SharePoint 2010 — an enterprise portal in practice

“Where did you put that Excel file with the budget?” That question is heard in Czech companies several times a day. Shared drives full of duplicates, email attachments in twenty versions, approval processes on paper. SharePoint 2010 solves all of this — and after two years of deployments at Czech clients, we know how to do it.

What SharePoint actually is¶

The most common misconception: SharePoint is not just “a better shared drive”. It’s a platform. Document management, team sites, corporate intranet, workflow engine, search, BI dashboards, forms — all in one product. And precisely this breadth is both its strength and its weakness. Its strength because the client gets an integrated solution. Its weakness because without proper design and governance you end up with chaos worse than a shared drive.

SharePoint 2010 brought significant improvements over the 2007 version. The Ribbon interface familiar from Office 2010, significantly better performance, Service Applications instead of Shared Services Provider, sandbox solutions for safe custom code and finally a decent Rich Text Editor. Anyone who worked with the MOSS 2007 editor knows what I mean.

Document management — the core of the deployment¶

Eighty percent of our SharePoint projects start the same way: the client wants order in their documents. And SharePoint handles this excellently. Document libraries with metadata, versioning (major/minor versions), check-in/check-out, content types for different document types, retention and records management.

The key is correctly designing the information architecture. How many times have we seen a deployment where someone created one enormous library with hundreds of folders — exactly what SharePoint tries to prevent. Instead of folders we use metadata and views. A document has a type, department, project, status — and the user filters through views to find what they need. A flat structure, rich metadata.

Managed Metadata Service is new and fundamental in SharePoint 2010. A central taxonomy shared across site collections, term sets for departments, projects and document types. When HR and accounting talk about the same “department”, they mean the same term. No duplicates, no typos.

Workflow — approvals without paper¶

SharePoint Designer 2010 allows creating workflows without a single line of code. For typical scenarios — invoice approval, document review, new employee onboarding — this is sufficient. Conditions, steps, parallel branches, email notifications, task assignment. The visual designer in SharePoint Designer is intuitive even for power users from the business.

For more complex processes we use Visual Studio 2010 and sequential or state machine workflows. A typical example: the contract approval process in the legal department with escalations, SLAs on processing time and integration with SAP via BCS (Business Connectivity Services).

InfoPath 2010 forms are another strong point. Electronic forms with validation, calculations, conditional field visibility — all without programming. For the HR department we created a complete set of forms: holiday request, expense report, employee appraisal. Paper forms disappeared within a month.

Search — Enterprise Search¶

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise brings FAST Search — technology Microsoft acquired from the Norwegian company FAST. The performance and relevance of results are orders of magnitude better than basic SharePoint Search. Visual refiners, document previews directly in the results, people search with the organizational chart.

The key is feeding search with the right data. We configure crawling not just of SharePoint content, but also file servers, Exchange public folders, database systems via BCS connectors and external websites. The user searches in one place and finds everything — that is the value of enterprise search.

BI dashboards and Excel Services¶

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise includes PerformancePoint Services for creating dashboards, scorecards and analytical reports. You connect to an Analysis Services cube, create KPIs and a dashboard — and management has a real-time overview.

Excel Services allows publishing Excel workbooks to SharePoint and sharing them as interactive reports in the browser. The user doesn’t need Excel installed to filter data, change parameters and view charts. For companies where Excel is the primary analytical tool (and honestly — that’s most Czech companies), this is an excellent solution.

Topology and sizing¶

For a company with 500 users we typically design a three-tier farm: two Web Front End servers behind NLB, one Application server and a dedicated SQL Server 2008 R2. SharePoint is demanding on SQL — never install SQL on the same server as SharePoint, that’s a path to performance hell.

SharePoint 2010 RAM requirements are higher than 2007 — minimum 8 GB on a WFE, 16 GB on the Application server. In practice we prefer to give more; RAM is cheap and SharePoint will reliably use it for cache.

Conclusion¶

SharePoint 2010 is a powerful platform, but it requires investment in design, governance and user training. Without that you end up with another shared drive, just a more expensive one. With a proper deployment, however, you get an integrated enterprise portal that will change the way your company works with information. And that at a fraction of the cost of a custom solution.