SharePoint Support Information Paper

SharePoint Support Information Paper

Executive Summary

SharePoint is a core enterprise technology used for collaboration for the Enterprise. SharePoint is one of the largest and most successful implementations of Microsoft products. Organizations use SharePoint for critical business functions, such as sharing real-time information and quickly retrieve organizational knowledge and experience. The core enterprise technology sits side-by-side with other technologies such as MS Outlook for e-mail and SQL Server for databases to maintain organizational data. As a core enterprise technology, SharePoint Support must align with the SLAs and processes of similar platforms and technologies in the enterprise.

SharePoint develops in many organizations organically without structure and governance. In the early days of SharePoint, programs may have started SharePoint pilots with SharePoint Foundation (a free version of SharePoint provided with Windows Server OS). In many organizations, the IT department has the first rogue SharePoint installation on a server under a server admins desk. The server admin did not spend a lot of time administering SharePoint and SharePoint might have contained a list for the Change Control Board (CCB) or maintaining development artifacts, like requirements and design documents and project plans. It may include list data to track open requests or suggestions from customers.  SharePoint pilots spread from IT departments with the programs implementing SharePoint as a collaboration tool. The pilots were consolidated in MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 into the organization-wide provided service by the infrastructure team. The Executive Sponsor and Business Owner/Sponsor of SharePoint remains with the executive sponsor and co-chair for governance. SharePoint governance was implemented to ensure order and sustainability of platform. SharePoint suffered from performance issues and a lack of discipline for Change Control and IT service management (ITSM) best practices. To overcome performance problems and implement the discipline required for an enterprise system, the Microsoft Product Line Architecture (PLA) and SharePoint 2013 was implemented was implemented in the corporate environment. The PLA provided a platform that in the future could transition to the “cloud.”

The “cloud” is an important concept for SharePoint support. The SharePoint environment in the cloud is restrictive to prevent customers from making configuration changes to the farm. Like preventing a user downloading software from the Internet, support costs are reduced by disallowing many actions that users can take to get them in trouble. This restrictive environment is setup with scripts and the most advanced infrastructure support available.  The data centers are large, hosting pods of thousands of servers where all activities are automated.

In the past year, the SharePoint Team has documented a support process. We have gone through more than three continuous improvement cycles to improve the support process. The team has undertaken the following approaches:

• We have documented to the current process
• We have shared the process with governance and site collection administrators (SCAs)
• We have defined performance metrics and objectives
• We have tried different ways of escalating issues and tracking issues with the infrastructure team

The purpose of this information paper is to highlight the challenges of SharePoint Support and begin a discussion to determine the value of SharePoint Support provides to the organization. The support role must change and value must be created for the organization with measurable outcomes. The final determination of success of SharePoint Support must be customer satisfaction. If a customer calls and only a few inquiries can be answered, customer satisfaction will suffer and our customers are dissatisfied. The collaboration SharePoint Team does not have satisfied customers and we do not help in moving issues toward resolution. In the current configuration of the SharePoint Support role, the collaboration SharePoint Team destroys value for the organization.

Problem Statement

The SharePoint Team does not create value needed for the organization.

The team recommends the following changes:

• There should be a single point-of-contact for support like any similar core enterprise technology. Support should be routed through the existing the infrastructure team Help Desk.
• The collaboration SharePoint Team has no permission in any Site Collections other than their own
• The collaboration SharePoint Team has no visibility greater than the SCA. We cannot do any activities the SCAs cannot do.
• We do not have access to SharePoint Central Administration (CA)
• We have reduced our capability to support because we no longer have development VMs to troubleshoot issues
• The the infrastructure team wants us to thoroughly investigate all issues. We work on a problem for 4-5 hours and the infrastructure team when they finally get to look into it solve the problem in 15 to 20 minutes.
• The infrastructure team wants to minimize interactions with the customer.
• The collaboration SharePoint Team has no greater permissions than the SCA. If the SCA does not have time to deal with an issue, they will automatically escalate to the collaboration SharePoint Team.
• Most of the issues we cannot do anything to resolve – it is either a development problem the developer must fix or an infrastructure problem we have no access to fix.

Current Situation

The organization has implemented Course of Action 3 is the standard option of continuing to do what we do today, but we will design improvements and do better. The capability to support the programs requires that calls coming to the collaboration SharePoint Team are issues that we can triage and a meaningful allotment of issues that we can resolve. The following represent some actions that can be taken to increase our support of the programs.

• The collaboration SharePoint Team need an Enterprise SharePoint 2013 environment that is similar enough to the production environment to test problems
• The collaboration SharePoint Team needs a complete list of SharePoint settings in Production. This can be screenshots of Central Administration to prevent the possibility of changing settings
• The collaboration SharePoint Team may need more than 4 hours we are currently allocating to each problem before escalation to the infrastructure team
• The collaboration SharePoint Team cannot follow-up on tickets escalated to the infrastructure team
• Need better criteria on issues that should be escalated to the the infrastructure team
• The infrastructure team Team must communicate the resolution to the collaboration SharePoint Team
• The infrastructure team must communicate with the programs their problem domain
• A SharePoint Support application that collects information required for support and sends to the correct resource and opens a Help Desk Ticket for tracking
• Customer satisfaction surveys for our customers are performed annually

Recommendations

This information paper was developed to highlight the current situation to SharePoint and provide and a path forward. The continued course of action does not provide value to the organization and the SharePoint community.

Course of Action 1: Move to Greater Self- Help and Autonomy by Programs

Course of Action 3 is the standard option of continuing to do what we do today, but we will design improvements and do better. The capability to support the programs requires that calls coming to the collaboration SharePoint Team are issues that we can triage and a meaningful allotment of issues that we can resolve. The following represent some actions that can be taken to increase our support of the programs.

• The collaboration SharePoint Team need an Enterprise SharePoint 2013 environment that is similar enough to the production environment to test problems
• The collaboration SharePoint Team needs a complete list of SharePoint settings in Production. This can be screenshots of Central Administration to prevent the possibility of changing settings
• The collaboration SharePoint Team may need more than 4 hours we are currently allocating to each problem before escalation to the infrastructure team
• The collaboration SharePoint Team cannot follow-up on tickets escalated to the infrastructure team
• Need better criteria on issues that should be escalated to the infrastructure team
• The infrastructure team must communicate the resolution to the collaboration SharePoint Team
• The infrastructure team must communicate with the programs their problem domain
• A SharePoint Support application that collects information required for support and sends to the correct resource and opens a Help Desk Ticket for tracking
• Customer satisfaction surveys for our customers annually

Course of Action 2: Provide infrastructure support team with a Support Analyst and All Support Goes to the Help Desk

Course of Action 3 is the standard option of continuing to do what we do today, but we will design improvements and do better. The capability to support the programs requires that calls coming to SharePoint Team are issues that we can triage and a meaningful allotment of issues that we can resolve. The following represent some actions that can be taken to increase our support of the programs.

• The collaboration SharePoint Team need an Enterprise SharePoint 2013 environment that is similar enough to the production environment to test problems
• The collaboration SharePoint Team SharePoint Team needs a complete list of SharePoint settings in Production. This can be screenshots of Central Administration to prevent the possibility of changing settings
• The collaboration SharePoint Team may need more than 4 hours we are currently allocating to each problem before escalation to infrastructure support team.
• The collaboration SharePoint Team cannot follow-up on tickets escalated to the infrastructure team
• Need better criteria on issues that should be escalated to the infrastructure support team.
• The infrastructure support team. must communicate the resolution to the collaboration SharePoint Team
• The infrastructure support team. must communicate with the programs their problem domain
• A SharePoint Support application that collects information required for support and sends to the correct resource and opens a Help Desk Ticket for tracking
• Customer satisfaction surveys for our customers annually

Course of Action 3: Provide SharePoint Team the Capability to Support the Programs

Course of Action 3 is the standard option of continuing to do what we do today, but we will design improvements and do better. The capability to support the programs requires that calls coming to the SharePoint Team are issues that we can triage and a meaningful allotment of issues that we can resolve. The following represent some actions that can be taken to increase our support of the programs.

• The collaboration SharePoint Team need an Enterprise SharePoint 2013 environment that is similar enough to the production environment to test problems
• The collaboration SharePoint Team needs a complete list of SharePoint settings in Production. This can be screenshots of Central Administration to prevent the possibility of changing settings
• The collaboration SharePoint Team may need more than 4 hours we are currently allocating to each problem before escalation to infrastructure support team.
• The collaboration SharePoint Team cannot follow-up on tickets escalated to the infrastructure team
• Need better criteria on issues that should be escalated to the infrastructure support team.
• The infrastructure support team must communicate the resolution to the collaboration SharePoint Team Team
• The infrastructure support team must communicate with the programs their problem domain
• A SharePoint Support application that collects information required for support and sends to the correct resource and opens a Help Desk Ticket for tracking
• Customer satisfaction surveys for our customers annually

SharePoint Go-Live Weekend Communications Plan

SharePoint Go-Live Weekend Communications Timeline

 

Time/Trigger	Activity	Audience	Hour
Friday, Day 1
4:00 PM	Announcement that SharePoint not available	Project Team, SCA	0
4:30 PM	Start Backups	Project Team (PMs Techs)	00:30 min
10:00 PM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	6
Saturday, Day 2
10:00 AM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	18
16:00 PM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	24
Sunday, February 15
10:00 AM	Checkpoint Conference Call -Backups/Restores should be complete	Project Team (PMs Techs)	42
14:00 PM	Completes Post-Migration Checklist (No Call)	Internal Team Meeting	46
16:00 PM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	49
Monday, Day 4 (Holiday)
09:00 AM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	66
10:00 AM	Team Tests environment	Test Team	67
16:00 PM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	73
16:30 PM	Upgrade first Site Collection	Project Team (PMs Techs)
17:00 PM	Communications to SCA they can now upgrade Site Collection	Project Team (PMs Techs), SCAs, Stakeholders	74
Tuesday, Day 5
07:30 AM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs)	86.5
08:00 AM	Smoke Test	Test Team	87
08:00 AM	Communication to SCA and stakeholders	PM
10:00 AM	Checkpoint Conference Call	Project Team (PMs Techs), SCAs, Stakeholders	89

 

 

The United States National Strategy

I have been reading the National Strategy released by the Defense Department and the Quadrennial Defense Review.  It is clearly identifies the threats the United States faces as a world power and the challenge to American power on many fronts, including the Ukraine, the South China Sea and of course, ISIS.  Of course, a Defense Department Strategy is going to focus on the military and military power.  A weak ago, I attended a presentation by Vice Admiral Branch and I was reminded about the importance of our economic power as an element of National Strategy.  The presentation by Vice Admiral Twig focused on information dominance and throughout the presentation, I kept thinking about our business and cultural institutions have left the field.  And our adversaries are happily filling the vacuum.

From early in our country’s founding, the Navy ensured sea lanes for commercial trade.  Over the past decade, the sea lanes have been dominated less and less by American merchant ships.  There are hardly any commercial ships built in our nation anymore.  The large shipping companies are also foreign, like Maersk.  And the goods are no longer made in America, but are made in China and being shipped across to the United States.  Our companies dominated industry after industry.  Now, General Motors is struggling to survive dropping not only below Toyota, but Volkswagen as well.  The financial center of the world has moved from New York City to London.  In our country, we are so insular that we have not noticed the change.  The last economic crisis made us look inward.  I high standard of living depends on our economic power, yet few people talk about it and less include it in a National Strategy.  When I was in Djibouti, I saw few American trucks and jeeps, but saw Toyotas everywhere.  The Chinese were building railroads and we were building schools and hospitals.  For the people I spoke with, jobs were more important than schools or hospitals.  The railroad would move raw materials to the coast where they would be shipped to China.  This would create a virtuous cycle of jobs.

American culture was broadcast around the world.  We exported music, television, movies and the Internet.  While the emergence of local music and television is a good trend, the emergence of satellite stations dominated by Gulf States is a dangerous and insidious trend.  The Gulf States are our allies, but they are also funding ISIS and Al Qaeda.  As American culture and values are squeezed out, it is no wonder radicalization is happening across the region.  We have left the field and the vacuum is filled by adversaries.  They see no advocacy of American values.

Finally, good intelligence relies on information and that cannot be collected from a drone flying in the sky.  You need people interacting on an ongoing basis in order to get reliable information and build trusted relationships.  It is not spying, but living with them and understanding the conditions.  If we do business there and are upset at corruption in the ports, we do something about it.  The local people have the same complaint and benefit from our pressure to improve operations and transparency.  China and other adversaries have no similar interest in promoting fairness, competition, lower prices, and opportunity.  China has no strings attached to trade, we probably have too much emphasizing human rights, justice, and eradicating narcotics.

One of our strengths as a country is the respect we have for human dignity.  We try to provide good working conditions, respect locals and show kindness.  My friends always say they want to work for Americans and do not for the Chinese.  Right now, our country does not want to be world’s policemen.  We want to focus on our country and solve our own problems with racism, poverty, housing, prisons, and other social problems.  We need a National Strategy that includes being an economic power and engagement in the rest of the world.  Otherwise, we will find that we no longer have one of the highest standards of living in world.