In-Depth

SharePoint Gets (Mostly) Top Marks

Once clear of the administrative learning curve, users give SPS 2003 high marks for ease of use and integration features.

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 10/01/2004

SPS 2003 boasts tight integration with Office 2003, a revamped user interface (UI), new features that help users more easily navigate SharePoint sites and SQL Server integration. The product does present a somewhat steep administrative learning curve, and upgrading from SPS 1.0 is no chip shot due to a lack of migration tools and new .NET underpinnings. But the experiences of several adopters suggest that, after adding up the pluses and minuses, SPS 2003 comes out solidly in the black.

The consensus among users we surveyed is that SPS 1.0 lacks many common usability features and frequently requires the intervention of IT personnel to perform mundane tasks, such as the delegation of users or content owners.

That's a significant problem given that SharePoint is intended to make it easy for users to share and collaborate on documents by publishing them to internal Web sites that they create on the fly. The product also includes knowledge management and document management features.

Staffing and Training
Maintenance—particularly with respect to staffing requirements—is one area in which adopters can wring significant cost savings out of SPS 2003 vis-à-vis its predecessor. "Typically IT gets it up and running and hands over the keys," says Mauro Cardarelli, a consultant with systems integrator Knowledge Management Inc. "SPS does not require dedicated [IT human] resources." Because data can be split among many different owners in the SPS 2003 model, he says, "the time spent updating content is only a small fraction of job responsibilities."

David Lowe, a consultant with systems integrator and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Intellinet, agrees. SPS 2003 allows IT organizations to "delegate adding users and content down to the department, division or even the user level," he says, whereas its predecessor required IT intervention to accomplish these tasks.

David Goebel, a SharePoint administrator with the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (CUIAB), paints a somewhat less rosy administration picture. He recently completed an upgrade from SharePoint Portal Server 1.0 to SPS 2003 on a four-way Dell Xeon box supporting 900 users. While he is indeed the only administrator overseeing CUIAB's SPS 2003 migration effort, he has his hands full.

"There are a ton of admin screens for settings, security, etc. I've been working with them for the past six months and I still don't know exactly how many admin screens there are and where they're all located," says Goebel. "Administration [in SPS 2003] is a fairly difficult task."

As the only admin minding a 900-person SharePoint 2003 implementation, David Goebel has his hands full.

While SPS 2003 may present a significant learning curve for administrators, the opposite is the case for end users, says Jeff Centimano, a principal consultant with system integrator Levi, Ray & Shoup Inc. "Training—or lack thereof—is my favorite thing about SharePoint. With absolutely no training at all a user can navigate the basic functions of SharePoint and find what they need," he says. "With a quick 30-minute lunch and learn session we have empowered customer staff with enough knowledge to post content, contribute to discussions, and even modify basic Web Parts." Web Parts let users build and customize Web pages in SharePoint sites.

It does take a high degree of coordination to realize the full benefit of SPS 2003, however. "Proper planning at installation time with your infrastructure team, DBA, Web design team, content owners and a professional consultant will ensure your IT department is not spending time updating the portal," Lowe says.

Kenton Gardinier, a senior consultant with IT staffing specialist Convergent Computing, says IT must also solicit input from business users during the SPS planning phases, to ensure that business needs map to technical requirements. "Business units and IT must work closely together on most issues, including sizing the solution, developing the user interface, setting user expectations, integrating outside sources of information and much more," he says.

Integration Galore
Users and consultants alike laud the tight ties between the revamped SharePoint product and Office 2003, including tighter coupling with Outlook 2003 and Word 2003. One upshot of this is that many SharePoint features—such as meeting workspaces and share attachments—are seamlessly integrated into Outlook, such that some users aren't even aware they're using a separate application, Lowe says. In the same way, he notes, SPS 2003 installs a "Shared Workspace" task pane in Excel 2003, Word 2003 and other Office applications, which enables users to collaborate and share documents "with little or no interaction with the IT staff."

Lowe is smitten with SPS 2003's revamped Web Parts infrastructure. Web Parts is built on top of ASP.NET and provides a .NET object model that contains classes that derive from and extend ASP.NET classes, Lowe says. Users can add Web Parts at runtime, assuming that they have permission to do so, and enable a variety of scenarios, such as:

• The creation of sites and pages
• Management of the site user roster
  
• Storage of Web Part customizations, including shared and personal property settings
  
• Administration of site backups and storage limits
  
• Assignment of users to customizable site groups

Lowe is also keen on SPS 2003's new "My Site" feature. My Site provides a repository—clearly accessible from the SharePoint UI—in which users can store content and control who can access it. "This makes it quite simple for non-technical users to contribute to the portal without even knowing the complex posting action taking place in the background," he says. "This personal site has a private storage area for personal content and work in progress, as well as a public storage area for easily sharing the projects and documents they are working on." The personal site includes some AD profile information, providing information to others about each user's role.

Indeed, Gardinier gives SPS 2003 high marks for its integration with AD, noting the two tie together easily and that SPS is flexible in terms of what information it can pull from the directory. "For instance, it has the ability to pull from not only the entire directory but also from select containers like an Organizational Unit," he says.

Knowledge Management's Cardarelli, for his part, insists that SPS 2003's best new feature is a no-brainer: "[The] SQL Server backend—it adds scalability and allows IT folks to see and access all the data directly."

Migration Experiences and Lessons Learned
Based on feedback from users who have done so, organizations mulling SPS 2003 upgrades should expect to encounter a hitch or two.

CUIAB's Goebel, for example, says his ongoing SPS 2003 migration has been "difficult," mainly because of the absence of built-in migration tools. "Testing the migration process and then getting the new portal to match the look and feel of our existing portal has taken six months," he says. "We're going to simulate the entire upgrade process multiple times until we can execute the upgrade without a problem."

Some users reported issues with Microsoft's downloadable migration tools, "Spin" and "Spout"—or, more properly, SPIN.EXE and SPOUT.EXE—which are designed to automate the process of exporting data from SharePoint 1.0 and importing it into SPS 2003. Spout exports the version history of legacy SharePoint sites into XML or flat file formats, while Spin imports SPS Areas or Windows SharePoint Services document libraries. For many users, the tools work as advertised. But others complain of lengthy import/export times and Microsoft's own USENET groups are littered with the carcasses of Spin and Spout migration efforts that somehow went awry.

These tools, while undeniably important, don't address a range of migration issues, such as the requirement that organizations re-code their SharePoint 1.0 Web Parts for SPS 2003 and its new .NET underpinnings (see "SPS Migration Tips"). As a result, says Lowe, the dreaded "P" word—planning, and plenty of it—is critical to the success of any large SharePoint migration. "All tools, including Microsoft's Spin and Spout, have issues," he says, suggesting—ever philosophically, "It's a great time to do a serious purge of your content and documentation."

Security
Users give SPS 2003 high marks for security, with Cardelli pointing specifically to the use of IIS authentication and role-based security as solid features. But he also has a few nits to pick. One is that users can see some links they don't have access to and get a pop-up requesting credentials. "Microsoft says it is for performance, but most find it very annoying," he says.

Similarly, Goebel says that he's both pleased and a little overwhelmed by SPS 2003's security features. "There's a lot of security all over the place and it takes time to figure out where what I'm looking for is."

Lowe points out that, at the portal level, you can only set security on an area, not the document library or file level. "But in fairness, the product's a collaboration tool and [is designed to] lend itself to sharing of information," he says.

In Search of ROI
Most SPS 2003 adopters haven't commissioned return-on-investment studies, but expect there's substantial ROI to be had. For example, says Cardarelli, once an IT organization implements SPS 2003 and brings its personnel up to speed on its new management features—no mean feat, as we've seen—it's a mostly turn-key environment. In this respect, he says, IT can effectively "hand-off" SPS 2003 to business users.

"We help clients split data ownership responsibilities, based on content. The interface is so easy to use it truly becomes a community-run tool," Cardarelli says. "There is no burden on any one person or group to maintain the portal. The [total cost of ownership] is minimized through the easy administration and the natural dissection of content."

Of course you can't get any ROI from new software if employees won't use it. At CIUAB, the original SPS fared pretty well in that respect. "Users really like it for the most part and use it regularly," Goebel says. Given SPS 2003's surfeit of user-friendly features, such as MySite and Shared Workspace, he expects the follow-up will be a smash. Such features allow users to collaborate more effectively, with minimal intervention from IT, resulting in productivity gains for both groups.

Cardarelli identifies several common SPS 2003 ROI benefits, starting with more efficient information reuse. Users often waste large chunks of time searching for documents and other resources on local or network file shares. In an SPS 2003 environment, the same searches take just seconds, thanks to SharePoint's integrated search facility. SPS 2003 can also help reduce e-mail traffic by eliminating the round-robin exchanges that occur when a user is looking for a document that addresses a particular issue. Finally, features like the SharePoint "Announcements List" (which provides a channel for broadcasting information to users), along with standardized templates, can bolster corporate branding efforts by ensuring consistency of corporate messaging.

All in all, SPS 2003 adopters say that the revamped SharePoint is a worthy upgrade to the occasionally frustrating SPS 1.0.