The starting decision around governance start with a couple of tightly coupled topics: Architecture and Environment choices. These two areas will determine the success of how your future work will be perceived by your users, sponsors and staff. Architecting a solid frame on how your SharePoint farm will perform and scale for the work that it’s intended to perform.
Some of the questions that need to be asked:
- How do we want to approach hosting the farm?
- On-premise hosting
- Outsource
- Cloud-based services
- Hybrid of On-premise and Hosted
- What type use are we expected to provide?
- Internet Public-facing Websites
- Extranet
- Portal
- Collaboration and document sharing
- Applications
- Records management
- What will we promise (Service Level Agreements (SLAs))?
- Disaster Recovery
- High-Availability
- Global deployment
Let’s start with the who/where your farm will be hosted.
As outlined above, you can see we have some options, but the who and where you host your farm will be the biggest factor of governance because if you select on-premise hosting, there is an amount of control that you can implement and also have to “fill-in more blanks” when you develop a governance plan. This article will discuss explicit hardware or networking but we broach some areas that are not considered on a “typical” deployment
How will we build out our farm?
Let’s just say that we are selecting a Proof of Concept (PoC) strategy where we have been commissioned to build an environment that will “get us by” until we are fully funded. To me, this is a problematic start where governance is concerned because you are asked to stand something up quickly, but you’re probably taking servers that are available and then the environment turns into the future production environment. That’s a bad situation that happens too often, but I digress. Back to our PoC, so when we get “foster” servers for our environment, make sure the hardware AT LEAST meets minimum hardware requirements for SharePoint 2010 (or 2007). At this point, make sure you plan for a successful upgrade or project acceptance and use the SharePoint 2010 requirements, you might only get one shot to go to the well to get money for the servers you need (“Go Big or Go Home” strategy).
Hosted solutions are better than they were a couple years ago, maybe that might be your route. You might not even have a choice, because more and more CIOs/CTOs are opting for this model to remove costs from their operating budgets. Most hosted options require less licensing (Windows and Support) and are handled different from an accounting side, so that is very attractive for mid-size and Enterprise-level organizations. Hosted (or Cloud) solutions also require less administration from internal staff, but have guidelines and governance for their own infrastructure, but this means you will have to know and utilize their rules structure. Hosting companies could meet your needs are now in the business of planning and building your infrastructure for size, scale and other deployment issues. To tie-in to hosted or cloud services, there are also outsource providers (possibly off-shore) that host your servers, just like your company, except physically off-site and managed by a separate technical staff.
What do we want to do with SharePoint?
This impacts our infrastructure and how we move forward, but we have to know which direction we’re going in, before we starting building out an architecture, or even solidify our requirements. Building out an appropriate hardware infrastructure means know what you need to get out of it. Determine if employees-only are your users, or external and internal, or anonymous users from an Internet website.
Most companies start with document sharing and collaboration features within SharePoint, unless there is a specific business need. Fulfilling those needs are centered around storage, Disaster Recovery (DR) / High-Availability (HA) and User Experience (UX). Users’ acceptance of the platform is vital for PoCs and once you are in production the primary need users demand is space for their documents. Nothing kills enthusiasm to collaborate than to provide the tool and not plan or implement a solid storage plan. For site collections, if you offer less than 2GB, you need to figure out how to expand the largest of your user’s need. Groups with large files (images, CAD drawings, versioned word documents) can eat up a major of a site’s (or web’s) space once uploaded so you will have to figure out how to handle these collections that outgrow your current standard site collection.
Special Considerations for Your Deployment (Yes, you’re Special)
If you have the understanding that the world is not flat, you’re going to make your deployment a hit when you figure out if you need WAN Accelerators, or even if you want to have separate smaller farms (again, what are you doing). Do you need your farm available 24/7 or is there a business time frame that will suffice? What happens if you’re primary site goes down, or worse catches fire or destroyed? How long can you go without SharePoint? Do you have multiple support groups working on the farm(s) and do they follow the same operating practices?
Touching on internal staff managing the SharePoint platform, if custom solutions (managed ASP.NET code) then development, testing and staging environments need to be an integral part of how you promote code through your farm. If you work with consultants, contractors or vendors, let them know what you're doing and how they can move their deliverables into production.
Next: What are your staff requirements?
Our next discussion will center around people. After you’d hired the consultants and contractors, is how many people do you need to permanently manage your SharePoint farm, what they should do and how will these staff support your users.