MOSS 2007 - Infrastructure counts!

Like all things infrastructure is often not seen, but is essential. There is a song called "The wise man built his house upon the rock". This is very much the same with MOSS 2007. The infrastructure, hardware, storage, network that supports the database and the application software is a very essential part of the design and deployment.

A case in point is the difference that a SAN can make to a MOSS 2007 deployment where there is lots of dynamic content from a very transactional Internet facing website, along with the right kind of Internet pipe as well. The difference is the time to load and deliver the pages necessary to make a great user experience rather than a pathetic one. Here are some good links to places that will give you a start on the necessary planning.

Planning and Architecture for MOSS 2007 - Microsoft Technet
SharePoint Capacity Planning Key Info - Joel Olsen SharePoint Land Blog (recommended)
MOSS 2007 Best Practices book link - Microsoft Press

ECM - MOSS 2007 How do I get going?

How do we get going with MOSS 2007. Well, Setup.exe is NOT I repeat NOT the way to get started. Why? MOSS 2007 is a great platform for collaboration and information sharing but if not planned correctly it quickly becomes a virus within the organisation with information silo's that are out of control.

Now, I am not advocating the evil empire control, but like most projects if you don't have the end in mind then failure at least comes a total surprise I guess.

Planning, especially in the information management space is hard work becuase it takes some hard thinking and some hard talking up front to get everyone on the same page, with a single view of the end game that we are heading towards. This is especially true with MOSS as you have to take into account the nature of containment in the MOSS Hierarchy.

Microsoft have some reasonable guidance and checklists on their Governance resources centre on Technet. However, this does not cover fully the information management side of getting ready, which if you don't get a good handle on will cause you pain in the long run.

Another starting point would be to look into the "Best Practices" book by Ben Curry, Bill English, Mark Schneider and the Microsoft SharePoint Team; you can find it here at Amazon. This book is a good one for both technical and business people to get a handle on the things that you need to consider with MOSS 2007 and some best practices based on real world field experience.

This is a good resource to get a handle on how to start and what to consider before SETUP.EXE.

ECM - MOSS 2007 Taking a general look

Is it bird? Is it a plane? Well with MOSS 2007 it sometimes feels that way. So the question is what is MOSS 2007? Let's start by quoting from the executive summary from the CMS Watch Report on SharePoint:

However, what remains less clear more than a year after the launch of
SharePoint 2007 is where the product actually fits into the
enterprise. SharePoint is truly a collection of individual components that
interact together to varying degrees, but require extra work to weld into a
cohesive package. And unfortunately not all components of SharePoint are created
equal. In other words, SharePoint is well suited to some requirements, but
certainly not all.

So folks, what is clear is that you need to be careful as to what you use MOSS for and how it is used. Some features work and play well out of the box, while others require development (that's cutting code folks). In addition I would say that MOSS 2007 is primarily a platform of services that may or may not suit what you are trying to achieve within an overall solution.

Now when I say platform of services I mean that what you get is the core services but sometimes it feels like you need to run your own power line from the curb to the house to get all the appliances working.

However, I must say that the set of services that are supplied in MOSS 2007 are feature rich, and on first look there is something for everyone. The overall message however is that prior planning will prevent a poor implementation, especially with SharePoint or MOSS 2007 as it is also known. Plan, Plan and then execute. Do not go direct to setup or base install, you will regret that somewhere down the track.

For a look at the top 10 things to avoid with MOSS 2007 click the link. Note that the first two points are not even technology rated and Setup.exe comes in at number 3. You should ask yourself before you slap that CD into the drive, have I though about why I am doing this and what we are trying to achieve here?

But back to MOSS 2007. Feature, feature, feature. Well to start there is really great

So firstly, it is a platform, and when we say platform that means a rich set of infrastructure services and some front end services out of the box. With any platform there is a degree of development that needs to happen to make the platform useful for your situation. An overview of the functionality provided by MOSS 2007 is as follows: (Diagram courtesy of Microsoft)

As you can see from the "Pizza wheel" there is a wide range of services and functions that are available as part of the platform. Here downunder (that's NZ folks) the main areas that are being implemented are as follows:

• Intranet (Portal) and Internet (WCM from the Content Management piece)
• Document Collaboration
• Forms and Workflow

Of course Search is something that is everywhere. With MOSS 2007 you get the ability to use Search across MOSS Site, and also to extend it to the web and file systems. The Enterprise license also gives you access to add search into line of business applications and bring a rich search experience into the MOSS Portal. With the recent acquisition of FAST there is a wider Search story that Microsoft is able to present and I am looking with interest as to how this unfolds.

Another area that I am keen to see get going in is records management, however this will require some planning as here in New Zealand there is very much a continuum life cycle approach to records management rather than the traditional here it is a document and "bling" now its a record. The life cycle approach is a view that starts from the time of creation of an item and this item is then managed in a "records context". Microsoft in NZ have done some great work to get connected to the government market and has developed a jump start pack for MOSS 2007 and NZ government agencies. There are also partner organisations that are now building Records Management add-ons for MOSS 2007 that are very exciting and will be a big change to the way that customers deploy MOSS 2007.

With the release of a solid records management add on that fits the NZ market MOSS 2007 will move from the Intranet collaboration space to the main stream records and document management fields, this is both exciting and scary. As I have said before when Microsoft decides to enter a market space it does not take long for them to start to dominate and certainly in NZ this is starting to come to pass.

ECM - MOSS 2007 compared to ECM components

Some posts ago I outlined my view of the ECM core components that make up an ECM product set, with a set of explanations as well.

I posed these components as a mixture of product features and supporting services. So in this post I am going to make a "subjective" assessment of MOSS 2007 and how it compares to the ECM core components.

This assessment is based in a New Zealand view, especially around things like records management. It is an "out the box assessment" So belt up folks, here we go.

You need to realise that this is not a WSS 3.0 comparison, but a MOSS 2007 (read Enterprise version) comparison against the ECM core components that I have outlined.

Now for some commentary / justification! Let's start with the obvious strengths areas for MOSS 2007.

• Collaboration - Out of the box you get great collaboration features to share documents and get people working together in a unified collaboration workspace. Combine this with blogs, wikis and other social networking / collaboration tools and MOSS provides a great "high value" low cost Portal for getting going in Collaboration


• Web Content Management - MOSS 2007 handles web content as part of the platform. There has been quite a change from the 2003 model with integration of the WCM from CMS 2002 into the overall MOSS 2007 platform. With some planning you can now deploy Portal / Intranet and Internet content directly off the same platform base.


• Document Management - With the introduction of Content Types, two stage recycle bin and a slew of other features Microsoft has finally made it to real time document management. While some vendors may say that they have only"just" arrived, Microsoft has certainly arrived in style. Combined with Office 2007 you get very good integration at the Office interface, especially with the Info panel view at the top of the Word document.
  
• Forms Management - With the Enterprise MOSS you get the capability to publish forms that can be deployed to a client web browser. Combined with workflow and some custom code you can develop and deploy forms based workflow solutions that meet most requirements in day to day business activities.

Here is NZ Collaboration, Web and Forms are driving technology adoption of MOSS 2007. Implementations are manifesting in the form of Intranet Portal and Web Content Management (WCM) projects. My company's own website http://www.gen-i.co.nz/ is a representation of the WCM side of MOSS 2007 deployment.

Document management is an out of the box strength, but generally we are only seeing this being implemented as part of the overall collaboration space, except for some work that we are doing internally around our own systems of how we manage document control for various business functions, such as customer data and the sales and bid processes.

Forms that can be delivered through the web are fantastic, but will only become as useful as the workflow that can be built behind it. While there are business user tools in the form of SharePoint Designer this does not go as far as other workflow "out-of-the-box" visual build features.

So forms gets a big 100% but business process management really requires some help to get going, hence the 60% assessment against the component area here. There are currently a number of companies out that that provide this value in a very cost effective way. We are seeing these staring to be adopted by customers as a "value add" to the overall platform.

The other areas that are marked as a more than 60% are marked thus because there is more required to get the overall solution together. Now some of the these are specific to down under, especially in the records management area where we have a different lifecycle view on records management. To quickly explain the rating here is my explanation:

• Records management - There are core records management features that are delivered and this is a great move by Microsoft. There are some pieces that were missing out of the box, namely visible numbering patterns, record relationships and classification construction, (see also classification with search). There has been a DoD pack that has been built to add on to Microsoft and this has been released as both an installable pack and MSDN developer features that can be used as part of an overall development. Here in NZ and AUS we are staring to see ISV's building on top of the MOSS platform to create added value records management solutions building on what Microsoft has delivered.

• Classification and Search - First a confession. Grouping classification and search together in some ways is not fair to the capabilities of Search by itself. But generally the two are combined together so given these two Microsoft only get a greater than 60% rating. Why? Well it's mainly because of the classification part. Out of the Box there is little or no capability to create classification structures.

• Archival and Storage - All content in the MOSS platform is stored in the SQL Database. IF you want some form of secondary storage and archiving you will need to go looking for 3rd party add ons. This is where there is a big opportunity for the pure play ECM vendors to step in and let you know why you should be working with them in combination with MOSS as a platform. Or if you are looking for a more pure archive and storage option there are players such as Symantec Enterprise Vault, Autonomy Zantaz and Commvault Data Archiver that can assist.

• E-mail management - MOSS provides some basic e-mail management out of the box, but goes and does things like storing the e-mail message in a non MSG format. While they have probably attempted to keep the format open for storage it takes away some of the fidelity of being able to open up and forward or reply off the archived e-mail if necessary. Partners such as Colligo Contributor are a good fit to get the e-mail into SharePoint, plus pulls SharePoint list and other functions directly into the Outlook UI.

• Process management - Here is where we are looking to go beyond just a workflow type activity and get into system to system process management. Enter Biztalk if you are wanting to get serious around long running inter system process management. There is much that you can do with the Workflow foundation (WF) to get going but if you start trying to build out too much stop and consider the options that are available. In the workflow space there are a couple of good options to round out the Microsoft WF, these are Nintex and K2.

So there it is folks a purely subjective assessment of the MOSS 2007 platform against the Core ECM Components. Overall assessment is that you get a great set of features out of the box, and if you combine these with some cost effective partner products you are well on the way to getting the right ECM technology in place to support your overall ECM programme.

But remember technology is only one third of the overall ECM solution, and I regard it as the bottom third, so get planning and get on with the business alignment and change management before setup.exe takes hold.

ECM - MOSS 2007 A disturbance in the Force

Reading a Gartner report early in the morning, as you do ! I came across one about MOSS that was almost akin to "A disturbance in the Force". From the key finding section came this comment

Enterprise interest in SharePoint is causing some concern that the enterprise
content management (ECM) market will face a recession.

And further into the document was this very interesting statement.

Another interesting piece was that Enterprises spend billions of dollars on ECM
Software but ask any CEO for the 30 second benefits that they have accrued and
most will struggle for an answer.

So we have interesting times around us folks, we can now blame ECM for global recession ! Yes I know I'm twisting the words, but if we look at the two comments extracted for the report we can see that there has been vast buckets of cash thrown at ECM Software and very little value is realised. Why? Well the technology alone is only an enabler to the overall business process, and the process requires people.

Change Anything anywhere and you need to change behaviours and ways of working. This is an area that naturally resists change, like a Force itself it moves organisations in a way of working as people have tried to do there jobs with what they have.

So now we have a low cost, reasonably high value tool that is easy to use and by all accounts is spreading like wild fire. A disturbance, Yes, recession, Yes for the fat bloated suppliers that delivery less value for more money, but NO for those that figure out how to make it work and compliment MOSS with some other products to get what you need today and to position for tomorrow.

ECM core components an overview

So what are the core components of an ECM product set? Well over the years the components have changed, so it is always difficult to get a full definition up front. Based on the various analysts in the market place here is my peg in the ground for ECM core components

Firstly, you need to realise that in this diagram there is a mixture of traditional product features and some supporting services that are supplied by the overall system, such as classification. So let's go through the pieces, some will be very self explanatory so I will not elaborate that much on them as we go through. let's begin:

Records Management - Here we deliver support to the management of both paper and electronic records, areas such as classification and retention and disposal are strong features that need to be delivered. Records management is a big driver, but beware of making it the be all and end all. Any good project should have compliance as a natural outcome to what you are trying to achieve.

Imaging - The capture and storage of paper having transferred the paper into a digital format for long term preservation. The electronic format and storage is perferably in the same repository as the other paper and electronic content from records and document managment but not always the case. You will find imaging is big in the Insurance and Finance sectors by the bucket load and has in the last couple of years had somewhat of a renaissance of sorts as it has been incorporated into a wider ECM play.

Web Content Management - management and control of web site style and content. Traditionally this has been out on its own, but if you look strategically it is just part of a spectrum of contnet that needs to be managed, processes and delivered across the enterprise. Therefore it has now become mainstream in ECM based solutions. Infact if vendor does not have an option here they will not make the quadrant.

Collaboration - Big word. lots of different meanings. Generally collaboration is aligned with portal. The Portal provides the interface to glue together office content and content from other sources such as line of business applications and the wider records and document management repositories. It is all brought together into a collaboration interface. Once again in days gone by we had a Portal market that lived by itself in this area, but now the Portals are also just part of a wider ECM offering.

Classification and Search - A Classification is all about grouping or bringing items together under a common category. An example is in records managemtn where a functional based classification has the hirearchy of Function Activity Task - at the end of the hirearchy folders for containment may or may not be developed. There are many other types of classification that can be built as well, you may hear of classification also called taxonomy. Now Search is well search. In some ECM systems the search is closed into the ECM repository only, meaning that you can only search the scope of contnet in the repository. However more forward thinking and innovative vendors will also offer a search engine that reaches outside of the core ECM repository in to the file system, line of business applications and the web.

Document Managment - The management of electronic documents, can be confused with Imaging for paper to electronic, but at the end of the day is is really about getting those office documents under control and into a repository where we can manage them effectively. Thing secure and relaible storage and access with version control and you are on your way. Yes MOSS 2007 does well here with Office documents.

Print and Distribution - This area covers the Computer Output to Lase Disk (COLD) and enterprise report management (ERM). Generally this is the domain of the top right had quadrant players, but there is also others that are now starting to provide these services on top of a MOSS base, such as ClearView ECM, and Knowledgelake.

Process Managment - covers both workflow (human based with system linkage) and business process managmenet (BPM), which is generally system to system and handles long running buiness processes. These days the two are generally interlinked and workflow tends to handle some form of documents within the overall process that is being managed. This is a area that should be of most interest to you as it is the one area that is the heart of all businesses. See the ECM Model to get a view of what I am trying to get across here

Archival and Storage Management - Archiving denotes the ability to capture and maintain content in a secure and manageable repository for a defined period of time. So retention and dispoal rules generally apply here. Most common forms of archiving around file system archiving and e-mail archiving. Traditional ECM vendors that have come from records and document management have generally had e-mail integration early on, but have in the lst couple of years added e-mail archiving to the mix as demand has driven it. Storage Management denotes the capability to manage storage of the overall respository and to provide soem form of HSM type capabilities. There are not many vendors that can do this other than the software + hardware players such as EMC and HP.

Digital Asset Management - Here we are looking to support the capture, annotation, cataloguing, storage and retrieval of assets, such as digital photographs, animations, videos and music. Digital asset management in ECM is a new thing and while the services to build a DAM system are there they may or may not be realised by the organisation as such. This is one area where specialised solutions are still selling very much like web content management used to.

E-mail management - OK folks, here is the big one. Hands up all those you do not have an e-mail problem. Not too many hands there! Well the big area that is driving is e-mail archiving, but archiving is not records management and the real issue is really around managing the "business transactions" that are flowing through the e-mail systems. Most ECM vendors provide front end integration to Outlook or Notes Mail but rely heavily on the end user for intelligence to get the e-mail into a system. Archiving provides a great vacuum cleaner to capture everything. If there is one area that needs real sorting this is it.

Forms management - Heavily aligned with the process management area you should see this popping up everywhere. There are a lots of e-forms projects on the go with everything from claims process to the basics leave forms. To get value from this area it will be combined with collaboration and the process side. Once again the traditional ECM vendors are pulling the forms into the overall ECM suite.

Well that's all folks, 12 components with a little explaination on each. Good luck out there becuase in the ECM world we all need some.

ECM - MOSS 2007 Top 10 things to avoid

So MOSS 2007 is a great platform for driving collaboration and usability around getting documents and other electronic information.

Here are the top 10 things that you should avoid. OK so it's not just MOSS 2007 that these apply to. But given the amount of MOSS out there and the types of people involved it is a timely list.

1. No business objectives - Why are we doing this anyway? You have got to have a connection to the business objective that you are trying to solve. Otherwise you will get a File Server on steroids result. Lot's of messy content with a pretty interface.


2. No measures for success - If you don't know what you are doing then how can you measure it, I guess failure then comes as a complete surprise.


3. Setup.exe - Commonly called the "Nike" install; That's right, a straight install with no fore thought will spell mid term disaster. This generally indicates that all the other points that we are talking in this list will not have been covered up front. In that case, Good luck guys!


4. No Governance - You need sponsors and people to make this all happen past setup.exe, who will provide the high level air cover, own content, administer sites, decide and make changes and ... (take a breath here !).


5. Lets put is all on one box with no planning - Prior infrastructure planning for growth up front equals a real pain for the migration later on. Not to mention that you will also need to ask for more tin. At this point I will put in a plug for virtualisation, think about it, seriously!


6. No information architecture - If you don't know how content will be structures then you won't have a clue where things will go the chances are you will not find any of it later, on. Also you may as well welcome yourself to Site Collection hell right now.


7. No rollout plan past setup.exe - So now that's all installed what next, you better have a plan past setup.exe please. Who's first, why, what for? And what extension and development needs to be done up front before you get rolling?


8. No communication plan - What , how, for who and when?


9. No training - Sorry we have spent all the budget, you told me this was intuitive! Wrong answer, you need to plan for the training and make sensible decisions up front.


10. No backup, recover or DR plan - Things go wrong and this has now become a mission critical platform for enterprise content, what is you get out of gaol plan?

Oh, and did I forget testing? Oh, don't worry it will just work anyway, at least it does on my desktop!

ECM - MOSS Architecture.

I deal a lot with MOSS 2007 these days. I guess with $800M in sales and the massive massive marketing machine that Microsoft brings to bear you can avoid it. I believe that even Microsoft themselves have been surprised at the adoption of MOSS 2007 as a platform.

But putting that all aside what fascinates me, and drives me mad is the way that the MOSS 2007 information architecture hangs together. Why? well because I have dealt with other ECM systems before, you tend to come with some well ingrained expectations when you begin to look at MOSS. Expectations such as:

• A single repository for information that is single source, create once and find and edit anywhere


• The ability to set retention and disposal at a system level and configure for the information in context


• The ability to leverage information outside of organisational boundaries eg. have a policy document spread across all departments

So give some of these expectations I found that I had to do a mind bend when starting to dig under the covers of the MOSS platform. Microsoft has an architecture for MOSS that goes like this.

(Click the image to get an enlarged view)

From the diagram you can see that the Site Collection is the logical grouping bucket for information. Now most large organisations that deploy MOSS will have multiple site collections. But here is where the mind bend on my expectations start.


The following features of MOSS 2007 DO NOT work across Site Collections (SC's)

• Content Types - You will need to deploy content types across all other SC's
  
• Content by Query Web Part - aggregates across site(s) but not SC's
  
• Workflow - Only available to the site collection it is deployed to !!!
  
• Information Management and Retention Policies - Only set at the SC level
  
• Search - Certain features so not work across SC's
  
• Quotas - Want to control the space people use, this must be deployed across SC's as well
  

So this starts to create some interesting exercise.

Firstly for the Information Architect / records management experts as they try to make sense of how to construct a classification / metadata / security and access controls.

Secondly for the MOSS Administrators as they try to keep track of the deployment and changes to the information support features that need to be managed as well. This is a ripe area for the 3rd party developers to help and some have already identified the gap.

So the moral is, prior planning prevents a poor deployment !