Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)
Chapter 1. Your Reading Journey
SharePoint 2013 is the next version of Microsoft’s popular content management and collaboration platform. With this version of the product, Microsoft has made the platform more Web-friendly, more mobile-friendly, and more social. They’ve also added a major deployment option: the cloud. A fast-moving, ever-changing platform like SharePoint deserves careful planning and guidance. Consider this book your guide.
What does it take to be successful with SharePoint? A quality SharePoint 2013 rollout relies not only on the structured design provided by an architect, but also on the collective content contributions of the user community. Through key activities like providing original content, ranking content that they like, collaboratively creating documents, and tagging content with their own taxonomy, users have the opportunity to improve an organization’s ability to deliver and share knowledge and best practices. Successfully getting users to contribute content effectively should be one of your key goals.
Some features in SharePoint 2013 will be new to users of past versions of SharePoint. That said, many users will feel right at home with the platform because of its similarities to most Internet sites, which encourage users to actively participate rather than simply read static content. SharePoint 2013 recognizes the global nature of information and enterprises, making it easier to support multiple languages, on multiple browsers, and on multiple platforms, such as handheld devices. This book is designed to help you navigate this new world of SharePoint.
If you have read Essential SharePoint 2007 and/or Essential SharePoint 2010, you will find a significant amount of new information in this book—not just about SharePoint’s latest features, but also about key topics we’ve developed further by working with hundreds of clients who use SharePoint every day to solve real business problems. For example, since Essential SharePoint 2010 was published, we’ve learned a great deal about effectively creating and deploying governance plans, operating and managing SharePoint from an IT perspective, and which SharePoint metrics really measure business value.
What Is This Book About?
Most books are designed to address the “how” behind SharePoint, from either an administrative perspective or a programming perspective. This book complements the typical SharePoint book with some of the “what” and “why” of SharePoint, provides insight into targeting business needs with collaboration technologies, and helps you understand how those needs might be addressed by using SharePoint.
This book addresses the multitude of decisions that must be made about topics within SharePoint in a way that speaks in simple language and bridges the gap between business and technical topics. Navigating the various client and server offerings from Microsoft can be confusing and daunting; this book will help you navigate these waters, providing direction and understanding. Specifically, this is a book about Microsoft’s SharePoint offering, with a particular focus on four commonly requested topics: a business-focused overview, guidance for setting a proper strategy, governance and user deployment, and a business-focused discussion on how to apply SharePoint’s key features. This book was written because collaboration, information management (knowledge and content), and Web accessibility are three of the most sought-after features in a corporate software solution1—and addressing those needs in a successful way is often no small feat. If you want to deploy SharePoint in your enterprise or upgrade from previous versions, or if you need a concise yet comprehensive introduction to collaboration solutions with SharePoint, you’re starting in the right place. This book provides a great user-level guide to Microsoft’s latest version of SharePoint, along with usage strategies and some insight into the technologies involved. This book is intended to be a tutorial as well as a handy reference.
1. Note that throughout the book we use the word solution to refer to the business problem you are using SharePoint to solve. The solution includes the hardware and software platform, of course, but it also includes the people and business processes that are critical to a successful outcome. The solution itself might be an enterprise portal, a departmental collaboration site, a partner extranet, or any one of the many business activities you can enable with SharePoint.
Reader’s Guide
While we hope that all readers will read the whole book from cover to cover, each chapter of this book can be read independently. The first section of the book is designed to help you think about planning your SharePoint project—the overall strategy for the solution you will build, the elements and features you will use, the organization of your information, your governance plan, your security model, and how you will launch the solution when development is complete. The second section describes how to optimize your solution, describing strategies for search, forms and workflow, deploying your solution as a public-facing Web site, planning business intelligence capabilities, and building solutions that combine information from multiple sources, including other Office 2013 products. The final section includes a handy appendix that we provide as a freely downloadable Word document that you can incorporate into your own planning. The document, along with a collection of additional resources, is available at www.jornata.com/essentialsharepoint.
If you’re familiar with Microsoft’s marketing framework prior to SharePoint 2013, SharePoint was often described by breaking it down into six key feature areas. We’ll discuss each of these key feature areas throughout the book.
Sites: core capability to facilitate the creation and management of Web sites that contain, display, and aggregate content. Information about sites is described in many places in the book, but to get started, please review Chapter 3, “Introducing the SharePoint 2013 Platform.”
Communities: ability to interact with (and solicit feedback from) other users through social tools. Communities are discussed in Chapter 15, “Planning for Social Computing.”
Content: enterprise content management (documents, records, Web, rich media). Content management is a broad topic that is discussed in Chapter 6, “Planning Your Information Architecture,” as well as Chapter 13, “Managing Enterprise Content.”
Search: ability to find information and people across SharePoint and other sources. Chapter 16, “Planning Enterprise Search,” provides advice about planning the use of search in your SharePoint solution.
Insights: business intelligence tools. Chapter 18, “Planning for Business Intelligence,” talks about this topic.
Composites: ability to create applications rapidly (mashups, composite applications, etc.). Developing composites is discussed in Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions.”
Other key topics include
Governance. Chapter 4, “Planning for Business Governance,” covers content governance, and Chapter 5, “Planning for Operational Governance,” covers operational and application governance.
Adoption and measurement. Chapter 7, “Planning Your Adoption Strategy,” and Chapter 8, “Developing a Value Measurement Strategy,” cover important aspects of user adoption and measurement to ensure that you get the most out of your SharePoint investment.
Cloud. Chapter 11, “Taking SharePoint to the Cloud,” covers important aspects of SharePoint Online as a deployment option.
Architecture. Chapter 9, “Understanding Architecture Fundamentals,” provides an overview of the SharePoint technical architecture.
When you’re finished reading this chapter, make sure you read Chapter 2, “Planning Your Solution Strategy,” which provides a critical foundation for understanding your SharePoint-based solution objectives and is a foundation for the rest of the book. So put away Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer for a moment. Take a breath and a step back. Start thinking about why your organization needs SharePoint and how you know you’ll be successful after your solution is deployed. Software is expensive to purchase and integrate. If you want to build a successful solution, you need a carefully defined plan. When you don’t plan your SharePoint deployment, you could suffer from poor adoption, cluttered information, and low user satisfaction. Given all that, we recommend that you read through the first section of the book before you start your project to ensure that you don’t miss any critical steps in your deployment.
What You Will Learn from This Book
To implement a content and collaborative system effectively, you’ll likely need to consider a number of key questions:
Do I need an overall strategy? If so, how do I create one?
What should my governance plan look like?
How do users perform the top activities that they’ll need to do?
What do I need to consider when I upgrade from previous versions of SharePoint?
Where are documents stored currently? Where should documents live?
How do users collaborate today?
What kind of hardware do I need? Do I need hardware at all?
How do I deploy the product properly?
How does the Web fit into my collaboration needs? What about Office and smart client applications? What about mobile devices?
Will I share information outside of my organization? Should I?
This book is designed to help you ask the right questions and get the right answers.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is not targeted to any one specific role. If you are a developer or solution architect, this book is the ideal companion to your SharePoint 2013 API guide and/or development books. It will help explain SharePoint best practices and help you understand your organization’s business needs and how they might be addressed using this powerful solution platform. No developer should use SharePoint without first understanding the people and business considerations that are important to every SharePoint-based solution. Likewise, for IT pros and SharePoint administrators, the key to being successful with your SharePoint implementation is to first understand the big picture. If you are a project manager, consultant, or business analyst, you’ll find that this book helps with the intangibles of a SharePoint rollout, for example, “What roles should exist to support SharePoint?” or “How can I best take advantage of the new features of SharePoint?”
A full list of enterprise roles is covered in Chapter 4, “Planning for Business Governance.” If you’re on the list, this book is for you.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is organized into three key parts.
Part I, “Planning,” helps you determine what kinds of business needs are addressed by SharePoint and how you should think about SharePoint-based solutions within your organization. It’s also a great introduction to the SharePoint feature set and architecture. Planning includes the following chapters:
Chapter 2: Planning Your Solution Strategy
Chapter 3: Introducing the SharePoint 2013 Platform
Chapter 4: Planning for Business Governance
Chapter 5: Planning for Operational Governance
Chapter 6: Planning Your Information Architecture
Chapter 7: Planning Your Adoption Strategy
Chapter 8: Developing a Value Measurement Strategy
Chapter 9: Understanding Architecture Fundamentals
Chapter 10: Planning Your Upgrade
Chapter 11: Taking SharePoint to the Cloud
Chapter 12: Planning Security
Part II, “Optimizing,” helps you implement SharePoint to its fullest potential by drilling into each of the key functional areas. Optimizing includes the following chapters:
Chapter 13: Managing Enterprise Content
Chapter 14: Managing Web Content
Chapter 15: Planning for Social Computing
Chapter 16: Planning Enterprise Search
Chapter 17: Planning Business Solutions
Chapter 18: Planning for Business Intelligence
Chapter 19: Planning for Mobility
Chapter 20: Integrating Office Applications
The third part is the appendix, which is designed to provide content that you can use as part of your governance and training plans as well as some of the trickier “how to” information for new capabilities in SharePoint 2013 that users and site owners should know.
What’s New in SharePoint 2013?
At the beginning of most chapters is a section called “What’s New in SharePoint 2013?” that summarizes the new features of SharePoint 2013 that align with the chapter topic.
Key Points
At each chapter’s conclusion (except for this chapter) is a section called “Key Points,” which summarizes the key facts, best practices, and other items that were covered in the chapter.
Thank You
Thank you for reading this book. Our goal was to write the most useful business-centric guide to SharePoint 2013 that will help you think strategically about planning and deploying SharePoint solutions for your organization. Enjoy!