Sharepoint Customization and Development

The Problem being is defining the grey area between development and Customization which produces to an end result of an Implementation of Sharepoint from the usual blue and white out of the box share point site. Almost all the implementations aren't just going to have content in them without some artifacts being created such as Custom Web parts, Site Templates, Site Definition, List Templates, Master Pages, and Page Layout etc.

Sharepoint Customization:

Customizations can be done by any person with correct Permissions in a Share point Web Application and with access rights to use the Web User Interface or Share point Designer.

Sharepoint Development:

The Development requires knowledge in:

1. Visual Studio
2. C#/VB.Net
 3. ASP.Net 2.0
4. HTML
5. CSS
6. XSLT and 
7. Share point Object Model at a minimum.

This is really dependent on out of the box functionality which we wish to Extend.

When does a proof of concept become a production application?

Another point brought up by the same client was around doing these Customization’s directly into Production. It is perfectly acceptable to improve the functionality by using Customization, but if the application is a important Business Process you do not want to break the application with your Customization. So, we end up having a Dev/Test environment to do these Customization’s. The Business Users making these Customizations get sick of repeating work and want to throw it back to the IT Department as soon as possible. This is where I suggest moving to Development and not Customization.

Reaching the Limits:

Another issue with Organizations going down the route of Customization is that at some stage they want to push their functionality past what is possible in the UI.

Migration Scripts and Change Scripts:

           The issue with then making the changes is that you simply can’t just overwrite what you've got in production because they will be live data in there. So what you have to do as a Developer is script up a change script to bring v1.0 to v2.0. This can be maintenance nightmare once you got v10.0 in the works as you can all imagine. The alternative is to just simply amend v1.0 and push this into production and migrate the from v1.0 to the newly built v2.0 vis migration script.

Performance Testing Tool for Active Directory

We have a load generation tool for active directory called ADTest it’s a Microsoft tool. Using the tool we can simulate client transactions on the host server. This tool can perform generic Active Directory requests, Inside the organizational units it can also create an organizational unit structure. Many organizational units and user objects can be added in those ADTest-created organizational units. Adding attributes to the user objects also possible. Once the Active Directory is created we can perform various Active Directory requests including Modify and Search. Pre-built tests have been written to reproduce some typical activities we may want to evolve. Examples: a batch logon, interactive logon, search for a user.

Varying the hardware environment and other test parameters, we can insight into the performance sensitivities of the particular setup.  Benchmarking and performance exercises are useful for comparing platforms or getting the understanding of the hardware requirements of common implementation scenarios. For server sizing this tool will be sufficient to plan server size.  

Success Stories of Enterprises

"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up."

Many enterprises have reaped the benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies which forms the backbone of enterprise collaboration. The below figure details the results of McKinsey’s global survey in which companies have responded on how they are getting benefited through Web 2.0 technologies .

§  ‘Cisco saved US$691 million and increased productivity 4.9% in fiscal year 2008. 

§  ‘ International energy company Statoil and peer energy companies operating on the Norwegian Continental Shelf estimate that, in 2007, they captured benefits worth a net present value of approximately 150 billion Norwegian kroner, or about 24.9 billion U.S. dollars. The benefits that Statoil has gained from collaboration are concrete, tangible, and capturable: Close to 80 percent of the value came from increased reserves and accelerated production, while the remainder resulted from reductions in drilling and operational costs.

§  ‘KCOM Group Communications Firm Transforms Business Culture with Collaboration Framework. 

§  ‘Polytechnic of Zagreb wanted to replace its aging email system with a full-featured communication and collaboration platform. The polytechnic is saving U.S. $300,000 on hardware, software, and administration, and faculty and associates have access to a robust suite of tools that helps the school run more smoothly and prepares students for future careers. 

§   ‘The city of Hamburg recently embarked on a multiyear campaign to reduce operating costs. Leading this effort, the city’s Ministry of Finance sought to automate its paper-based approval process. The ministry projects cost savings over the next five years of up to 10 million euros (U.S. $14.3 million).

Document Library in Share Point

Many companies has started to adopt share point during the past years. Share point is emerging as a standard portal product from the Microsoft world. Document libraries are the collection of knowledge’s in the form of files with the team members in a n/w based share point services.

Share point has a beautiful way to manage the documents. Whenever a document is added/edited/deleted from the share point library mail notifications can be triggered to your outlook so that you keep in track of all the changes happening in document library or to the individual document. Certain documents in the office space may have to undergo a certain approval from the senior management before its being published to all the employees in those conditions this share point would help you to set the work flow to get the approval process done.

You can also track the previous history or the changes which the documents in the share point library has crossed using the view history option. You may also revert back to the previous version of the documents using the same option.

How to Overcome Collaboration Challenges?

Change Organizational Structure: Traditional hierarchical structure within the organization should be replaced with structure that encourages sharing of information and collaborating on it. Traditional structure will make communications across different departments to be less effective. Contribution of information will be restricted within departments which benefits departments’ interests alone rather than viewing and benefitting organization as a whole. An informal medium of communication would allow all employees to have access to new knowledge outside their boundaries as a means of updating their knowledge bases. Therefore, change in traditional structure where restricted information sharing is in place should be changed to a structure which encourages healthy informal knowledgeable discussions. 

Induce Employee Contribution: In many organizations inducing employees’ behavior to contribute requires changing traditional mindsets and organizational culture from "knowledge-hoarding" to "knowledge-sharing”. Employees who are contributing have to be motivated with appropriate rewards and recognitions in order to retain the ethic of contribution among employees. Top executives has to make sure the visibility of the contributors along with due recognition in order to create an atmosphere of trust in the company.

Implementing a framework for collaboration:  Implementing a framework for collaborating and information management would negate the adversity caused due to information mismanagement. Cisco has reported a savings of US$691 million and has increased productivity 4.9 percent in fiscal year 2008. This is possible because of immaculate collaboration framework in place. The framework would reduce the pilferage of confidential information, data loss and information mismanagement. The framework in place should cover all the enterprise needs with the ability to scale up in future depending on situations.

Checklist for Testing Sharepoint Web Parts

1. Make sure that you can add web part in the web part zone of your application without any errors.

2. Make sure that added web part works correctly where the web part is added in the web part zone.

3. Make sure that all of your web part property attributes are defined.

4. Make sure that Web Part changes made in personal view are not reflected in shared view.

5. Make sure that Web Part properties displayed in the tool pane are user-friendly.

6. Make sure that Web Part appears appropriately in the search results.

7. Make sure that you can Import web part without any errors.

8. Make sure that you can Export  web part without any errors.

9. Make sure that Web Part preview shows the exact preview.

10. Make sure that adding several instances of the same Web Part to a Web Part Page works correctly.

10 Top things developers should know about SharePoint

http://blog.pentalogic.net/2012/05/10-things-developers-should-know-about-sharepoint/

Enterprise Collaboration Challenges

Enterprise Collaboration enables people to connect and interact with exceptional speed and ease but there are few challenges for enterprises in achieving seamless collaboration. Few main challenges faced by the enterprise are:

 

Ethic of Contribution among employees: Due to organizational design in an enterprise, employees with Contribution Ethic are always rare and they have always been the ones who have driven the enterprise successfully. Employees are reluctant to contribute because of lack of motivation and minimal attention to the contribution made. 

 

Quantifying the benefits of collaboration: One of the key challenges in implementing enterprise collaboration relates to quantifying the benefits of collaboration. Apart from travel cost reduction, the softer benefits of collaboration are very complicated in assessing. Investing millions in a collaboration tool where the output is difficult to assess to the granular level and match the economic benefits to justify the cost turns to be one of the important challenges. 

 

Information Mismanagement: Information is said to be the data that has been verified, organized and presented with a context that is meaningful and relevant. All the companies rely heavily on the information which decides the success or failure. Most of the companies spend majority of their time dealing with information from multiple sources. The latest version of the documents is not available to concerned employees every time due to absence of proper system for information management. There are also huge chances for data loss when there is no central repository for storage and retrieval with access restrictions. 

‘Here’s a real life example: At the end of a £2m project at a major transport company, some documents were handed over from the IT Company that installed the new system. The documents included some test scripts (of little value) and a document that documented how to rebuild the system from scratch (a very valuable document if anything were to go wrong). The company put the documents somewhere. A year later it became evident that the documents could not be found and consequently paid the consultants £20,000 to come back and recreate them. 

 

Failure to deploy a perfect system: Often the top executives of the company complain ‘We tried implementing a collaboration system in our company, but we failed miserably.’ The reason for this is due to inadequate understanding of the organization structure and needs. Different kind of industries requires different collaboration tool based on their needs. An IT company’s need would be different to that of a company in retail domain. Implementation of a perfect system for collaboration would require a detailed and thorough analysis of the company, employees, industry, organization’s goals aimed to achieve through collaboration and organizational culture.