SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance
Content
SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance
SharePoint Deployment Planning Services
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners Saturday, 22 June 2013 Version 1.0
Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization [email protected]
Contributors SDPS Delivery Partner
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication and is subject to change at any time without notice to you. This document and its contents are provided AS IS without warranty of any kind, and should not be interpreted as an offer or commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT. The descriptions of other companies’ products in this document, if any, are provided only as a convenience to you. Any such references should not be considered an endorsement or support by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot guarantee their accuracy, and the products may change over time. Also, the descriptions are intended as brief highlights to aid understanding, rather than as thorough coverage. For authoritative descriptions of these products, please consult their respective manufacturers. This deliverable is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind and MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, OR OTHERWISE. All trademarks are the property of their respective companies. ©2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Page ii
SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners
Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 2 Purpose or What To Be Tracking Towards .......................................................................................... 3 Communities Overview ......................................................................................................................... 4 Communities Concepts .......................................................................................................................... 5 User Profile Service ................................................................................................................................ 6 Overview.............................................................................................................................................. 6 Core Services ....................................................................................................................................... 6 Planning Considerations ...................................................................................................................... 6 POC Opportunities .............................................................................................................................. 9 References ........................................................................................................................................... 9 My Sites ................................................................................................................................................ 10 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 10 Core Services ..................................................................................................................................... 10 Planning Considerations .................................................................................................................... 10 POC Opportunities ............................................................................................................................ 12 References ......................................................................................................................................... 12 Enterprise Wikis ................................................................................................................................... 13 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 13 Core Services ..................................................................................................................................... 13 Planning Considerations .................................................................................................................... 13 POC Opportunities ............................................................................................................................ 14 References ......................................................................................................................................... 14 Collaboration Workspaces .................................................................................................................. 15 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 15 Core Services ..................................................................................................................................... 15 Planning Considerations .................................................................................................................... 15 References ......................................................................................................................................... 16
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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INTRODUCTION
This document should be considered a component that should be included in any SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) engagement where the Communities capability is a key component of the solution you are working on with your customers. This guide is intended to supplement the core platform guidance, and in some cases, may contain recommendations that supersede information that you find in that document.
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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PURPOSE OR WHAT TO BE TRACKING TOWARDS
SDPS is a planning offering, and in many cases, should be considered an accelerator for either an actual deployment or a launching point for deeper planning. For a Microsoft funded SDPS engagement is concerned, you rarely will have sufficient time to fully document a sophisticated solution. As such we will describe a minimum set of topics that you should cover with your customers, even if that coverage is in some cases superficial. The objective is to: Understand the overall importance of communities to your customer Document what you can about particular community capabilities If appropriate, incorporate what you learn back into the logical and physical architecture diagrams you will be providing back to your customer
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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COMMUNITIES OVERVIEW
SharePoint 2010 implements features that make enterprise social computing and collaboration easier. Social networking tools such as MySite Web sites and social content technologies such as blogs, wikis, and really simple syndication (RSS), are examples of social computing features. These features enable users to easily capture and share the knowledge and expertise necessary to do their work. This sharing of information encourages collaboration, improves innovation, and targets relevant content to the people who have to see it. You can adapt content to each user, while enabling administrators to set policies to protect privacy. The social computing and collaboration features in SharePoint 2010 are built on a database of properties that integrates information about people from many kinds of business applications and directory services. Good understanding and planning of social computing and collaboration features is very important for creating effective SharePoint 2010 solutions. For the sake of this document, the following topics are covered User Profiles My Sites Enterprise Wikis Collaboration Sites
The following Microsoft TechNet resource centers are relevant to content in this guide: Enterprise Collaboration Social Computing
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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COMMUNITIES CONCEPTS
You should be familiar with the following dictionary of terms:
Term User Profiles
Definition Contain detailed information about individuals in an organization. A user profile organizes and displays all of the properties related to each user together with social tags, documents and other items related to that user Contain detailed information about an organization such as teams, divisions, and so on Provides a reliable way to synchronize user, group, and organization profile information that is stored in the SharePoint 2010 profile store with profile information that is stored in directory services across the enterprise Enables organizations to target content to users based on their job or task, as defined by their membership in a SharePoint 2010 group or distribution list, by the organizational reporting structure, or by the public properties in their user profile A dedicated site for hosting My Site Web sites. A My Site Host is needed in order to deploy the social features of SharePoint 2010 A personal site that gives users in your organization a central location to manage and store documents, links, and colleagues Enables users to add social tags to documents, to other SharePoint 2010 items, and to other items, such as external Web pages and blog posts. Users can also leave impromptu notes on profile pages of a My Site Web site or any SharePoint 2010 page. Administrators can delete all tags for employees when they leave the company or remove a tag they do not want
Organization profile
Profile synchronization
Audiences
My Site Host
My Site Web site
Social tags and notes
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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USER PROFILE SERVICE
Overview
The User Profile service stores information about users in a central database. Social computing features use this information to facilitate productive interactions which enable users to collaborate efficiently. In order to provision My Site Web sites, enable social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and create and distribute profiles across multiple sites and farms, you must enable the User Profile service. Before you can personalize the sites and content within an organization, you have to plan user profiles. Information about users can come from directory services such as Active Directory directory service (AD DS). It can also come from line-of-business applications, such as SAP. The User Profile Service enables you to bring all of the properties from these diverse content sources together to create unified and consistent user profiles across an organization. The properties and content from these sources are stored in user profiles that are managed by the User Profile Service. User profiles identify connections among users, such as common managers, workgroups, group membership, and sites. User profiles also contain information about areas of user interest and help users locate subject matter experts for a particular area. This information enables users to find human resources by using the People Search feature. In this way, the relationships among users in an organization can encourage more efficient collaboration with colleagues and across teams. User profiles are more than merely groups of imported and custom properties about users in an organization. The properties are also used to display information about the relationships of each user to other users in an organization. Profile subtypes can be used to provide more detailed information about a user. For example, you can assign a subtype to the employee property that categorizes a user as either an intern or a full-time employee. Additionally, user profiles and user profile properties can be used to implement personalization features, such as audiences, and the policies that define how information about users is displayed and shared. Every site that uses the same User Profile Service application receives the same set of properties from the user profile store and displays them in the site's user information list. This also includes a list of documents that are shared by each user.
Core Services
Service Name User Profile Service User Profile Synchronization Service Service Location Application Server Application Server Databases Required Profile DB, Synchronization DB, Social Tagging DB (As defined above)
Planning Considerations
Question What directory service should be the foundation Objective This is typically the same directory service that a user
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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where user profiles are sourced from?
authenticates against, but potentially could be any system which could provide a core set of user information. This system should be identified in your logical and physical topologies. These systems should be included in your logical and physical topologies. In some instances, Business Connectivity Service (BCS) connections may need to be created to support the acquisition of data to support the user profile.
What other directory service(s) or line-of-business applications contain information that can be used in your user profiles?
Which properties from each system does the customer You need to understand not only the properties that want included in the user profile? are made available by these source systems, but also the range of possible property values, and value types. Once you understand these properties and values, you should work with the customer to determine if there is value in including these properties as part of a user’s SharePoint 2010 profile. Typically, you select properties because they provide information can be useful for other users in the system (such as phone numbers) or can be used for targeting or restricting the availability of other SharePoint 2010 content or functionality. If SharePoint 2010 does not already provide a surface for mapping these properties, then you will need to plan for their creation, being sensitive to the data type of the property in the source system. What other properties should be created to supplement a user’s profile? In many instances, the information that can be pulled from other systems does not fully meet the needs of the system. For example, a user’s stated area of expertise may not be captured in a directory service, but may be useful for supporting the identification of claimed experts within an organization. You will need to determine what these properties are and their associated value types. In some instances, you may even want to bind a property to a managed metadata term store to ensure a consistent taxonomy across users. Another example might be in an Internet facing deployment where you have a need to persist custom user registration information, such as their willingness to be contacted using email. Policies determine whether properties are mandatory, disabled, and their visibility to other users. An administrator may also want to delegate the management of some properties to the user who is associated with the profile. Remember that there are some ―system‖ properties with default policy settings that cannot be changed. Some property values that are sourced from an external directory service support the ability for a user to change the value, and then have the SharePoint
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
What policies should apply to each user profile property?
Should write-back be supported for certain properties?
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2010 broker send changes back to the source system. This requires you to work with the administrator of the source system to ensure that the service account has sufficient permissions to support this scenario. If this is not supported and users are allowed to update a system sourced property, their updates will be overwritten the next time synchronization takes place. An example of where write back might be useful is if a user was to change their cell phone number and there is currently no self-service interface in the organization for users to make this change inside a directory service. What frequency should user profile information besynchronized? Both initial and ongoing user profile synchronization consumes resources on both the source and target systems. In addition, these operations can take time— sometimes significant time—to complete. The frequency is generally determined by the amount of change that takes place within the systems providing profile information and a customer’s requirements on how quickly changes in those source systems are reflected in a SharePoint 2010 profile. Administrators associated with these systems are typically involved in these conversations such that they can provide input on this planning and also be made aware of the demands that may be made on the systems they own and manage. You need to know the total number of user profiles that the customer expects to support to plan for capacity. In an intranet deployment, this may amount to the total number of users that can authenticate against the system. The customer may wish to reduce this number by specifying additional restrictions on who within this group should have a user profile. For example, one deployment may only want user profiles created for division employees who are not contractors. Profile information is stored in a database. The size and performance characteristics are determined by the number of user profiles, the data load of each profile record, and the demands for this information by other services and systems. For large volumes of users, the initial profile population may consume a lot of system resources. The speed at which profile synchronization activities complete depends on the amount of data being transmitted but also any transport limitations. As user profiles can be shared both across farms and within a farm, you should work with the customer to
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
What is the number of user profiles that need to be supported?
Where will user profile information be stored?
How might secondary systems be impacted during profile import?
What other farms and applications might require access to this profile information?
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anticipate the impact of these connections. For example, a separate farm that requires profile data to determine audience membership may necessitate ensuring the high availability of the service. In addition, you will want to anticipate how service demand might impact other services that might also be running on the server. You may decide to isolate the service or its associated databases to dedicated server(s).
POC Opportunities
Creating a User Profile Service Application Add, Edit, or Delete Custom Profile Properties Configure Profile Synchronization
References
Overview of the User Profile Service Plan for User Profiles Plan Policies for User Profiles Plan for Profile Synchronization
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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MY SITES
Overview
My Site Web sites are personal sites in SharePoint 2010 that provide users in an organization with a rich set of social networking and collaboration features. These features give users a way to discover areas of expertise, projects, and business relationship from a central location. Each user can view his or her My Site Web site by clicking the corresponding user name in the top, right corner of any page and then clicking My Site.
Core Services
Service Name Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application User Profile Service Service Location Web Server Databases Required Content DB
Application Server
Profile DB, Synchronization DB, Social Tagging DB
Planning Considerations
Question Does the customer want to support My Sites? Objective Some deployments are generally not well suited for My Sites, such as an Internet facing deployment for a largely anonymous user base. If the customer does not have an initial need, but speculates that they might in the future, you may still want to consider planning for My Sites, but indicate to the customer that you can restrict the actual creation of My Sites through policy settings. Understanding how the customer expects their users to interact with their My Site may impact how you choose to develop these (and potentially other) areas. For example, if My Sites will primarily be used as a self-managed collaboration workspace versus whether the My Sites will be hosting web parts that provide summary information from other areas within the deployment – such as a personal dashboard. The location is specified through the configuration of a user profile service application. Once completed, a special site collection will be provisioned to host all My Sites. While it is possible to host these within a web application intended to host other site collections, it is strongly recommended that you create a dedicated web application for this purpose. If the customer wishes to proceed in this manner, you
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
What is the motivator for supporting My Sites?
Where should My Sites be hosted?
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should plan for this web application no differently than any other web application. For example, what is the URL that end users will be using when viewing a MySite. Is more than one instance of the user profile service running within the same farm or within separate farms? For each instance of the user profile service users will potentially have the ability to create a separate My Site. While there may be certain scenarios where this is desirable, there is no linkage between these two sites. For example, personal documents stored in one My Site are not replicated to a user’s second My Site. To prevent this from happening, you should plan for using the Trusted My Site Host Locations feature. For geographically distributed farms, administrators can use this feature to ensure that one group of users has their My Sites hosted in one farm while another group of users has their My Sites hosted in another. For example, Tokyo users might have their My Sites on the Asia Pacific farm, while New York users would have theirs on the Americas farm. Assuming a My Site site collection is provisioned by default, all authenticated users can create a My Site. This permission Create Personal Site can be removed outright (possibly to support the first question in this section) or reassigned to a subset of authenticated users. For example, in an Intranet deployment, an organization may want to expose this capability to full time employees but not contractors. By default, users can add ratings, notes, and social tags to SharePoint content and other items, such as external Web pages and blog posts. The permission Use Social Features controls this ability, and like the previous permission may be retracted or reassigned to a smaller set of users. By default, all authenticated users can edit their profiles, add or edit colleagues, and add or edit memberships. The permission Use Personal Features controls this ability, and like the previous permission may be retracted or reassigned to a smaller set of users. Understand that the exact properties that a user may edit will be determined by how each of the user profile property policies are configured. You should ensure that any profile changes that a user might be permitted to make will not be overwritten during a profile synchronization activity as described in the previous topic. By default, this is disabled, but can be enabled by starting the Activity Feed Timer Job. The customer (and end user) should be made aware of the potential
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
Who can create personal sites?
Who can add social tags and content ratings?
Can users edit their own personal profiles?
Should news feeds be enabled?
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privacy issues around exposing one user’s activities to another user. Should the organizational browser be available? If the customer wants to support this feature, then they should expect to have profile information that can be used to build an organizational hierarchy. Ideally, this information is automatically populated, but end users may be allowed to provide this information manually. The organizational browser will also require Microsoft Silverlight 3 be installed on the client machine.
POC Opportunities
Setup My Sites
References
Overview of My Sites Plan for My Site Web Sites Configuring Outlook 2010 for SharePoint Colleague Recommendations
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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ENTERPRISE WIKIS
Overview
Enterprise wikis help organizations collect, organize, and distribute information. Enterprise wikis often become repositories for an organization's unstated knowledge, which otherwise might not be stored anywhere. Enterprise wikis can encourage informal learning and sharing tips with other users, which can reduce the need for formal training or continuous IT support. You can use an Enterprise Wiki to share and update information on a larger scale than a wiki, library, or team site.
Core Services
Service Name Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Service Location Web Server Databases Required Content DB
Planning Considerations
Question Why does the customer want to create an Enterprise Wiki? Objective An Enterprise Wiki is a good solution when a business need requires multiple users to contribute to a knowledge repository. However, if you need a way to set up one-to-many communication about a project or area of interest, you should use a Team Site Since an Enterprise Wiki is technically a specially purposed publishing site template, an Enterprise wiki can be created beneath an existing site collection, as its own site collection on an existing web application, or even on a dedicated web application. One typical influencer on this decision might be the vanity URL that the customer may want used. For example, http://ContosoWiki as opposed to http://ContosoIntranet/sites/wiki. If the customer environment is more restrictive, then they may want to consider other one-to-many options. The WikiMembers group controls the contribute permission, while the Wiki Visitors group controls who can see content. For privacy, information security, accuracy, or even legal reasons, a customer may wish to ensure that all content that is added to the wiki must be approved prior to publishing. For situations where a customer has no similar
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
Where should you host an Enterprise Wiki?
Who will be allowed to contribute and view content?
Will any workflow or content approval process need to be put in place?
How many wiki pages does the customer believe will
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be created and how popular will the site be?
applications in their organization, both will be difficult to predict. However, a customer may see an Enterprise Wiki as a better way of managing an existing body of content and may ―seed‖ an initial deployment with this content. Both traffic and content size may factor into decisions to isolate an Enterprise Wiki from other content, from separate content databases to even a dedicated farm. You can supplement the body of content with additional meta-information to improve discoverability. You can use an existing Managed Metadata service application to assist in this classification, or create a new one.
Does the customer want to support the informal or formal classification for Wiki page?
POC Opportunities
Create an Enterprise Wiki
References
Overview of Enterprise Wikis Planning for Enterprise Wikis
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COLLABORATION WORKSPACES
Overview
With SharePoint 2010, you can support collaboration sites in your environment. Collaboration sites store information that individuals and groups can collectively author, share, and revise. These sites do not need to be associated with a particular portal site collection or part of a publishing site collection. They can be stand-alone sites that are available for teams or groups of users who need to collaborate on projects or share information. For example, a team at an engineering firm might want a collaboration site to discuss current project status, assign tasks, or arrange group lunches, without publishing this internal information to the corporate intranet. Collaboration sites can be made available for searching from your portal or publishing site, so that information from these sites is available across the organization.
Core Services
Service Name Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Service Location Web Server Databases Required Content DB
Planning Considerations
Question How many collaboration sites are expected? Objective This may depend on how the customer wishes to advertise these sites to their users. For instance, a customer may see these sites as places where they manage documents related to their customers. While allowing sites to be created on demand will probably increase the speed at which new sites are available for use, it will be more difficult to manage the number of sites. Alternatively, while there may be more control over what gets created and where, end users may be delayed in their collaboration activities should a human element be involved in this provisioning process. Collaboration sites can be created anywhere, but it is often better to identify specific web applications, site collections, and URL paths where you prefer these sites be hosted. Because collaboration sites tend to have much different usage characteristics than other types of sites, some of your decisions on where to allow these sites to be created may impact your ability to isolate and manage such things as databases that hold the collaboration site data.
Will users be allowed to create collaboration sites on demand or will these require a more formal request process?
Where will these collaboration sites be created?
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Will SharePoint Workspace 2010 be used?
SharePoint workspace enables users to collaborate on documents offline and synchronize changes back into SharePoint 2010. Workspace implementation may have consequences on the usage characteristics of some servers in the farm. Consult the SDPS Sites planning document for additional information.
References
Collaboration Site Planning Plan for SharePoint Workspace 2010
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
SharePoint Deployment Planning Services
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners Saturday, 22 June 2013 Version 1.0
Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization [email protected]
Contributors SDPS Delivery Partner
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication and is subject to change at any time without notice to you. This document and its contents are provided AS IS without warranty of any kind, and should not be interpreted as an offer or commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT. The descriptions of other companies’ products in this document, if any, are provided only as a convenience to you. Any such references should not be considered an endorsement or support by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot guarantee their accuracy, and the products may change over time. Also, the descriptions are intended as brief highlights to aid understanding, rather than as thorough coverage. For authoritative descriptions of these products, please consult their respective manufacturers. This deliverable is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind and MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, OR OTHERWISE. All trademarks are the property of their respective companies. ©2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Page ii
SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 2 Purpose or What To Be Tracking Towards .......................................................................................... 3 Communities Overview ......................................................................................................................... 4 Communities Concepts .......................................................................................................................... 5 User Profile Service ................................................................................................................................ 6 Overview.............................................................................................................................................. 6 Core Services ....................................................................................................................................... 6 Planning Considerations ...................................................................................................................... 6 POC Opportunities .............................................................................................................................. 9 References ........................................................................................................................................... 9 My Sites ................................................................................................................................................ 10 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 10 Core Services ..................................................................................................................................... 10 Planning Considerations .................................................................................................................... 10 POC Opportunities ............................................................................................................................ 12 References ......................................................................................................................................... 12 Enterprise Wikis ................................................................................................................................... 13 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 13 Core Services ..................................................................................................................................... 13 Planning Considerations .................................................................................................................... 13 POC Opportunities ............................................................................................................................ 14 References ......................................................................................................................................... 14 Collaboration Workspaces .................................................................................................................. 15 Overview............................................................................................................................................ 15 Core Services ..................................................................................................................................... 15 Planning Considerations .................................................................................................................... 15 References ......................................................................................................................................... 16
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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INTRODUCTION
This document should be considered a component that should be included in any SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) engagement where the Communities capability is a key component of the solution you are working on with your customers. This guide is intended to supplement the core platform guidance, and in some cases, may contain recommendations that supersede information that you find in that document.
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners
PURPOSE OR WHAT TO BE TRACKING TOWARDS
SDPS is a planning offering, and in many cases, should be considered an accelerator for either an actual deployment or a launching point for deeper planning. For a Microsoft funded SDPS engagement is concerned, you rarely will have sufficient time to fully document a sophisticated solution. As such we will describe a minimum set of topics that you should cover with your customers, even if that coverage is in some cases superficial. The objective is to: Understand the overall importance of communities to your customer Document what you can about particular community capabilities If appropriate, incorporate what you learn back into the logical and physical architecture diagrams you will be providing back to your customer
Page 3
SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners
COMMUNITIES OVERVIEW
SharePoint 2010 implements features that make enterprise social computing and collaboration easier. Social networking tools such as MySite Web sites and social content technologies such as blogs, wikis, and really simple syndication (RSS), are examples of social computing features. These features enable users to easily capture and share the knowledge and expertise necessary to do their work. This sharing of information encourages collaboration, improves innovation, and targets relevant content to the people who have to see it. You can adapt content to each user, while enabling administrators to set policies to protect privacy. The social computing and collaboration features in SharePoint 2010 are built on a database of properties that integrates information about people from many kinds of business applications and directory services. Good understanding and planning of social computing and collaboration features is very important for creating effective SharePoint 2010 solutions. For the sake of this document, the following topics are covered User Profiles My Sites Enterprise Wikis Collaboration Sites
The following Microsoft TechNet resource centers are relevant to content in this guide: Enterprise Collaboration Social Computing
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
Prepared for SDPS Delivery Partners
COMMUNITIES CONCEPTS
You should be familiar with the following dictionary of terms:
Term User Profiles
Definition Contain detailed information about individuals in an organization. A user profile organizes and displays all of the properties related to each user together with social tags, documents and other items related to that user Contain detailed information about an organization such as teams, divisions, and so on Provides a reliable way to synchronize user, group, and organization profile information that is stored in the SharePoint 2010 profile store with profile information that is stored in directory services across the enterprise Enables organizations to target content to users based on their job or task, as defined by their membership in a SharePoint 2010 group or distribution list, by the organizational reporting structure, or by the public properties in their user profile A dedicated site for hosting My Site Web sites. A My Site Host is needed in order to deploy the social features of SharePoint 2010 A personal site that gives users in your organization a central location to manage and store documents, links, and colleagues Enables users to add social tags to documents, to other SharePoint 2010 items, and to other items, such as external Web pages and blog posts. Users can also leave impromptu notes on profile pages of a My Site Web site or any SharePoint 2010 page. Administrators can delete all tags for employees when they leave the company or remove a tag they do not want
Organization profile
Profile synchronization
Audiences
My Site Host
My Site Web site
Social tags and notes
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SharePoint 2010 - Communities Guidance, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, Version 1.0 Prepared by SDPS Partner Organization, last modified on 22 Jun. 13
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USER PROFILE SERVICE
Overview
The User Profile service stores information about users in a central database. Social computing features use this information to facilitate productive interactions which enable users to collaborate efficiently. In order to provision My Site Web sites, enable social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and create and distribute profiles across multiple sites and farms, you must enable the User Profile service. Before you can personalize the sites and content within an organization, you have to plan user profiles. Information about users can come from directory services such as Active Directory directory service (AD DS). It can also come from line-of-business applications, such as SAP. The User Profile Service enables you to bring all of the properties from these diverse content sources together to create unified and consistent user profiles across an organization. The properties and content from these sources are stored in user profiles that are managed by the User Profile Service. User profiles identify connections among users, such as common managers, workgroups, group membership, and sites. User profiles also contain information about areas of user interest and help users locate subject matter experts for a particular area. This information enables users to find human resources by using the People Search feature. In this way, the relationships among users in an organization can encourage more efficient collaboration with colleagues and across teams. User profiles are more than merely groups of imported and custom properties about users in an organization. The properties are also used to display information about the relationships of each user to other users in an organization. Profile subtypes can be used to provide more detailed information about a user. For example, you can assign a subtype to the employee property that categorizes a user as either an intern or a full-time employee. Additionally, user profiles and user profile properties can be used to implement personalization features, such as audiences, and the policies that define how information about users is displayed and shared. Every site that uses the same User Profile Service application receives the same set of properties from the user profile store and displays them in the site's user information list. This also includes a list of documents that are shared by each user.
Core Services
Service Name User Profile Service User Profile Synchronization Service Service Location Application Server Application Server Databases Required Profile DB, Synchronization DB, Social Tagging DB (As defined above)
Planning Considerations
Question What directory service should be the foundation Objective This is typically the same directory service that a user
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where user profiles are sourced from?
authenticates against, but potentially could be any system which could provide a core set of user information. This system should be identified in your logical and physical topologies. These systems should be included in your logical and physical topologies. In some instances, Business Connectivity Service (BCS) connections may need to be created to support the acquisition of data to support the user profile.
What other directory service(s) or line-of-business applications contain information that can be used in your user profiles?
Which properties from each system does the customer You need to understand not only the properties that want included in the user profile? are made available by these source systems, but also the range of possible property values, and value types. Once you understand these properties and values, you should work with the customer to determine if there is value in including these properties as part of a user’s SharePoint 2010 profile. Typically, you select properties because they provide information can be useful for other users in the system (such as phone numbers) or can be used for targeting or restricting the availability of other SharePoint 2010 content or functionality. If SharePoint 2010 does not already provide a surface for mapping these properties, then you will need to plan for their creation, being sensitive to the data type of the property in the source system. What other properties should be created to supplement a user’s profile? In many instances, the information that can be pulled from other systems does not fully meet the needs of the system. For example, a user’s stated area of expertise may not be captured in a directory service, but may be useful for supporting the identification of claimed experts within an organization. You will need to determine what these properties are and their associated value types. In some instances, you may even want to bind a property to a managed metadata term store to ensure a consistent taxonomy across users. Another example might be in an Internet facing deployment where you have a need to persist custom user registration information, such as their willingness to be contacted using email. Policies determine whether properties are mandatory, disabled, and their visibility to other users. An administrator may also want to delegate the management of some properties to the user who is associated with the profile. Remember that there are some ―system‖ properties with default policy settings that cannot be changed. Some property values that are sourced from an external directory service support the ability for a user to change the value, and then have the SharePoint
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What policies should apply to each user profile property?
Should write-back be supported for certain properties?
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2010 broker send changes back to the source system. This requires you to work with the administrator of the source system to ensure that the service account has sufficient permissions to support this scenario. If this is not supported and users are allowed to update a system sourced property, their updates will be overwritten the next time synchronization takes place. An example of where write back might be useful is if a user was to change their cell phone number and there is currently no self-service interface in the organization for users to make this change inside a directory service. What frequency should user profile information besynchronized? Both initial and ongoing user profile synchronization consumes resources on both the source and target systems. In addition, these operations can take time— sometimes significant time—to complete. The frequency is generally determined by the amount of change that takes place within the systems providing profile information and a customer’s requirements on how quickly changes in those source systems are reflected in a SharePoint 2010 profile. Administrators associated with these systems are typically involved in these conversations such that they can provide input on this planning and also be made aware of the demands that may be made on the systems they own and manage. You need to know the total number of user profiles that the customer expects to support to plan for capacity. In an intranet deployment, this may amount to the total number of users that can authenticate against the system. The customer may wish to reduce this number by specifying additional restrictions on who within this group should have a user profile. For example, one deployment may only want user profiles created for division employees who are not contractors. Profile information is stored in a database. The size and performance characteristics are determined by the number of user profiles, the data load of each profile record, and the demands for this information by other services and systems. For large volumes of users, the initial profile population may consume a lot of system resources. The speed at which profile synchronization activities complete depends on the amount of data being transmitted but also any transport limitations. As user profiles can be shared both across farms and within a farm, you should work with the customer to
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What is the number of user profiles that need to be supported?
Where will user profile information be stored?
How might secondary systems be impacted during profile import?
What other farms and applications might require access to this profile information?
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anticipate the impact of these connections. For example, a separate farm that requires profile data to determine audience membership may necessitate ensuring the high availability of the service. In addition, you will want to anticipate how service demand might impact other services that might also be running on the server. You may decide to isolate the service or its associated databases to dedicated server(s).
POC Opportunities
Creating a User Profile Service Application Add, Edit, or Delete Custom Profile Properties Configure Profile Synchronization
References
Overview of the User Profile Service Plan for User Profiles Plan Policies for User Profiles Plan for Profile Synchronization
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MY SITES
Overview
My Site Web sites are personal sites in SharePoint 2010 that provide users in an organization with a rich set of social networking and collaboration features. These features give users a way to discover areas of expertise, projects, and business relationship from a central location. Each user can view his or her My Site Web site by clicking the corresponding user name in the top, right corner of any page and then clicking My Site.
Core Services
Service Name Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application User Profile Service Service Location Web Server Databases Required Content DB
Application Server
Profile DB, Synchronization DB, Social Tagging DB
Planning Considerations
Question Does the customer want to support My Sites? Objective Some deployments are generally not well suited for My Sites, such as an Internet facing deployment for a largely anonymous user base. If the customer does not have an initial need, but speculates that they might in the future, you may still want to consider planning for My Sites, but indicate to the customer that you can restrict the actual creation of My Sites through policy settings. Understanding how the customer expects their users to interact with their My Site may impact how you choose to develop these (and potentially other) areas. For example, if My Sites will primarily be used as a self-managed collaboration workspace versus whether the My Sites will be hosting web parts that provide summary information from other areas within the deployment – such as a personal dashboard. The location is specified through the configuration of a user profile service application. Once completed, a special site collection will be provisioned to host all My Sites. While it is possible to host these within a web application intended to host other site collections, it is strongly recommended that you create a dedicated web application for this purpose. If the customer wishes to proceed in this manner, you
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What is the motivator for supporting My Sites?
Where should My Sites be hosted?
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should plan for this web application no differently than any other web application. For example, what is the URL that end users will be using when viewing a MySite. Is more than one instance of the user profile service running within the same farm or within separate farms? For each instance of the user profile service users will potentially have the ability to create a separate My Site. While there may be certain scenarios where this is desirable, there is no linkage between these two sites. For example, personal documents stored in one My Site are not replicated to a user’s second My Site. To prevent this from happening, you should plan for using the Trusted My Site Host Locations feature. For geographically distributed farms, administrators can use this feature to ensure that one group of users has their My Sites hosted in one farm while another group of users has their My Sites hosted in another. For example, Tokyo users might have their My Sites on the Asia Pacific farm, while New York users would have theirs on the Americas farm. Assuming a My Site site collection is provisioned by default, all authenticated users can create a My Site. This permission Create Personal Site can be removed outright (possibly to support the first question in this section) or reassigned to a subset of authenticated users. For example, in an Intranet deployment, an organization may want to expose this capability to full time employees but not contractors. By default, users can add ratings, notes, and social tags to SharePoint content and other items, such as external Web pages and blog posts. The permission Use Social Features controls this ability, and like the previous permission may be retracted or reassigned to a smaller set of users. By default, all authenticated users can edit their profiles, add or edit colleagues, and add or edit memberships. The permission Use Personal Features controls this ability, and like the previous permission may be retracted or reassigned to a smaller set of users. Understand that the exact properties that a user may edit will be determined by how each of the user profile property policies are configured. You should ensure that any profile changes that a user might be permitted to make will not be overwritten during a profile synchronization activity as described in the previous topic. By default, this is disabled, but can be enabled by starting the Activity Feed Timer Job. The customer (and end user) should be made aware of the potential
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Who can create personal sites?
Who can add social tags and content ratings?
Can users edit their own personal profiles?
Should news feeds be enabled?
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privacy issues around exposing one user’s activities to another user. Should the organizational browser be available? If the customer wants to support this feature, then they should expect to have profile information that can be used to build an organizational hierarchy. Ideally, this information is automatically populated, but end users may be allowed to provide this information manually. The organizational browser will also require Microsoft Silverlight 3 be installed on the client machine.
POC Opportunities
Setup My Sites
References
Overview of My Sites Plan for My Site Web Sites Configuring Outlook 2010 for SharePoint Colleague Recommendations
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ENTERPRISE WIKIS
Overview
Enterprise wikis help organizations collect, organize, and distribute information. Enterprise wikis often become repositories for an organization's unstated knowledge, which otherwise might not be stored anywhere. Enterprise wikis can encourage informal learning and sharing tips with other users, which can reduce the need for formal training or continuous IT support. You can use an Enterprise Wiki to share and update information on a larger scale than a wiki, library, or team site.
Core Services
Service Name Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Service Location Web Server Databases Required Content DB
Planning Considerations
Question Why does the customer want to create an Enterprise Wiki? Objective An Enterprise Wiki is a good solution when a business need requires multiple users to contribute to a knowledge repository. However, if you need a way to set up one-to-many communication about a project or area of interest, you should use a Team Site Since an Enterprise Wiki is technically a specially purposed publishing site template, an Enterprise wiki can be created beneath an existing site collection, as its own site collection on an existing web application, or even on a dedicated web application. One typical influencer on this decision might be the vanity URL that the customer may want used. For example, http://ContosoWiki as opposed to http://ContosoIntranet/sites/wiki. If the customer environment is more restrictive, then they may want to consider other one-to-many options. The WikiMembers group controls the contribute permission, while the Wiki Visitors group controls who can see content. For privacy, information security, accuracy, or even legal reasons, a customer may wish to ensure that all content that is added to the wiki must be approved prior to publishing. For situations where a customer has no similar
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Where should you host an Enterprise Wiki?
Who will be allowed to contribute and view content?
Will any workflow or content approval process need to be put in place?
How many wiki pages does the customer believe will
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be created and how popular will the site be?
applications in their organization, both will be difficult to predict. However, a customer may see an Enterprise Wiki as a better way of managing an existing body of content and may ―seed‖ an initial deployment with this content. Both traffic and content size may factor into decisions to isolate an Enterprise Wiki from other content, from separate content databases to even a dedicated farm. You can supplement the body of content with additional meta-information to improve discoverability. You can use an existing Managed Metadata service application to assist in this classification, or create a new one.
Does the customer want to support the informal or formal classification for Wiki page?
POC Opportunities
Create an Enterprise Wiki
References
Overview of Enterprise Wikis Planning for Enterprise Wikis
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COLLABORATION WORKSPACES
Overview
With SharePoint 2010, you can support collaboration sites in your environment. Collaboration sites store information that individuals and groups can collectively author, share, and revise. These sites do not need to be associated with a particular portal site collection or part of a publishing site collection. They can be stand-alone sites that are available for teams or groups of users who need to collaborate on projects or share information. For example, a team at an engineering firm might want a collaboration site to discuss current project status, assign tasks, or arrange group lunches, without publishing this internal information to the corporate intranet. Collaboration sites can be made available for searching from your portal or publishing site, so that information from these sites is available across the organization.
Core Services
Service Name Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Service Location Web Server Databases Required Content DB
Planning Considerations
Question How many collaboration sites are expected? Objective This may depend on how the customer wishes to advertise these sites to their users. For instance, a customer may see these sites as places where they manage documents related to their customers. While allowing sites to be created on demand will probably increase the speed at which new sites are available for use, it will be more difficult to manage the number of sites. Alternatively, while there may be more control over what gets created and where, end users may be delayed in their collaboration activities should a human element be involved in this provisioning process. Collaboration sites can be created anywhere, but it is often better to identify specific web applications, site collections, and URL paths where you prefer these sites be hosted. Because collaboration sites tend to have much different usage characteristics than other types of sites, some of your decisions on where to allow these sites to be created may impact your ability to isolate and manage such things as databases that hold the collaboration site data.
Will users be allowed to create collaboration sites on demand or will these require a more formal request process?
Where will these collaboration sites be created?
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Will SharePoint Workspace 2010 be used?
SharePoint workspace enables users to collaborate on documents offline and synchronize changes back into SharePoint 2010. Workspace implementation may have consequences on the usage characteristics of some servers in the farm. Consult the SDPS Sites planning document for additional information.
References
Collaboration Site Planning Plan for SharePoint Workspace 2010
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