Taking SharePoint to the Cloud - Planning - Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)

Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)

Part I. Planning

Chapter 11. Taking SharePoint to the Cloud

On March 4, 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the public statement that Microsoft was “all in” with the cloud and that Microsoft was betting the future of its company on cloud computing.1 In October 2012, Ballmer redefined Microsoft as a “devices and services” company in his annual shareholder letter.2 It is clear that cloud computing is viewed as strategic by Microsoft.

1. Steve Ballmer, “Cloud Computing.” www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/steve/2010/03-04cloud.aspx

2. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft shareholder letter. www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar12/shareholder-letter/index.html

In this chapter, we will

Image Define what cloud computing is

Image Review the past, present, and future for SharePoint in the cloud

Image Discuss some of the key questions and considerations about developing a successful strategy for using SharePoint in the cloud

Image Compare the differences between SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Online

Image Review the implications that the cloud has for SharePoint governance, adoption, migration, and overall planning

Microsoft has been in the cloud computing business for roughly 20 years. Services such as Hotmail, Bing, the Microsoft Network (MSN), SkyDrive, and Xbox Live are among the largest consumer services available. In recent months, Microsoft has acquired online service companies, including Skype and Yammer. Microsoft has also launched the Azure online service to enable organizations to run their servers, databases, and applications in a Microsoft-managed data center.

Microsoft has offered a managed version of Exchange and SharePoint Online since the launch of Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) in 2009. BPOS was based on SharePoint 2007, which was not truly designed to be run as a cloud service offering. Because of these limitations, SharePoint Online in BPOS did not offer much more than the basic functionality that Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provided.

With the 2010 wave of products (Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Office), BPOS was rebranded as Office 365. SharePoint Online then supported many of the core features of the standard version of SharePoint Server but still lacked some of the higher-end SharePoint Server enterprise features, including FAST search and business intelligence.

SharePoint 2013 now offers near-perfect feature parity between what Microsoft delivers as a service via SharePoint Online and what it ships as part of SharePoint Server. The SharePoint engineering team designed this release to be delivered as a service while still offering customers and partners choices about whether to deploy everything online, on-premises, hosted by a third party, or a hybrid combination.

What’s New in SharePoint 2013?

SharePoint 2013 is designed to be a cloud service. There are now some capabilities that exist only in the online version of SharePoint, such as external sharing of content and new developer tools known as Napa. We will discuss these new capabilities later in this chapter.

SharePoint (2013) Online supports many of the same capabilities already described elsewhere in this book, including the new social computing features, SkyDrive Pro, eDiscovery, and enterprise search capabilities. There are also new online services that are built on top of SharePoint Online. Project Online provides the ability to perform enterprise project, task, portfolio, and resource management via Office 365. Duet Online adds the ability to more deeply integrate SharePoint Online with SAP.

SharePoint Online now has tighter integration with Exchange Online. Key examples of this include the new capabilities for eDiscovery and Site Mailboxes, which are described in Chapter 13, “Managing Enterprise Content.” The task view within your SharePoint Online personal site provides an aggregated view of all of your tasks across various SharePoint Online sites as well as tasks assigned to you in Exchange Online and Project Online.

SharePoint Online search now supports hybrid scenarios where there may be some content on-premises and some online. In this model, SharePoint Online indexes content stored within Office 365. SharePoint on-premises indexes the content stored on-premises, including file servers and other content stores. The major change is that both SharePoint Online and on-premises can now display results from a remote SharePoint farm. For example, SharePoint Online can display results from the on-premises search index using the new result sources and query rules capabilities that are described in more detail in Chapter 16, “Planning Enterprise Search.”

SharePoint Online is also integrated with other Microsoft cloud services such as Windows Azure and SQL Azure. When developing applications for SharePoint Online, one option is to have the application automatically hosted to run inside of Windows Azure. Access Services (when used via SharePoint Online) now automatically creates databases within SQL Azure and stores data within that service—as opposed to storing data within SharePoint Online. These are two examples of how Microsoft is seeking to provide new ways for scaling and building applications targeted at the multi-tenant SharePoint Online offering—applications and services now extend beyond Office 365.

Cloud Computing Concepts

Cloud computing has become an industry catchphrase with many different definitions and interpretations. Before we discuss SharePoint Online and Office 365, we will explain some of the different cloud computing concepts and options.

Private Clouds

The first option is a private cloud. In a private cloud, your organization owns and manages the physical servers and networking and is responsible for items that include the operating system, patching, databases, backup, disaster recovery, and high availability. You have full control over SharePoint and all of its related components. Many organizations today leverage this model and have a mix of physical and virtualized servers using technologies such as VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V and are taking advantage of private cloud benefits, including self-service provisioning and scalability.

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a service (IAAS) has become much more prominent in recent years. Companies such as Amazon offer organizations large amounts of computing power and elasticity to handle things like seasonal spikes in business. In this model, the service provider manages the physical services and resources, including the server and its hardware resources such as memory, storage, and networking. Your organization owns the virtual machine that runs within the service provider’s data center, and you are responsible for the operating system and applications (such as SharePoint, SQL Server) that run within the virtual machine as well as the patching and management of these virtual servers and products. Microsoft is beginning to offer its own IAAS offering as part of the Windows Azure service offering.

Platform as a Service

Platform as a service (PAAS) is still a relatively new service offering. In this case, the service provider manages all of the infrastructure (physical and virtual), and you focus on your applications and data management. Your organization does not need to deal with sizing or patching the underlying servers. An example of this is Microsoft’s Azure Media Services where Microsoft manages the servers and storage for your online media files (such as streaming videos).

Software as a Service

Software as a service (SAAS) has been around for a while. SAAS offers consumers and organizations the ability to subscribe to a product that is delivered via the public cloud. The service may be free of charge, advertiser funded, or charged per user on a regular monthly or annual basis. The service provider manages all aspects of the service, including providing regular updates to the application and ensuring that it is highly available and backed up. Many consumers are using services such as Hotmail, Xbox Live, or Skype. Enterprises may be using services such asSalesforce.com or Yammer. Microsoft has been moving into the enterprise SAAS business over the past few years, including Office 365, which is where SharePoint Online runs.

Key Differences

Figure 11-1 summarizes the key differences among on-premises (private cloud), IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS from a Microsoft cloud services perspective. One of the main things to consider is the level of control and customization your organization needs. Typically, the more control you keep, the higher your long-term costs will be since you will be responsible for management, patching, storage, backup, disaster recovery, and other operations. However, the further you move toward the SAAS model, the less you control, which typically means less long-term cost since the service provider can realize economies of scale by providing a standardized service to multiple customers.

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Figure 11-1 Microsoft cloud services comparison

Office 365 Overview

Office 365 is one of Microsoft’s SAAS offerings. The following services are key components of Office 365 with the wave of products released online in early 2013:

Image Exchange Online is for e-mail, calendaring, and personal task management. Microsoft also offers Exchange Online Archiving and Exchange Online Protection as services for storing archived messages and handling e-mail spam and virus and malware protection.

Image SharePoint Online is very similar to what is available in SharePoint Server 2013 on-premises. This chapter will highlight key differences between the online and on-premises versions.

Image Lync Online provides presence status, instant messaging, audio, video, and desktop-sharing capabilities.

Image Office Professional Plus provides the Office clients (such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote) as a subscription service. Office applications can be installed on demand via streaming technology from Office 365, including side-by-side installations with older versions of Office. Office as a service is licensed per user. Each user can install Office on up to five PC or Mac devices. Please see Chapter 20, “Integrating Office Applications,” for more information on the new Office clients.

Image Office Web Apps provide browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that support viewing and editing of Office documents directly within a Web browser; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are supported. Please see Chapter 20, “Integrating Office Applications,” for more information on the updated Office Web Apps.

Image Project Online is a new offering with the 2013 SharePoint Online service update. Project Server is now available as an online service for enterprise project, resource, and portfolio management. Project Online integrates with SharePoint Online by providing a rolled-up view of all tasks assigned to an individual across Exchange, SharePoint, and Project sites. The Project desktop client is also available on a per-user subscription basis and is installed and managed in a manner similar to the Office clients.

Image Visio Online is an update to Visio Services (first introduced in 2010) and includes the new ability to subscribe to a user-based service for managing the deployment of the Visio client software.

Image Duet Online is a new joint offering from Microsoft and SAP that offers the ability to integrate SharePoint Online with an SAP implementation.

Image Information Rights Management (IRM) is now available as a service offering from Microsoft and can be integrated with Exchange and SharePoint Online. It enables the ability to apply policies to messages and documents stored within Office 365 to manage who can view or edit items and for how long. You can also set policies to prevent messages and files from being sent or viewed by people outside of your organization.

Office 365 Licensing Considerations

Microsoft offers a variety of Office 365 pricing plans for individual components; discounts are offered when multiple services (such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online) are purchased as part of a suite. Various options are available based on the size of the organization, and there is the option to have different license types for different user roles. For example, kiosk workers who need only browser-based access to e-mail and Office documents can be covered under a less expensive plan than others who need to fully use SharePoint and Office. More details on the various Office 365 license offerings can be found at www.office365.com.

One of the main licensing items to consider is whether or not your organization is able to run in the standard multi-tenant environment or if it needs to be in its own dedicated environment. In a multi-tenant environment, multiple organizations share the same hardware, but their content and data are kept separate. For example, multiple organizations may be managed within the same SharePoint farm, but each organization resides within its own “tenant” (essentially a separate Web application within the SharePoint farm), and all of its content is stored within its own private site collections and content databases. In a dedicated environment, a single organization is in a single SharePoint farm. One of the main trade-offs between dedicated and multi-tenant is cost. Typically a dedicated environment costs more since Microsoft needs to allocate and manage specific hardware for a single customer.


Note

The SharePoint Online standard (multi-tenant) and dedicated versions offer different capabilities, benefits, and feature roadmaps. The primary focus of this chapter is on the standard offering.


Office 365 Identity Management

There are multiple ways to set up user access to Office 365. Smaller organizations will likely use the Office 365 user management system to manually create user accounts and set passwords within Office 365. Organizations that already have Active Directory in place on-premises will often want to set up single sign-on (SSO) and identity federation with Office 365. In this scenario, the organization will typically synchronize its user accounts (but not the user passwords) with the Windows Azure Active Directory service with which Office 365 integrates. When users log in to Office 365, they use their normal Active Directory user accounts and domain passwords. The benefit of this is that users do not have to remember different usernames and passwords between online and on-premises systems. From the perspective of your organization, this enables you to manage a single set of user accounts and apply your corporate policies to them, such as password complexity and expiration. This common user identity configuration is also important for supporting hybrid scenarios, which will be discussed later in this chapter.


Note

More information on the options and setup for SSO and directory synchronization can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh967619.aspx.


SharePoint Online also offers the option of inviting people outside of your organization to collaborate. The SharePoint Online tenant administrator for your organization can determine whether to allow external sharing within your tenant and, if external sharing is enabled, whether to require external users who accept sharing invitations to sign in as authenticated users or if they can access resources anonymously (no login required). Your organization can also specify different external sharing policies for different site collections within SharePoint Online. For example, your organization may have a site collection set up for collaboration only within your organization. In this case, external sharing should be disabled for that site collection. Your organization may have a separate site collection for external collaboration for areas such as working with customers, partners, or boards of directors. Additional considerations for security in this scenario are discussed in Chapter 12, “Planning Security.”

Office 365 Administration

Most organizations use Office 365 in a multi-tenant environment. A tenant is the boundary that separates your organization’s content and data from what belongs to other organizations. Office 365 offers a consolidated management console for tenant administrators to manage their Office 365 environment. From this environment you can

Image View a dashboard (see Figure 11-2) to see the overall health of the Office 365 service and whether there are any issues or planned maintenance activities for the individual service components, including SharePoint Online. You can also view and open new service requests and see what users have been assigned Exchange mail licenses but have not logged in to use the service.

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Figure 11-2 Office 365 tenant administrator dashboard

Image View the “setup” resource area to help your organization determine the right approach for setting up your user accounts in Office 365. This area is also used to facilitate migrating to Exchange Online or running in a hybrid environment where some users are kept on-premises while others are online.

Image Access the “users and groups” area where you can manually create Office 365 online user accounts or learn how to set up Active Directory synchronization, single sign-on, and federation. This is also the area where you assign and manage individual user licenses based on the services and plans you have purchased.

Image View the “domains” area to associate your organization’s domain (such as myorganization.com) with the Office 365 service.

Image Update service settings where you will see direct links to manage the various components of Office 365, for example, Exchange Online archiving, auditing, or data loss prevention policies.

Image View information about service health (see Figure 11-3) to have additional visibility into the individual service components and their availability over the previous seven days. This area also provides additional details on upcoming maintenance. You are able to subscribe to service alerts using an RSS feed reader (such as Outlook or Internet Explorer) as well.

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Figure 11-3 Office 365 service health

Image View reports to see how your tenant is being used.

Image View a “support” area that offers links to frequently asked questions, forums, and resource tools. Depending on your contract and support agreements with Microsoft, your organization may have different forms of support available, including telephone support for tenant administrators.

Office 365 User Experience

From a user perspective, Office 365 seeks to bring together various products in a single integrated environment. One example is the common navigation bar at the top of the page in Office 365 (see Figure 11-4).

Image

Figure 11-4 Office 365 navigation bar

This navigation bar enables you to navigate to the following:

Image Outlook takes you to your Exchange Online mailbox via the Web-based version of Outlook—Outlook Web Application (OWA). If you are using Lync Online, your presence status (free, busy, in a meeting, etc.) is also visible within the browser.

Image Calendar shows a Web-based view of your personal calendar stored within Exchange Online.

Image People displays your contacts from Exchange Online and provides the ability to show integrated contact information from social networks that you may belong to such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

Image Newsfeed is your SharePoint Online activity stream for the people, sites, documents, and tags that you are interested in. Please refer to Chapter 15, “Planning for Social Computing,” for additional information on the SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed capabilities.

Image SkyDrive is your personal storage within SharePoint Online. Each user with a SkyDrive in SharePoint Online is allocated 7GB of personal storage. (Though the tab says SkyDrive, this is actually SkyDrive Pro. SkyDrive is your personal documents area. SkyDrive Pro is where you can synchronize SharePoint documents with your computer to work with them offline. You will likely need to explain this to your users as part of your training plan.) Please refer to Chapter 20, “Integrating Office Applications,” for additional information on the SkyDrive Pro capabilities.

Image Sites provides a list of the sites you are following within SharePoint Online and provides the ability for your organization to promote certain sites to be visible at the top of the page for each user. Please refer to Chapter 15, “Planning for Social Computing,” for additional information on the SharePoint 2013 Sites capabilities.

Image Office Store (listed on the “. . .” more options menu) is a link to the Microsoft public store where you can preview or purchase applications for Microsoft Office applications and SharePoint. Please refer to Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions,” for additional information on the new Office and SharePoint application model and store.

Image Office.com (listed on the “. . .” more options menu) is a link to the Microsoft Office site where you can search for information, access online help resources, and download Office document templates.

Image Admin is where Office 365 tenant administrators are able to access the Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online administrative features.

Note that these features and links are dependent upon the Office 365 services to which your organization has subscribed and the specific license that has been assigned to each user. For example, users with a kiosk license will not have access to SkyDrive Pro for personal storage and will not have a SkyDrive link available at the top of each page.

SharePoint Online Functionality

In most cases, SharePoint Online is run as a multi-tenant service, which means that multiple organizations exist within the same physical SharePoint farm. SharePoint Online provides the ability to administer your tenant within Office 365.


Note

When managing SharePoint Online, you do not have access to the physical server, nor can you access SharePoint’s central administration area to manage farm-wide services and features. This means that, among other things, you cannot install new farm-level solutions in SharePoint Online.


The SharePoint Online tenant administration screens allow you to centrally manage many shared settings across your various SharePoint site collections, including the following:

Image Site Collections (see Figure 11-5) enables a SharePoint Online administrator to create new site collections and manage existing site collections. Key considerations include specifying who will be the administrators for the site collection and whether or not you will add a third-party “support partner” to help administer and manage SharePoint Online on behalf of your organization. This screen is also where you can specify unique external sharing policies on a per-site-collection basis. From this screen you can also allocate how much of your organization’s pooled SharePoint Online storage quota is allowed for each site collection and how many resources can be allocated to each site collection to run custom applications.

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Figure 11-5 SharePoint Online site collections administration

Image InfoPath enables a SharePoint Online administrator to specify if browser-based InfoPath Forms Services can be used by authorized users, based on their license and permissions.


Note

Please see Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions,” for additional information on InfoPath Forms Services.


Image User Profiles supports maintenance of properties that are available for each user and management of their personal content (formerly referred to as My Site), including individual components such as Newsfeed and SkyDrive Pro. User profiles are discussed in depth in Chapter 15, “Planning for Social Computing.” If your organization is synchronizing on-premises Active Directory information to Office 365, information such as the user’s name, phone number, and title are populated in the user profile within SharePoint Online.

Image Business Connectivity Services (BCS) enables SharePoint Online to connect to external systems. Two primary scenarios are supported. The first allows you to connect to other online services such as Windows Azure or CRM Online. The second scenario allows you to connect to an on-premises system. In both cases, BCS connects to the data service using the oData standard and an externally available Web service. BCS provides the option to connect to the data source using either the identity of the current logged-in user or a system user account that has been specified by the SharePoint Online administrator and stored within the secure store.


Note

More information on BCS can be found in Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions.”


Image Term Store supports sharing enterprise keywords across SharePoint Online site collections. Note that out of the box, the term store can be used only within a single SharePoint Online tenant and cannot be integrated with an on-premises term store. A variety of different third-party tools and programmatic options are available if you have a requirement to have a single term store in use for hybrid scenarios between SharePoint Online and on-premises.


Note

For more information on the term store, please see Chapter 13, “Managing Enterprise Content.”


Image Records Management provides the ability for SharePoint Online administrators to specify “send to” connections for content to be routed either manually or via defined retention policies. For example, a corporate Records Center could be established within SharePoint Online and certain document types could be automatically copied or moved to that location based on a defined policy. Sales proposals, for instance, could be moved three years after they were last modified.


Note

Please see Chapter 13, “Managing Enterprise Content,” for more information on records management capabilities within SharePoint.


Image Search presents SharePoint Online search management settings such as defining the location of the primary Search Center and configuring result sources for searching content from a remote SharePoint server on-premises or another search provider (such as Bing or Google) using the OpenSearch federation standard.


Note

For additional information about search, see Chapter 16, “Planning Enterprise Search.”


Image Secure Store enables SharePoint Online administrators to centrally define the username and password used to authenticate and connect to other systems using Business Connectivity Services.

Image Apps provides the ability to manage SharePoint Online policies for acquiring third-party applications from the public SharePoint marketplace as well as establishing an organizational application catalog for centrally publishing and managing applications that can be used across the SharePoint Online environment. You can also monitor application usage and track license allocations from this area.

Image Settings (see Figure 11-6) is a key page for managing your overall SharePoint Online environment. From here you can specify whether or not authorized users should be able to invite external people to collaborate in SharePoint and whether or not they need to log in to gain access. You are able to specify if new site collections can be created using the older SharePoint 2010 user experience or if they must use the new SharePoint 2013 style. This is an important item to consider as you plan for your training, adoption, and migration to SharePoint 2013. You can also enable or disable the integration of the IRM service with SharePoint Online for applying policies to Office documents stored within SharePoint. Site self-provisioning policies are defined here, and you can specify whether to use the default SharePoint site provisioning form or a custom form. You can also define whether information classification policies must be assigned to the site and if an additional site owner must be specified before the site can be created. Office on Demand (described further in Chapter 20, “Integrating Office Applications”) can be enabled or disabled here if you want to allow people to temporarily install an Office application (such as Word) on devices they are using (such as at a library, kiosk, or family member’s house) when they need the full Office client features to make document edits. Finally, you can specify whether or not you want preview features to be enabled within your SharePoint Online tenant or if only fully released and supported capabilities should be provided.

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Figure 11-6 SharePoint Online tenant settings

Comparing SharePoint Online with SharePoint Server 2013

At the time of the writing of this book, there continue to be differences between capabilities that are available in SharePoint Online and what is available within SharePoint Server 2013 on-premises. With the third major service update to SharePoint Online in early 2013, Microsoft has shortened the list of capabilities that can be used only within SharePoint Server and has started to add capabilities that now will be available only within SharePoint Online.

The SharePoint Online service descriptions are regularly updated to provide information on what capabilities and features are available across the various licensing plans and how they compare to what is available via SharePoint Server. Refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx for the latest information. It is strongly encouraged that organizations evaluating SharePoint Online carefully review these service descriptions to confirm that they meet their needs.

Capabilities Missing from SharePoint Online

One of the main differences between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online is the degree of administrative control provided to the SharePoint administrator. As we described earlier, SharePoint Online does not provide access to central administration. Instead, your organization is provided access to a SharePoint Online tenant administration area for performing the available tasks. One of the primary impacts of this is that there are some farm-level settings that you are not allowed to modify. These include the maximum size of a file that can be uploaded to SharePoint Online (currently limited to 250MB per file), the types of files that can be uploaded, and the quota allocation to personal sites and SkyDrive Pro, which is currently set at 7GB per user. This is one of the main trade-offs that organizations need to assess when evaluating SharePoint Online. For some organizations, not being able to turn all of the knobs and dials within SharePoint is acceptable in exchange for potentially lower administrative costs and having a standardized offering that is managed by Microsoft. For others, these limitations present a decision point where they need to assess if they can modify their requirements to accept the capabilities offered by the service.

Applications are another significant area to review and assess when considering SharePoint Online. The new SharePoint apps model and marketplace discussed earlier provide new ways to develop and purchase applications for SharePoint. Applications can also be developed within SharePoint using the Client Side Object Model (CSOM). Sandbox solutions are still available, although Microsoft has deprecated sandbox solutions with this release to encourage the new application model to be considered for SharePoint-hosted applications. One major difference between SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server is that full-trust farm-level solutions cannot be deployed to SharePoint Online. This includes both applications that your organization may build and those you may purchase from third parties. The main reason for this is that your organization does not have access to the physical server in SharePoint Online and therefore does not have permission to deploy and manage full-trust applications. Microsoft also needs to maintain its SLAs for all customers in multi-tenant scenarios where more than one organization is running within the same SharePoint farm.

Business intelligence capabilities have been improved in SharePoint Online but still have some restrictions. Excel Services can be leveraged, including support for PowerPivot and Power View. However, there are limitations on Excel file size and how external data sources can be accessed from SharePoint Online. PerformancePoint Services is not currently supported within SharePoint Online. One alternative that some organizations consider is leveraging other cloud services, such as Windows and SQL Azure, to provide the more advanced business intelligence and reporting capabilities that are required and then have that information surfaced within SharePoint Online. Additional information about SharePoint business intelligence capabilities can be found in Chapter 18, “Planning for Business Intelligence.”

Search has been improved in SharePoint Online and now provides many of the enterprise search capabilities that were previously part of FAST search for SharePoint. However, there are limitations on what content sources can be indexed and made available via SharePoint Online. While SharePoint Online has added the ability to connect to a remote SharePoint server in a hybrid scenario, it does not currently enable you to directly crawl and index content sources outside of SharePoint Online, such as on-premises file shares or other content stores. If this is something that your organization requires, you will need to implement an on-premises SharePoint server to index that content and then have the SharePoint Online search service connect to that as an external content source. Note that when implementing hybrid search in this manner the results are not interwoven for relevancy. This means that the results of online and on-premises cannot be shown within a single search results block. There are third-party applications available, such as those provided by BA Insight, that provide additional capabilities for working with SharePoint search in hybrid environments. Another limitation of SharePoint Online’s search capabilities is the range of file formats that can be full-text indexed. SharePoint Online does not allow organizations to install and configure additional file format handlers beyond what is standard with SharePoint 2013 (refer tohttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219530 for the complete list). This means that file types not on this list will only be searchable based on the metadata attributes associated with the files such as their title, author, and any other attributes that you associate with the files within SharePoint.


Note

For additional details and a full comparison of SharePoint search differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server, please see Chapter 16, “Planning Enterprise Search.”


Usage reporting and auditing are currently not as robust in SharePoint Online as they are in on-premises. One example is that SharePoint Online does not allow organizations to audit who has viewed an item, but it does support auditing the create, edit, and delete actions. Usage reporting and administrative reporting are also areas where third-party tools such as Axceler, AvePoint, Metalogix, Quest (now part of Dell), and Webtrends may provide enhancements.

Capabilities Available Only in SharePoint Online

There are a number of capabilities that exist only within SharePoint Online. As Microsoft announced at the SharePoint Conference in November 2012, going forward, the online service will be updated on a much more frequent release cycle than SharePoint Server. At a minimum, Microsoft plans to update SharePoint Online on a quarterly basis. This suggests that additional SharePoint Online–only features will be added before the next version of SharePoint Server is released.

External sharing (see Figure 11-7) is one area that is unique to SharePoint Online. As discussed earlier in this chapter, external sharing enables sites, lists, and/or individual items (such as documents) to be selectively shared with people who do not have an account within your Office 365 tenant. If enabled, users can send an anonymous guest link to specific items or invite people to log in to the site by using any e-mail address.

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Figure 11-7 Inviting an external user to edit a file in SharePoint Online

If a login is required, the recipient of the e-mail (see Figure 11-8) will need to first associate his or her e-mail address with a Microsoft account (such as hotmail.com, outlook.com, or live.com) or an existing Office 365 account (see Figure 11-9).

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Figure 11-8 External user invitation e-mail

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Figure 11-9 External user account association with online ID

External sharing can be used in a variety of scenarios such as working with customers, partners, boards of directors, and others outside of your organization. However, you should carefully consider if and where to enable external sharing and confirm that proper governance and audit controls are in place to ensure that sensitive information is not being shared inappropriately with people outside of your organization—similar to policies that may be in place today for e-mail, FTP sites, and extranets. You should also ensure that access requests and permissions are regularly reviewed (see Figure 11-10) to ensure that access is revoked when it is no longer required.

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Figure 11-10 Reviewing access requests within SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online includes a public Web site that may be useful for some organizations. The Web site (see Figure 11-11) comes prebuilt with a basic Publishing Site template and supports many of the core Web content management capabilities described in Chapter 14, “Managing Web Content.” Note that this site does not support the full set of capabilities often required by large organizations to manage their public Web sites, such as the new Content by Search Web Part. In those scenarios, organizations may find that running their public-facing Web site based on SharePoint on-premises, or hosted by an IAAS provider such as Windows Azure or Amazon, to be a better alternative.

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Figure 11-11 SharePoint Online public Web site

SharePoint Online provides a Developer Site template that can be used to build applications for SharePoint and Office using the new apps model described earlier. SharePoint Online also supports an application called Napa (see Figure 11-12), which provides the ability to build and run SharePoint-hosted applications directly in a Web browser. These applications can be built quickly without additional developer tools. If a full development environment is needed for advanced applications, Napa solutions can be exported to Visual Studio 2012, where they can be further developed and debugged with a richer toolset.

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Figure 11-12 SharePoint Online Napa development tools

Office 365 has a variety of features for integration between Office clients and SharePoint Online. Office on Demand, the ability to temporarily stream and use the Office clients on another device, is available only from the SharePoint Online personal site. The ability for Office to remember the documents that you recently viewed and where you left off when reading or editing a document works only if your Office clients are connected to Microsoft online services—either SkyDrive (as a consumer) or Office 365 (as an organization). More details on these topics are discussed inChapter 20, “Integrating Office Applications.”

Yammer, an online-only social networking solution that Microsoft acquired in July 2012, is available in two licensing models. The free version of Yammer provides organizations with user social and document-sharing capabilities. The paid enterprise version of Yammer allows organizations to integrate Yammer with other systems, including SharePoint, and to perform advanced administrative functions, including integration with on-premises Active Directory environments to help ensure that user access to Yammer is terminated when an individual no longer works for an organization. At the SharePoint Conference in November 2012,3 Microsoft announced licensing changes that now provide SharePoint Online users with a license to also use Yammer enterprise capabilities. Microsoft also demonstrated how in the future Yammer and SharePoint will become integrated for social computing and file sharing. Given Microsoft’s focus on Office 365 and the fact that Yammer is delivered only as an online service, it is expected that integration between Yammer and SharePoint Online will be accelerated and delivered prior to additional integration with SharePoint Server.

3. Jared Spataro, Senior Director, Microsoft Office Division, “Putting Social to Work,” November 12, 2012. http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/11/12/putting-social-to-work.aspx

Planning for SharePoint Online

How do you know if SharePoint Online is right for your organization? There are a number of different considerations and trade-offs that you need to consider. For organizations that are new to SharePoint or those that have limited resources to manage their SharePoint infrastructure (including backups, disaster recovery, patching, and upgrades), going to SharePoint Online may be an easy decision. For organizations that have made a large investment in SharePoint on-premises, or have developed or purchased many custom solutions that are not yet compatible with SharePoint Online, the decision may be more challenging.

With SharePoint 2013, many organizations are considering starting with SharePoint Online in a few key use case scenarios:

Image SkyDrive Pro for providing 7GB of personal file storage per user. This may help to replace unsupported consumer file-sharing services (such as Box, Dropbox, SkyDrive consumer, or Google Drive) that people are using outside of established IT security policies. Hosted in SharePoint Online, SkyDrive Pro is also available from any corporate, personal, or mobile device, which is a frequent requirement to support flexible work styles.

Image Social via either SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed or Yammer, which is now included with the price of SharePoint Online. Providing these services via the public cloud allows you to support mobile scenarios and enable external collaboration.

Image Mobile by leveraging the SharePoint and Office Mobile and Web Applications to access files and social information via SharePoint Online. This includes providing access to phone and tablet devices and supporting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios.

Image External sharing and collaboration by using SharePoint team sites and the ability to invite external users to view or edit a document, library, or site. Examples are board of director sites or collaborating with customers and partners.

Image Basic team sites for utility SharePoint environments with minimal customization, such as basic document management and collaboration requirements.

Image Project management using the new SharePoint 2013 task management capabilities or Project Online.

Getting Started with SharePoint Online

If you do decide to move to SharePoint Online, your planning process will be similar to what has been covered elsewhere in this book. Topics such as governance, measurement, and adoption remain just as important online as they do on-premises. You will need to review your existing policies, training plans, and support procedures to see what needs to be revised to factor in your move to SharePoint Online.

Migrating to SharePoint Online

When planning your migration to SharePoint Online, you will first need to determine what needs to be migrated—if anything. Will you be migrating all existing content to SharePoint Online or just some content? Will you operate in a hybrid mode where some content will be kept on-premises and other content will be moved to SharePoint Online?

Information classification is an important consideration. Some organizations may have a policy that all content classified as “high business impact” (HBI), such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, or patient information, cannot be stored in the cloud. There may be business or geopolitical regulations in place that require content to be stored in a particular country. These requirements must be considered and documented before beginning to move content to SharePoint Online.

Once you have determined what needs to be migrated, you next need to determine how that migration will occur. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not allow you to connect your existing SharePoint content databases to move them to SharePoint Online. Microsoft also does not currently provide tools to support the content migration process. There are a few options to consider:

Image Migrate nothing and start with SharePoint Online for new content and sites going forward.

Image Request that users manually migrate their own content, recognizing that dates and the user ID for the Created By and Modified By users are not preserved with a manual migration.

Image Develop and test your own migration utilities by leveraging remote PowerShell scripts or the new Client Side Object Model.

Image Purchase a third-party migration tool, such as those provided by vendors like AvePoint, Axceler, Metalogix, and Quest (Dell), to support the migration process.

In addition to planning for content migration, you need to review any application and integration requirements that you may have in place. Have you developed or purchased any third-party applications that are actively being used in your existing SharePoint environment? If so, do you still need the application or does the supplier have a version that is compatible with SharePoint Online?

Understanding SharePoint Online Governance and Operational Implications

A number of areas within your SharePoint governance and operational plans will need to be reviewed and updated for SharePoint Online:

Image Can your operational procedures be simplified since you may no longer need to be concerned with patching, backups, and restores?

Image Is your organization building applications for SharePoint? If so, you will need to think about whether to build those applications with the new SharePoint apps model. You will also need to review your SharePoint application development life cycle model to consider where applications will be developed and tested and how they will be deployed and managed with SharePoint Online.

Image Will people have access to SharePoint Online from computers that are not managed by your organization? If so, have you considered your policies and requirements for encrypting data on those devices if users will be able to synchronize files offline with SkyDrive Pro?

Image Is any training needed for SharePoint Online tenant administrators? If you are using SharePoint on-premises today, will the online administrators be the same people?

Image Will you enable external sharing to be leveraged within SharePoint Online? If yes, will it be for all site collections or just specific ones?

Image Do you need to connect SharePoint Online with other data sources and systems either on-premises or via other cloud services, such as an online customer relationship management (CRM) system? Are these systems already externally accessible?

Image Will you need to have a hybrid search environment set up to span searching across online and on-premises content sources?


Note

Microsoft has published documentation and reference architectures to help customers plan for and implement a hybrid between SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 on-premises. These resources can be found on TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj838715.aspx.


Other Online Options

While most of this chapter has focused on Microsoft’s SharePoint Online offering via Office 365, it should be noted that there are many other hosted SharePoint offerings available for organizations that do not want to manage SharePoint on-premises.

Companies such as Fpweb, Rackspace, NaviSite, and Amazon offer the ability for organizations to have their SharePoint environment hosted elsewhere. Microsoft is also offering IAAS offerings via its Azure cloud service for organizations that require more control and ability to customize than are available via SharePoint Online, such as for advanced Web content management and business intelligence requirements.

When considering these options, you need to decide how much control and management your organization wants to have over the environment. There are pros and cons of each of the cloud options described earlier—especially when comparing IAAS and SAAS.

Many of the hosting providers also offer services to assist with the migration and management of your SharePoint environment. It is important to review these options and have clear contract terms regarding SLAs and roles and responsibilities between your organization and the service provider.

Key Points

Consider the following points as you determine your cloud strategy for SharePoint:

Image Microsoft has stated that they are “all in” with the cloud and will be moving toward making the latest SharePoint capabilities available first through SharePoint Online as part of Office 365.

Image Going forward, Microsoft has begun to publicly state that it intends to develop for SharePoint Online as the primary delivery model. This does not mean that Microsoft is abandoning SharePoint Server, which can be run by organizations on-premises or hosted by third-party providers. What this strategy means is that new functionality will be made available first in SharePoint Online, likely in a series of regular service updates.

Image During the SharePoint Conference in November 2012, Jeff Teper, corporate vice president and head of the SharePoint engineering team at Microsoft, stated that SharePoint Online would be receiving updates at least once per quarter.

Image In July 2012, the Microsoft SharePoint team acquired Yammer, which is an online-only social computing platform. Yammer and SharePoint will be integrated more as the two services evolve.

Image There are a variety of different options available for moving SharePoint to the cloud. Microsoft and a variety of third-party service providers offer different hosting models that you should carefully consider. Whether you look at running SharePoint on-premises using an IAAS provider, or moving to a full SAAS option such as Office 365, there are many different pros and cons to carefully consider.

Image Document your requirements and evaluation criteria. Determine if the cloud is right for your organization. Microsoft and its partners have tools and resources to help determine if there is alignment. One example is the Office 365 alignment index calculator tool that can be found athttps://onramp.office365.com.

Image Consider your software currency requirements. For some organizations, the fact that Office 365, including SharePoint Online, is updated regularly is a benefit. You need to think about your organizational culture and training requirements. You also need to make sure that you can maintain the necessary operating system, Web browser, and Office version levels to stay current with usage of the service.

Image If you do decide to go with Office 365, think about your identity management requirements. Will you require synchronization with an existing Active Directory environment, or will you use cloud identities that are unique to Office 365?

Image Determine if you will license just SharePoint Online or other components of the Office 365 suite such as Exchange, Lync, Office, or Project Online as well. You may also want to consider segmenting your user population to have different license types for different people, such as kiosk workers who may not require the same capabilities as a power user.

Image Consider your security requirements and make sure that the standard multi-tenant offering meets your needs. If not, you may want to explore the dedicated option, keep SharePoint hosted on-premises, or consider a third-party provider. Microsoft provides an online “trust center” that explains the processes, controls, and certifications that are in place for Office 365 which can be found at http://trustoffice365.com/.

Image If you do decide to move to the cloud, consider starting with a pilot team or department before moving your full organization. Use this pilot to confirm and validate that your requirements are being met and to update your communications, training, migration, and adoption plans for further rollout within your organization.