent use of content types and workflows– Reduced metadata duplication– Documented customizations that make system updates and platform

upgrades much easier– Easier for supporting and training end users, – Managing business processes, – Controlling information policies, and – Providing metrics and key performance indicators.

• Downsides to this model:– Takes a lot of design and planning– Requires more upfront work and maintenance– Requires an increased reliance on governance and formal change control

boards– Has difficulty managing across site collections and portals

Some structured sites

Sub Sites, My Sites, or other detached sites/farms

Top level portal

The Other Side of the Scale - Decentralized

• Advantages of a decentralized environment :– Little up front planning (but more later around how to connect / enable)– Very little up front effort to deploy– Low time/cost to train end users– Decreased emphasis on taxonomy and business process management– Most decentralized systems work across site collections and portals– Mirror the consumer-based collaboration platforms users are accustomed to

using, such as social networks and microblogging sites

• Downsides to this model:– They decrease consistency– Increase metadata duplication– Make taxonomy management complex– Hard to update, – Support and train on, – Manage information policies with, and – Difficult to upgrade/migrate

Portal Model vs. SharePoint

• Portals have traditionally been locked down, centrally managed resources– Controlled– Structured– Built for specific business uses/processes

• SharePoint as a platform supports the portal model, but offers ad hoc collaborative functions out of the box, allowing much more diverse application– Platform– Centralized management, but distributed application– Supports ad hoc

[Demo] of a centralized environment

The 4 Organizational Shifts from Centralized to

Decentralized

1. The Environmental Shift

2. The Cultural Shift

3. The Governance Shift

4. The Social Informatics Shift

1. The Environmental Shift

• Your SharePoint architecture has little to do with whether your environment strategy is centralized or decentralized– Moving from multiple farms to a single 2010 farm– Expanding from a single-server install to a more stable

configuration– Expanding your content databases– Adding additional servers to support

plans around additional SharePoint services

• The key is to review your architecture, optimize for your model and for scalability

Environmental Considerations

• Site administration• Roles, Site Permissions, and Security Trimming

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.06.insidesharepoint.aspx?pr=blog

• Site administration• Roles, Site Permissions, and Security Trimming• Content Databases• Additional Services

2. The Cultural Shift

Why is change so difficult?

– It means letting go, giving up control

– Recognition that there is a gap between the philosophical idea of allowing people to manage their own stuff, and reality

– Collaboration itself is a hard thing for people to embrace. It takes times, and can be counterintuitive to the way that many businesses are run

Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra

1. Business Focus / Productivity

2. Security

3. Lack of Visibility / Transparency

4. Support Issues

Cultural Considerations

1. Innovation

2. Flexibility (let teams work on their own terms)

3. Organic growth (supports both structured and unstructured growth)

4. Process and content efficiencies (learn from various implementations, making the system better/stronger)

Cultural Benefits

• Business may want to get more value out of their SharePoint investment

• Keep hearing about all these great features, but don’t see them deployed/in use

• Recognize the lack of collaboration outside of certain teams

• Current platform seen as “too hard to use”

What is Driving this Cultural Change?

• There is no such thing as a homogenous SharePoint deployment– I don’t know what changes your organization

is prepared to accept– Work with stakeholders to identify vision and priorities– Overlay this vision with your cultural reality – know

your limits, and baby step new features

• Involve your end users– Capture their feedback through multiple feedback

mechanisms– Have them help in the creation of key documentation– Get their help in prioritizing features within the

future-state environment– Have them help you define the success metrics

Preparing for Change

3. The Governance Shift

• Push responsibility to the site administrators (even though they may do strange things)

• Understand what can be delegated

• Clarify roles and responsibilities– Farm Admins responsible for farms– Site Collection Admins responsible for site collections– And so forth

• Understand skill levels, and company climate

Governance Considerations

1. Have a plan

2. Create a governance site

3. Create an internal SharePoint user group

4. Enlist your portals users and content authors

5. Clearly define roles and responsibilities

6. Outline your taxonomy, communicate it, refine it (and then rinse, repeat)

7. Outline your search strategy

8. Outline your social media strategy

9. Understand any regulatory or compliance concerns

10. Migrate your data, leveraging your metadata

11. Go slow (or fast). Just be careful

12. Learn and evolve

Governance is a series ofguidelines to live by,

not rules to die by

4. The Social Informatics

Social Informatics is the study of information and communication tools in cultural and institutional contexts

It is a cross-disciplinary focus on usage patterns. It is a blend of sociology, anthropology, psychology, technology and business perspectives, examining the changing way in which we do business.

(Wikipedia)

• Metadata is the lifeblood of SharePoint

• Taxonomy and metadata drive the tools and processes that make the world go round

• Metadata powers search,

it powers social media,

and it powers SharePoint

The Role of Metadata

Scott Singleton, Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010 http://www.slideshare.net/scottsingleton/managed-metadata-insharepoint2010

• SharePoint 2010 offers many services OOTB– Search– Excel Services– BCS– Project Server– Web Analytics– Access– Performance Point– Visio– Word– Office Web Apps– People

• These centrally managed services allow for greater control across the enterprise– Have your cake and eat it through centrally managed services

The Role of Services

Managed Metadata Service

Service Hierarchy

Service Application Instance

Term Group

Term Set

[Demo] of social media tools in 2010

• Search still critical to the business, but how you access it will be embedded into the tools you use

• Social computing tools are just additional enablers and consumers of search

The Role of Social Media

It’s All About “the app”

Btw, the word “app” was just made “word of the year” 2011

Wrap Up

• Change is hard

• Look before you leap

• Let governance be your guide

• Ask a 5th grader for advice

(often)

Some thoughts…

Centrally managed Team Sites + ad hoc My Sites

Portal for external-facing + Team Sites internal

Website + My Sites w/ strong (FAST) search

Q: Do these models impact search performance

differently?

Q: Do you have any guidance on migrating existing metadata from decentralized to

centralized (managed) metadata?

Q: What are the best practices for starting a governance model?

Q: Do most companies use MySites?

Common Questions

All great questions!

Unfortunately, we’re out of time.

For more information

• Contact me at

Christian Buckley

cbuck@axceler.com

425-246-2823

@buckleyplanet

The Shift from Centralized to Decentralized #SPSVB

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