© 2014 Perkins Eastman Architects, PC

The Challenges of Upgrading SharePointMaking SharePoint Work

May 2014

Perkins Eastman

1990 = 30 employees, 1 office 2014 = 750 employees, 13 offices Greatest concentration of employees are in the NYC office.

KRT includes 4 employees based out of 3 offices. Report to Director of Communications, but are primarily independent. KRT provides Perkins Eastman with Knowledge Management services, including:

Practice Area Community liaisons Crosstalk Taxonomy Process Improvement Learning & Development / Continuing Education Intranet gatekeepers

Knowledge Resource Team (KRT)

ORCHARD = Online Resource for Creative Harvest of Architecturally Relevant Discovery

SharePoint 2007 Central repository for departmental resources. Staff directory News Community Sites

ORCHARD

SP 2007 is 7 years old (49 in canine years.) SP 2013 is new and exciting! Mobile device-friendly Great for collaboration O365 is less resource-intensive SP is familiar Out of the box community sites. Migration should be easy Let’s do this!

Time to Upgrade!

Stop!

Is there anything wrong with what we have? Is there room for improvement? How much would it cost to upgrade? Does an upgrade fit into the plans for other system upgrades? Does it fit with the organization’s strategic goals?

Basic Reflection

What is the driving force behind the upgrade? What benefits must exist to justify the cost upgrade? What new features and functionality will become available? What features may have deprecated? What license version do we need? Cost considerations

Hardware Software Licensing Consulting Services

Version comparison (Office 365 vs. On-Premise vs. Current Version)

More Detailed Considerations

This is a major capital investment. (Did I say major?) Extensive user and administrator training Potentially impacts everyone and everything in your organization. Ties up resources and involves multiple levels of approvals.

Points to Remember

Caution

Prior implementation documentation should be available. Find it and study it!

Was the vision and what was reality? Who was part of the original team? Did that team work well together?

Should History Repeat Itself?

Mission: Provide employees with a base of operations tailored to their specific needs while accommodating the organization's need to communicate with them.

Mission: enabling employees to navigate the organization, network with colleagues across silos, find and leverage expertise.

Mission: enabling employees to manage their retirement funds, health benefits, and career development.

Mission: enabling employees to get their daily work done moreefficiently and effectively, while allowing them to share work- related knowledge.

Mission: enabling employees to better understand (“become more aware of”) the organization’s mission, strategy, initiatives, etc. and enabling them to discuss and provide feedback on them.

My Home Page

Company & Colleagues

Health Wealth & Career

Productivity Tools

News & Events

Representative Content: • PE news and

alerts • My news and

alerts • Events calendar • Personalized/

customized content and functional components

• Most popular quick links

• My quick links • Polls and surveys • My

teamsites/project sites

Representative Content: • PE mission,

strategy, ethics • About Perkins

Eastman• Office/location

pages • Department

pages • Employee profiles • Reporting

structures • Communities of

Practice

Representative Content: • 401K data • HR and hiring

policies and procedures

• Online forms • New hire

orientation resources

• Job-related tools (pay, leave, performance)

• Employee Handbook

Representative Content: • Service/Support

tools• Project

management • Online

collaboration tools

• Applications Knowledgebase

• How Do I... Ask a Question

• Prospect and client management

• Reference materials

Representative Content: • News about CB• Industry news

Industry trends analyses

• Master events calendar

• Event and news submission

• Industry/member surveys

• PE News Archive

Original Vision

Click to edit titleLocation

Proceed

We have decided to move forward. The catalyst was Hurricane Sandy. Phase I – Office 365 Phase II – SharePoint Phase III – Data connections

Hurricane Sandy

Evaluate internal capabilities. Create logical and strategic partnerships. Understand the internal team’s strengths and weaknesses. Look at current vendor relationships as candidates. Look at other vendors.

Assemble the Right Team

Establish team governance, guidelines and expectations. Develop definitive roles and responsibilities. Create a Team Site and provide everyone with access. All communications and documentation to go through team site. Project Schedule Project Plan

Team Kick-off Meeting

Start with a thorough inventory, not design! Provides a blue print of what we have and this will assist in designing

the future environment. Prevents features and functionality from being overlooked. Ensuring that the final product provides value to the business.

Inventory Current Environment

Current Information Architecture: How the content is generally organized?

Current System Architecture: farm topology in terms of servers, development vs production environments, application pools, web applications.

Inventory of current functionality & features enabled and used Inventory of current content: Site Collections, Sites, Lists, and Libraries.

What to Inventory

What custom solutions or features have been developed, outside of the Out-Of-Box functionality of SharePoint, including:

Web parts 3rd Party Tools Integrations with other systems Custom Branding Custom Site Templates Data Structure Workflows & Server Controls Event Handlers Large Lists Sandbox Solutions

What to Inventory - Customizations

When we think of information architecture we should think in terms of: Data presentations Features and functionality Content organization

Information Architecture

So when deciding on an information architecture we should consider the following:

Usability – Who’s the audience? What makes sense for your users? Are things organized in a way that is intuitive?

Security – What security requirements does your organization have? This Intranet, internet vs. extranet

Maintenance – From IT perspective how much maintenance is your organization willing to perform. This could also include total cost of ownership, implementation, etc.

Information Architecture - Questions

System Architecture

Substance over style (for now). What do people want on the home page? Leave the look and feel to the experts. (With the exception of branding

and corporate style guidelines.) Keep reviewers to strategic few. Understand that SP 2013 is not SP 2007.

User Interface Design

Some general steps to take for any migration: Clean up environment before upgrade Use a trail upgrade to find potential issues Communication plan Migration plan: details new architecture, plan for dealing with

customizations, sets duration for locked source content, sunset plan and back-out / recovery plan.

Lock content and functionality on source and target Migrate content to mapped location on target Recreate or reorganize content as necessary Validate migration Open permissions on target

Migration Strategy and Deployment

Besides a good communications plan, every migration would benefit from having the following plans:

Back out plan – Specifies the necessary processes required to restore a system to its original state.

Sunset plan – Once a migration has occurred, the outcome should be monitored by stakeholders, business analysts, and IT in order to validate and confirm soundly that everything migrated as planned. This is key to ensuring the sunset plan can be initiated followed by the training and adoption plans.

User training plan – Enough can’t be said about developing a comprehensive, but digestible training plan. Training is your best form of marketing and the only way to build champions.

Adoption plan – Upgrade must align with organizational goals and make sure that there is a strong customer service/support model in place.

Migration Strategy and Deployment

Enough can’t be said about the importance of not only user training, but IT staff training. Particularly if you’re jumping from SP 2007 to SP 2013/Office 365.

Training, Training and More Training

Make sure the upgrade is necessary. Align with organizational objectives. Create a strong implementation team. Hold people accountable. Identify and learn from past mistakes. Communicate throughout. Make sure you know the product!

Simple Conclusions