In SharePoint 2007, if you created a new site collection using the ‘Collaboration Portal’ template, it would come with a number of sites, including the Search Center. In SharePoint 2010, this is no longer the case. There isn’t a Collaboration Portal template for starters, the nearest you’ll find is the Enterprise Wiki template which is my recommended starting point for Intranets, KM and Collaborative Sites. (Side note: Another example of poor usability on Microsoft’s part. The Enterprise Wiki template is available in both the Standard and Enterprise editions of SharePoint 2010. When you read about features with ‘Enterprise’ in the title, don’t assume they are limited to the Enterprise Edition, in most cases they are also available in Standard.)

In SharePoint 2010, the clue is in the search box:


When you create a new site collection, the default search settings limit search to within the current site only and uses built-in search pages. If you want to search across multiple sites (a fairly normal requirement for most internal SharePoint deployments), use search scopes and configure different types of results pages, you will be wanting a dedicated search site. Here’s what to do:

Create a Search site

1. At the root of the site collection where you want the Search site to live, click Site Actions and select ‘New Site’
2. Select the search site template you want to use
3. Enter a title and URL (Search works for me…) and create the site

There are up to three search site templates to choose from (and you should use a search template if you don’t want to create a lot of extra work for yourself setting up search query and results pages):

1. Basic Search – available with all versions of SharePoint
2. Enterprise Search – requires SharePoint 2010 Server: Standard or Enterprise edition (yes, another of those ‘Enterprise’ features also available in Standard)
3. FAST Search – requires SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise Edition (or FAST add-on/dedicated)

The search query box is automatically integrated every SharePoint site within the global navigation bar (as shown in the first image above). Unless you particularly want to also have the Search site listed in navigation, go into the Navigation settings and hide it.

Configure Search Settings

Once you’ve got your search site, you can now configure the search settings to use it. This step needs to be repeated for each site collection that you want to point to the Search site.

1. At the root of the site collection, go to Site Actions – Site Settings.
2. Under Site Collection Administration, click on Search Settings
3. Within Search Settings:
- For the Site Collection Search Center, enter the URL to your search site in the format /search/Pages (replace the word ‘search’ with the site URL for your search site, if different))
- In Site Collection Search Scopes dropdown mode, select ‘Show search scopes’
The image below shows the settings for my demo machine:


4. Click OK and you’re done.

Once the search settings are configured, the search box will show scopes with the default set to search across all sites instead of just the current site:


Don’t forget, you’ll need to configure search settings for each site collection that you want to point to the Search site. Whilst the URL will be relative for the site collection where the search site is located, for all other site collections you will need to enter the full path (for example, on my demo the URL is http://sp2010/search/ for all other site collections)

Enter a search query in the new search box and you will be routed to the Search site to display results:

In the image above, I’ve configured the default results page in the Search site to also include federated search results. When I enter the query ‘SharePoint’ I can see documents and items on the Intranet (along with refiners on the left to filter results), people who have SharePoint in their profile and federated results YouTube.

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Recap

Search scopes improve the SharePoint search experience by letting users search over a subset of information within an organisation. For example you can create a search scope for a specific project or a group such as Legal or Marketing. Search scopes can either be created globally at the search service application level so they are available to all site collections, or defined within a specific site collection.

Creating search scopes

Global search scopes in SharePoint 2010 can easily be created using PowerShell commands such as New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope. Corey Roth covers this in his article on Creating Enterprise Search Scopes with PowerShell. While the PowerShell method can also be used to create site collection related search scopes you might also want to do this programmatically in a feature receiver. Another thing you might want to do programmatically is to associate a search scope with a display group such as the ‘Search Dropdown’ so it appears in options next to the search box.

As there are problems with some of the methods that can be used to create search scopes and display groups programmatically I’ll detail these in this article. In a follow up article I’ll cover a method of creating scopes and scope display groups that avoids these problems.

The object model classes I will cover in this article are:

- SearchContext
- SearchServiceApplication
- SearchServiceApplicationProxy

SearchContext

This is only included as it is referenced in other articles and was a common way to create scopes in SharePoint 2007 such as in the code shown below.


In SharePoint 2010 this class is marked as obsolete and should not be used. If you use the SearchContext class in your code you will get the following warning at compile time:

“This class is obsolete now. Please use SearchServiceApplication and SearchServiceApplicationProxy instead.”

According to the article Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010: Deprecated Types and Methods:

Obsolete types and methods will continue to work in your custom code and solutions, but they will generate compiler warnings, and you should update your code to use the new types and methods as indicated by the compiler warnings.

So while this might work it may not always function as expected and there is no guarantee it will continue to work in the future. Next we will look at the alternatives suggested in the compiler warning message.

SearchServiceApplication

If you are updating SharePoint 2007 code the SearchServiceApplication class is an obvious choice as it is a suggested alternative to the SearchContext class. The code is slightly more complicated as you need to retrieve various classes relating to the search service application but a similar outcome can be achieved using the code below:


There is a fundamental problem with this code, however (on top of the hardcoded strings and a complete lack of error handling). The code tries to access the search service application database directly without going through the search web service. In a least privilege installation this means that the application pool account of the web application containing the site collection will be used (even if you elevate privileges for this code) and will not have access to the search service application database by default (as least privilege requires separate accounts for search and content). The specific error message you get when running this code is:

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database “Search_Service_Application_DB_{…}” requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user ‘{0}’. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection)


In the example above DEVDOMAIN\spcontent is the identity of the application pool of a web application that contains the content sites for which I want to create search scopes. Using the code above the spcontent account is trying to access the database directly as shown below:


This is something to watch out for as if your dev machines are not running a least privilege installation but your production servers are the issue may not manifest itself until it is difficult and costly to fix.

What we need to do is go through the web services so the account running the search web service (in this case an account named DEVDOMAIN\spservices) is used to connect to the database as shown below:


In the screen shot the intuitively named a168dee… application is the search web service.

This brings us on to the next method mentioned as an alternative to the SearchContext class – the SearchServiceApplicationProxy class.

SearchServiceApplicationProxy

This class requires the use of ScopeInfo and DisplayGroupInfo objects and requires some lower level code such as passing around the ID’s of the display groups. This does get around the database access issue metioned above, however, as it goes through the SearchServiceApplicationProxy class which uses the search web service instance.

While this method works, it requires a lot more code than the methods above and isn’t as intuitive. What used to take 9 lines of code in SharePoint 2007 now takes 30 lines and requires us to pass round the Id’s of scopes and display groups and managing the list of display groups in our code.

So to summarise we have found that:

- SearchContext is now obsolete (and can also cause permission issues)
- SearchServiceApplication can lead to permission issues if called from within a feature receiver as it doesn’t use the search web service
- SearchServiceApplicationProxy uses the search web service but requires much more code and is difficult to work with

Findability is one of the most important factors in the success of a SharePoint site. If users cannot find what they are looking they will quickly use alternate methods to get results. Employees that cannot find information are less productive and less likely to use the system in general. Likewise users that cannot find information on an internet site will look elsewhere for products and services losing the company revenue.

SharePoint 2007 introduced some powerful tools for improving findability but fell short when it compared to larger Enterprise Content Management systems. SharePoint 2010 takes this a huge step forward with cutting edge enterprise ready findability features. Here are 10 new features SharePoint 2010 brings to the table in addition to the features available in SharePoint 2007.

1. Metadata driven navigation

SharePoint 2010 provides a rich set of features that allow users to use metadata to navigate content repositories. Document libraries can be configured to show navigation based on both the corporate taxonomy (or managed metadata) and combined with other metadata filters. For example with a you can filter items from the ‘Bicycle’ product category of content type ‘Sales presentation’ using the navigation as shown below.


2. Search enhancements

SharePoint 2010 includes some impressive enhancements to the search experience. Search facets allow users to filter the results by relevant metadata such as author or content type. Relevancy is improved as it takes the number of views into account. This, along with the addition of related queries, improved query syntax and thumbnail previews help users locate the content they are after.


3. Ratings

The introduction of a ratings field allows community driven content classification. Ratings can be used to improve findability through sortable list columns, or by the creation of ‘highest rated documents’ rollups using the Content Query Web Part, allowing users to see popular content in prominent places.


4. Tagging

SharePoint 2010 includes a tag cloud web part that provides a visual representation of the metadata associated with the content inside a repository. Additionally tag profile pages contain lists of items such as sites, documents or people tagged with a particular term as well as a list of community members and discussions facilitating information retrieval.


5. Document IDs

SharePoint 2010 provides a unique Document ID service that can be used to create absolute references to content regardless of file renames or content moves. As well as resulting in a reduction in broken links the Document ID can be used to search for an individual document and the format of the ID is configurable allowing organisations to create meaningful document identifiers.

Classification

All the findability improvements mentioned above rely on the correct classification of content in the first place. The following five findability improvements aid the correct classification and organisation of content in SharePoint 2010.

6. Managed metadata service

SharePoint 2010 now includes a dedicated service for managing metadata within the enterprise. The managed metadata service allows content owners to maintain a centrally managed structured taxonomy as well as allowing users to contribute to an unstructured ‘folksonomy’ in the form of managed keywords. This makes it much easier for users to classify content, and guides users to use consistent terms, improving the quality of metadata in the system.

Structured classification:


Unstructured classification:


7. Shared content types

One key architectural limitation in SharePoint 2007 was that Content Types could not be shared between site collections. This resulted in the duplication of content types and associated lookup lists which could become out of sync over time. SharePoint 2010 removes this limitation and thus improves the consistency of information stored in different site collections or even separate SharePoint farms.

8. Location based metadata defaults

SharePoint 2010 allows you to set metadata defaults at the document library and folder level. This means that users do not have to enter the same metadata over and over if they are uploading content into a repository that has a shared set of metadata.
9. Content Organiser

In SharePoint 2007 the location in which content was stored was largely up to the end users. The Content Organiser in SharePoint 2010 helps alleviate problems caused by users uploading documents to a variety of different places by allowing routing decisions to be centrally managed. Content can then be routed to the correct location based on the content type and other metadata values. This helps the user to focus on providing quality metadata and results in a well organised repository.

10. Document Sets

A document set allows you to manage a group of documents as a single entity. The ability to apply metadata to the entire set of documents improves consistency and storing related documents together can help users find relevant material easily.

Summary

SharePoint 2010 delivers some massive platform improvements that help in the classification and retrieval of content. It is important to note, however, that the toolset is only a small part of an information management strategy. Information management should start with clear business objectives, a clear strategy and right areas of focus before technology is involved. Once this is in place, however, the significant advancements of SharePoint 2010 make it a more obvious choice for content management than ever before

The SharePoint 2010 Health Analyzer is a great way of getting information about the state of your SharePoint farm. It checks things including disk space and database fragmentation and other security, performance and configuration issues. If the health analyzer finds issues you are presented with a message when you browse to the Central Administration site. There is also a link to find out details of all problems that were found.


One thing to note, however, is that it can take a few days or weeks before all the health rules are run on the default schedules. When building a new farm it can be useful to get instant feedback, so you can make sure the new installation is in a healthy state. Did you remember to remove the farm account from the administrators group after setting up User Profile Synchronization? I find this helpful as a consultant as I can rectify issues such as disk space or other problems while I’m on-site with a client and avoid having to return if something is missed.

To get instant feedback you can run all the health analysis jobs immediately through PowerShell. Note that this will place some load on your system so running this on a live environment should be done with caution but in the case of a fresh build with no users that is unlikely to be an issue.

To run all the jobs immediately fire up a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell as a farm administrator and drop in the following PowerShell:

$jobs = Get-SPTimerJob | Where {$_.DisplayName -match "Health Analysis Job"}
foreach($job in $jobs) {
  Write-Host "Running" . $job.DisplayName
  $job.RunNow()
}

You should now see any problems appear in the Health Analyser screen, ready for you to address while you are on site before the client sees an angry red message when they use Central Administration the next day. Note this can take a few seconds to update so check the timer job history or the modified column to ensure the latest results are showing.


Once you have fixed the issues you can either run the PowerShell again or check the rules individually using the Reanalyze Now button that is displayed within each problem.
Missing server side dependencies.

Explanation: [MissingWebPart] WebPart class [8d6034c4-a416-e535-281a-6b714894e1aa] is referenced [6] times in the database [AdminContentDB], but is not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature/solution which contains this web part. One or more web parts are referenced in the database [AdminContentDB], but are not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature or solution which contains these web parts.

Solution: Following the steps in the article Missing Server Side Dependencies – 8d6034c4-a416-e535-281a-6b714894e1aa to browse to the SearchAdministration.aspx and SearchFarmDashboard.aspx in Central Adminstration and perform an iisreset seemed to fix the issue for me.

The server farm account should not be used for other services.

Explanation: DOMAIN\spfarm, the account used for the SharePoint timer service and the central administration site, is highly privileged and should not be used for any other services on any machines in the server farm. The following services were found to use this account: User Profile Synchronization Service(Windows Service)

Solution: Unfortunately I don’t have an easy fix for this one (assuming it is referring to the User Profile Service – any other services should not be running as the farm account). Spence and Spence on TechNet both indicate the farm account must be used to run the User Profile Synchronization service application. Changing this to any other managed account seems to break the UPS app so if you know how to avoid this please let me know.

Verify that the Activity Feed Timer Job is enabled

Explanation:The newsfeed displayed on My Site and Profile pages uses the Activity Feed Timer Job. Without this timer job, no newsfeed will be available on My Site and Profile pages. This also applies to any third-party product that uses this newsfeed.

Solution: Start the User Profile Service Application – Activity Feed Job from the Monitoring > Job Definitions page in Central Administration.

As a side note some of the common non-trivial messages are:

Status Indicator is a report type, where it shows and compares the actual performance of particular measure with goal value. Without doing any calculations, you can know the performance of a measure with good status indicator. You can know whether measure results are on target or off target. This post explains how to create a status indicator in SharePoint 2010. 

Status Indicator shows name, results and icon. It provides a quick information, green icon indicates good performance, Red icons flags the problem areas and yellow icons warn of potential problems. The typical status indicator looks as follows


Creating status indicator

status indicator is an item in status list in SharePoint. You can create a status list in two ways

1. Create a status list
2. Create a web part with status list

Creating a Status List

Create a Status List in the Business Intelligence Center site in SharePoint. You can add status indicator once you create a list. Steps to create a list

1. click Site Actions, and then select View All Site Content, click create option as shown below


2. On Create page, click the Status List icon


3. Enter name and description for Status List as shown below


Create a Web Part with Status List, take these steps

1. Click Dashboards from BI site quick launch panel

2. Click Documents tab in the Library Tools group

3. Click New Document, and then select Web Part page with Status List


4. Select the layout from the list


Add a status indicator to a Status List

You have to create a Status List to create a status indicator. Click new on Status List tool bar as shown below


Select the indicator type from the available options, in this example I am using SharePoint List based Status Indicator

SharePoint List based Status Indicator

To create a new status indicator that is based on a SharePoint list

In the list url box, enter the URL of the list or library


2. Select the view that you want items in the status indicator from view box

3. select the calculation method that you want to use in the Status Indicator

Calculation options

1. Percentage of list items in the view where you can select the criteria
2. select the column and comparison operator from the drop-down list
3. Type the value that you want to use for comparison in the text box

you can either select Number of list items in the view as shown in the above dialogue

4. In the Status Icon Rules section, do the following

From the Better values are drop down list, select Higher to have SharePoint change icons when increasing values meet or exceed goal.

In the Display when value has met or exceed goal box, type the goal value. when the indicator value reaches this goal, SharePoint changes the icon to show the performance on target

In the Display when value has met or exceeded warning, type the value at which performance is unacceptable.

You can provision managed metadata column into the content type.

You need to add the “Metadata” column into the site columns and content type using element xml file, and also need to connect the field to metadata column in the feature activation.

Here is the solution:

1.    You need to add a new field element of the type “TaxonomyFieldType”. 

<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
 <Field ID="{46138ADB-1778-4E05-8371-114006F725A0}"
    Type="TaxonomyFieldType"
    DisplayName="Locations"
    ShowField="Term1033"
    Required="TRUE"
    EnforceUniqueValues="FALSE"
    Group="_Custom"
    StaticName="Locations"
    Name="Locations"
     />
</Elements>

2.    Add this filed to the content type, just need to add a new “FieldRef”

<FieldRef ID="{46138ADB-1778-4E05-8371-114006F725A0}" Name="Locations"/>

3.    Now we have to connect this field to managed metadata service(MMS).

For this we need to create an event receiver for the feature. Right click on the feature  and select “Add event receiver”.
Uncomment the “feature activate” code and replace it with the following code.  

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
 {    
              SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;    
             Guid fieldId = new Guid(“{46138ADB-1778-4E05-8371-114006F725A0}"   
             if (site.RootWeb.Fields.Contains(fieldId))
             {
                       TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(site);        
                       if (session.TermStores.Count != 0)
                       {            
                            var termStore = session.TermStores["Managed Metadata Service"];            
                            var group = termStore.Groups.GetByName("Locations Group");            
                            var termSet = group.TermSets["Towns"];                    
                           TaxonomyField field = site.RootWeb.Fields[fieldId] as TaxonomyField;           
                           field.SspId = termSet.TermStore.Id;            
                           field.TermSetId = termSet.Id;            
                           field.TargetTemplate = string.Empty;            
                           field.AnchorId = Guid.Empty;            
                           field.Update();        
                      }   
                }
} 

This method will check if the field has been deployed. We used Guid to retrieve the filed as defined in the XML.  Your term store group definition should look like this.                              

If it is different then you need to change the “group name” and “term set” name in the feature activation according to your MMS environment.

Now you deploy your content type and can test it by creating a new list from that content type.

The result with the metadata column is shown in the below picture.

<!--[endif]-->

Features are SharePoint Server 2010–specific declarative (XML) programming elements. Features configure, associate, define, create, and copy.

Features are most commonly used for the following:
- To define the columns that make up list types and the fields that the columns are based on
- To copy Web parts and master pages to their respective galleries
- To associate Visual Studio workflows with a list or site
- To modify and extend the configuration of the SharePoint Server 2010 user interface
- To serve as a control panel that allows code and configuration changes to be turned on and off in the browse

Note: Features can affect four different scopes: farm, Web application, site collection, and site. Site-scoped and site collection–scoped features can be controlled by information workers, which allows farm administrators to delegate responsibility for them

Feature Location:

Features are XML files and must be contained in a folder in C:\Programs Files\CommonFiles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES

Basic Know-how:

Features are generally composed of two types of files: a feature header file and one or more element files. Because the feature files are simply XML and because they are located in TEMPLATE\FEATURES, they can be easily inspected by browsing to the appropriate folder and examining the contents of the files. Feature header files are generally named Feature.XML

Feature Life Cycle

There is a four-stage feature life cycle
- Features are installed, activated, deactivated, and uninstalled
- Features can be manipulated with Stsadm.exe, Central Administration,and Windows Power Shell
- Features are deployed using solution packages with either full-trust or sandboxed deployment mechanisms

How to install a Feature:

Features are deployed with solution packages and should be automatically installed when deployed. Although it is uncommon to have to manually install features, you should know what the installation process does to install features

To install a feature, the necessary feature files must already be deployed to the TEMPLATE\FEATURES directory on all servers in the farm. Installing a feature simply makes it available to be activated. Any installed feature that does not have the property Hidden=True can be seen and activated through the SharePoint Server 2010 user interface

Features must be installed using either Stsadm.exe or Windows Power-Shell.

Stsadm.exe is located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN. To install a feature using Stsadm.exe, use the following
command:

stsadm.exe -o installfeature {-filename | -name } [-force]

To install a feature using Windows PowerShell, use the following command:

Install-SPFeature -Path [-AssignmentCollection ] [-Confirm []] [-Force ] [-WhatIf []] []

How to Activate/Deactivate features:

To activate or deactivate a farm-scoped feature using Central Administration, do the following:

- Browse to Central Administration, System Settings, Manage Farm Features
- Click either the feature’s Activate or Deactivate button
- To deactivate a feature, confirm the deactivation

Activating Web application–scoped features in Central Administration has changed considerably and is now accomplished using the new management Ribbon

To activate a Web application–scoped feature, do the following:
- Browse to Central Administration, Application Management, Manage Web Applications
- Click the row that contains the Web application that the feature should be activated on
- Click the Web Application tab in the management Ribbon
- Click the Manage Features button in the management Ribbon
- Click either the feature’s Activate or Deactivate button
- To deactivate the feature, confirm the deactivation

Activating and Deactivation Features in Site Collection

If a feature has been installed to the farm and scoped to a site collection, a site collection administrator can then either activate or deactivate the feature. To activate or deactivate a site collection–scoped feature, do the following:
- Open the appropriate site collection in the browser
- From the Site Actions drop-down menu, click Site Settings
- Click the Site Collection Features hyperlink in the Site Collection Administration group,If the Site Collection Administration group contains a Go To Top Level Site Settings hyperlink, click on it to go to the top-level site, and then click the Site Collection Features hyper-link.
- Click the Activate or Deactivate button
- To deactivate a feature, confirm the deactivation

Activating and Deactivation Features in a Site

If a feature has been installed to the farm and scoped to a site, a site owner can activate and deactivate the feature. To activate or deactivate a site-scoped feature, do the following:
- Open the site in the browser.
- From the Site Actions drop-down menu, click Site Settings
- Click the Manage Site Features hyperlink in the Site Actions group
- Click the Activate or Deactivate button
- Confirm the deactivation

Activating and Deactivation Features using STSADM.EXE

Features can also be activated and deactivated from the command line using Stsadm.exe. Activate or deactivate features using the appropriate stsadm.exe command:

stsadm.exe -o activatefeature {-filename | -name | -id } [-url ] [-force]|

Or

stsadm.exe -o deactivatefeature {-filename | -name | -id } [-url ] [-force]

Activating and Deactivation Features using Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell uses a slightly different naming system than Stsadm.exe and
the user interface. Instead of using the activate and deactivate parameters, Windows PowerShell use the verbs Enable and Disable. To activate (enable) or deactivate(disable) features with Windows PowerShell, use the appropriate cmdlet:

Enable-SPFeature -Identity  [-AssignmentCollection ][-Confirm []][-Force ] [-PassThru ] [-Url ][-WhatIf []] []

Or

Disable-SPFeature -Identity [-AssignmentCollection ][-Confirm []][-Force ] [-Url ] [-WhatIf []][]

Planning of backup & restore process becomes very critical when you are handling the large content volume in SharePoint 2010 due to some of the limitations of the content backup and performance issues. Let's say you have the terabytes of data in your SharePoint 2010 Farm and you create the backup/restore policy.

The following things are important to consider:
- Farm backup and recovery using Central Administration or stsadm/powershell command processes 600GB of data for 6 hours
- SQL Server backup processes 600GB of data for 6 hours
- System Center Data Protection Manager processes terabytes of data for 6 hours
- SQL FILESTREAM provider does not support SQL Server snapshots backupRemote Blob Storage (RBS) should be installed on source and destination backup servers
- Use "Backup Compression" feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 that increases the performance
- Web application and service application settings are not included in a configuration backup, so backup/restore them manually
- Workflows are not included into export sites or lists
- It's not recommend to backup SharePoint Server 2010 site collection that are larger than 85 GB
- Restore process using Central Administration will not automatically start all of the service applications
- SharePoint Server 2010 backup backs up the Business Data Connectivity service external content type definitions but does not back up the data source itself
- The search index is not stored in SQL Server. If you use SQL Server tools to back up and restore search, you must perform a full crawl after you restore the content database.
- SharePoint Server 2010 allows to backup and restore the Farm Configuration settings, however neither SQL Server nor Data Protection Manager are able to do it


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You may have dismissed SharePoint 2007 as the web content management system for your internet presence, but with the update to SharePoint 2010, and its improvements to web content management, maybe it's time to reconsider?

The growth of SharePoint within organizations is well documented. However many organizations have been apprehensive in adopting SharePoint as a Web Content Management system for their public internet presence due to the difficulty in customizing SharePoint Server 2007 effectively

With the release of SharePoint 2010 Microsoft has made a concerted effort to position SharePoint as a leader in the WCM space, prompting organizations that already have deployed SharePoint in an Intranet or Extranet environment to consider the feasibility of adopting the platform. Although many of the technical improvements have already been discussed in various articles the question that most organizations are now considering is if it is worth moving from their established WCM platform to SharePoint. The recent release of the Gartner WCM Magic Quadrant for 2010 has shown that the new version of SharePoint has improved its capabilities in this area.

In this article We try to provide some guidance into some of the advantages, disadvantages and various questions that organizations should be considering when contemplating this move to SharePoint 2010


Technology Rationalization

It is the dream of every CIO and administrator to reduce the amount of systems that an organization possess and standardize on a platform that will be robust, scalable and ultimately support business goals. If an organization has made a considerable investment internally on the SharePoint platform, most commonly through an Intranet/Extranet/Collaboration presence, then having a completely separate platform for an Internet presence can be a huge hindrance

By standardizing on SharePoint for all types of Web management there are huge savings that can occur. Savings in hardware, licensing and operational costs can amount to huge sums to an organization. The ability to only have one platform to develop customizations on, one governance model or one common set of skills needed for employees is a very attractive proposition

If this course of action does occur however, an organization should make sure that firstly SharePoint will fulfill their requirements for a WCM platform. Also if rationalization does occur it could be a considerable amount of time before cost savings are realized. Training staff in a new technology, the cost of transferring from one platform to another or simple change management activities can be sizeable for an organization and should be considered before moving to SharePoint 2010

Platform Capabilities

With the broadness of the feature set in SharePoint 2010, being able to leverage this in an internet scenario is highly palatable and advantageous

Not only can the considerable WCM capabilities of SharePoint be leveraged but other important feature sets can also be utilized. The social toolset can be used to create public internet sites that can make use of SharePoint’s considerable tagging, ratings, blogs, wiki and other social engagement features. The search capabilities can be leveraged to create compelling search experiences. Business Intelligence for real time reporting can be combined with rich online InfoPath forms capabilities to create more consumer driven sites

Other features such as Claims based authentication can be leveraged to allow users to authenticate using a third party provider. Microsoft’s heavy investment into cloud computing also lends itself extremely well in a WCM scenario where potential traffic spikes can be absorbed by the cloud infrastructure

Of course the breadth of SharePoint’s capabilities can also serve as its downfall. If your organization has specific needs that need deep vertical capabilities than you should be considering the cost of implementing this custom functionality on the SharePoint platform. If this is the case then you might be better served with a niche solution, rather than the broader set of features that SharePoint offers

User Rationalization

From an end user perspective there are huge advantages of having one platform for daily activities. The time wasted performing the mental switch from one interface to another is well documented. The reduction of training costs is another advantage of having one platform for interaction. User engagement can also be increased with users feeling confident in being able to contribute content across all possible areas of an organization

In essence users hate and resent having many differing interfaces to generate the same output. It simply doesn’t make sense that authoring a news article on the Intranet is different than authoring one on the Internet for many users. Presenting users with one interface, one set of actions, one set of guiding principles can lead to huge efficiency gains across an organization

Licensing Changes

The new licensing model that Microsoft is now providing for public facing SharePoint sites is much more palatable then it was for SharePoint 2007. In the days of MOSS, the public connector license necessary to expose SharePoint to an anonymous audience was cost prohibitive for many smaller and mid-tier organizations to adopt

This has changed considerably in SharePoint 2010 with the new licensing model that Microsoft has provided. With the various flavors that are available, and the ability to use FAST search in these licenses, it makes for a very attractive proposition cost wise for many clients. Although licensing is still as complex as ever, We would dare say more complex now, at least mid-tier organizations can expose SharePoint out to the world without a huge price tag

Partner Ecosystem

It’s also worth noting that because SharePoint is a Microsoft product that the potential to find resources, training, add-ons and partners to assist an organization in meeting their business objectives in an Internet scenario is increased

The common issue of finding suitably experienced and expert staff in a particular technology can be somewhat alleviated by standardizing on a single platform, with the backing of the huge partner ecosystem that revolves around Microsoft. We expect partners to become even more engaged with SharePoint work in the near future as the demand grows. With the growth in the public web facing presence, Microsoft partners could specialize on this skillset and find themselves in a great position for the future. Of course this would have the added advantage to providing skills necessary for organizations as well

Final Thoughts

We hope that this article does provide some information that should be considered for implementing SharePoint 2010 as your web content management system. As with any product, careful planning and tradeoffs should be considered before making any major platform changes in your organization. However we believe that the ability to standardize on a single platform, a common architecture, governance model and training and user experience can be extremely powerful to an organization. Make sure that you spend a considerable amount of time researching the pros and cons of any such move