Mauro Cardarelli

How Many Site Collections Do We Need?

I get asked lots of questions about SharePoint.  One of the harder ones to answer is “how many site collections do we need?”  Why?... because, in my opinion, there is no right answer.  SharePoint implementation is a very personalized experience where you, as a member of the implementation team, make many choices of what functionality to use (or not use) and to set a definition for how it should be used.  Determining the appropriate number of site collections is (or should be) dependent on the choices you make in your information architecture and, in some ways, will ultimately depend on the bias of the information architect(s).

Never one to shy away from a question,  I answer in the following way…

Your decision on site collections will depend on your SharePoint knowledge.  This is split into two main categories, technical and tactical.  Technical knowledge is defined by terminology and concept information that you might find in places like here.  It sets the basis for understanding the limits of functionality within and across site collections.  The second is tactical and is focused on your business users.  It sets the basis for understanding how information workers in your environment best work and adhere to structure (including content organization, navigation, branding, and search).  The cross-section of these two help define your site collection roadmap (I use the term ‘roadmap’ to emphasize the need to consistently evaluate your information architecture and course correct – add/consolidate site collections as an example – as needed).  Remember, there is no “right” answer but your users will most certainly tell you implicitly or explicitly if they think you got it wrong.

When I lead a design session and we talk about site collections I lay out for discussion the items listed below.  In the case of an intranet design, I always start with two site collections (one for corporate content, one for ad hoc collaboration), walk participants through the technical and tactical decision points, and challenge the default design until we get to a comfortable place.  This is a very interesting experience as we often find that one item, navigation for example, will sway the decision making.  Sometimes, we end up with one site collection; often times, it is two or many more… but I NEVER set the number until we get to the appropriate level of detail to make an educated choice.

So, sometimes I answer “how many site collections do we need?” with another question “how many site collections do you think you need… and why?”

·         Quota

·         SharePoint security groups

·         Branding

·         Site columns

·         Navigation

·         Search

·         Backup/Restore

·         Features

·         Distributed site collection administration

·         Security

·         Governance

·         Service Level Agreement (SLA)

SharePoint Admins - Can I get five minutes of your time?

Dear SharePoint Administrator,

I know you are busy.  I know those business folks and corporate executives are driving you crazy with demands for additional SharePoint functionality.  I promise to be brief.  Can I get five minutes of your time this week?

I’d like you to perform the following five tasks.  They shouldn’t take more than a minute each.  The goal here is to give you a pulse on the health of your SharePoint environment.  We’re not trying to fix anything as much as we’re being proactive and looking to not have anything break (forcing those long, drawn out support calls into Microsoft at 2AM).  So, please just go down this checklist then dump this note into a recurring monthly appointment so we can do it every month.  Remember what your mom said about an ounce of prevention…

Thanks!

The Magic SharePoint Elves

1.     Check the date on your last SharePoint backup.  If it is equal to this morning, move on.  If it is last August, set aside some time to get this fixed.

2.     Check the event log on your SharePoint servers.  Red X’s are bad.  If you see none, move on.  If you see a couple, read them and set aside some time to troubleshoot.  If there are lots, make time now to get this fixed.  Remember, when SharePoint gets “sick” it stays “sick”.

3.     Check the disk space on your servers.  SharePoint goes to a very bad place when disk space gets low.  Make sure there is ample space on all the necessary drives.

4.     Check the SharePoint version numbers.  Make sure you are at least to SP2 for SharePoint 2007.  Make sure this version number is consistent across all your front end servers, including development servers.

5.     Randomly test your search security.  Pick two documents from two different places that are secured.  Validate that you can discover them in a keyword search.  Send those keywords to someone who does not have access and confirm the document is not shown.  Pass this test to five business users.

Migrating to SharePoint 2010 is like…

One of my favorite roles is that of storyteller.  I like to talk about real-life experiences and, when appropriate, use an analogy to drive home a message.  With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010, I have heard lots of questions about the new features as well as the potential challenges of upgrading.  I’ve been struggling with finding a good analogy that offers fair perspective.  Yesterday, my business partner, Scott Jamison, shared his opinion with me…

“Going from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 is like moving from a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house.”

That’s awesome!  As someone who moved last year, this resonates well.  Here’s why:

·         In planning a move, worrying about whether the van is going to get all your “stuff” to the new place is the least of your worries.

·         You don’t expect the moving company to do any thinking for you; they just ask “where do you want this”

·         Moving is a good time to throw away all the crap you have be storing that has very little value but had found a home in some obscure corner of the old place

·         Label everything well and have a plan for where everything will go in the new place; understanding that the new place will offer a bigger and different way of using some of your old stuff

·         Anything that gets packed on moving day will most certainly live in that box in the basement of the new place forever

·         Make sure everyone knows you're moving… the more advanced notice the better

And I can go on and on but I think you get the message.  So as you think about your migration to SharePoint 2010 focus on the stuff you have stored, what you are going to keep, where it will all go, and who needs to know you are moving…

What If You Throw a Party and Nobody Shows Up

Interesting Read: The new content editor WebPart in SharePoint 2010

Recently, Sahil Malik wrote an interesting blog post entitled “The new content editor WebPart in SharePoint 2010” where he highlights the exciting new updates to the CEWP.  Read the full post here.

I wrote years ago that I felt the most powerful web part in SharePoint’s gallery was the Content Editor.  It gives the user full freedom to present content the way he/she chooses while not requiring HTML (i.e. “techie”) skills.  One of the challenges with this empowerment, however, is that sometimes you are left to the limits of the technology.  One example is the use of embedded url’s.  Here’s an example… A business user leverages a CEWP to add a note to a team site that states “click here to go to our knowledge base” where ‘here’ is a fully qualified url to another site within SharePoint (acquired through copy/paste in the browser).  The problem becomes when this portal is restored to another location (i.e. development server) that url stays the same.  SharePoint was smart enough to alter the url’s of most other internal references but it was NOT able to alter url’s in the CEWP.  The risk, of course, was that users of a test environment could unknowingly find themselves back in the production system (yes, I have seen this… Disaster caused by disaster recovery testing!).  Since SharePoint 2003, I have advised business users and administrators on using relative url’s to ensure this type of misdirection does not occur (not the easiest lesson to teach to less techie savvy users).  Now, SP2010 fixes that!

If I enter text in a CEWP with the following: This is a test of how url mapping works and set ‘url’ to be http://testserver/sites/mauro/Pages/default.aspx (another page in my SharePoint 2010 environment) and save then go back into the html of that web part I see that the url is actually ‘/sites/mauro/Pages/default.aspx’.  Yeah!

To me, as small as this feature might seem, it is a big deal… it proves that the folks in Redmond are actually making this a more useful and impactful business tool…