Blog

By Cathy Dew

SharePoint 2016 has been released to manufacturing... and this begs the question: What SharePoint strategy is right for your organization? Welcome to the second webinar in our Plus16 series.

The format for these webinars is a brief presentation (~20 min.) followed by questions and answers from the audience. Addressing content migration during custom website development or intranet design, 2Plus2 President and CEO Cathy Dew kicked off the Plus16 webinar series with a resounding bang. In case you missed it, here are two options for catching up:

Watch the Video replay

 

Transcript: What SharePoint strategy is right for me?

Good morning West Coast and good afternoon East Coast. Welcome to a the second in our monthly Plus16 webinar series. Today we will delve into “What SharePoint strategy is right for me?” Thank you for taking the time to join us. We know that you are busy – so our goal is to be focused and to pack meaningful data into an efficient 30-minute window. The presentation will last about 20 minutes leaving 10 minutes for Q&A. So please drop your questions into the chat as we go through the presentation. We will be recording this session and sending you a link at the end.

My name is Cathy Dew and I am CEO & Information Architect for 2Plus2 Partners. I’ve also got Sally Dew our Creative Director and Anthony Baratta, CTO for 2Plus2. During this webinar we are going to talk about SharePoint and an approach to help you determine just what is the right SharePoint strategy for you.

Who is the target audience for today’s webinar and what are the expected outcomes?

This webinar is for anyone that already has or is seriously considering SharePoint as a solution for their Intranet, team sites (typically internal access), project sites (which may include external access), document management, etc.

At the end of this webinar you will have a good basic understanding of the options (on-premise vs in-the-cloud) and you will be equipped with the key questions and decisions that your organization needs to make as part of determining which SharePoint strategy is right for you.

Okay, I think we are ready to get started.

Why ask the question now?

SharePoint 2016 is out

On May 2^nd Sharepoint 2016 was released for MSDN Subscribers and Volume License Subscribers. For many medium- to large-size companies, SharePoint has been installed on-premise for potentially many years. SharePoint has been around for quite a while. 2016 is the 6^threlease of SharePoint, going back to 2001 and a new release approximately every 3 years.

• SharePoint 2007: Released in 2006, end of product life will be 2017

• SharePoint 2010: Released in 2010, end of product life will be 2020

• Office 365: Released in 2011 (with SharePoint2010 interface)

• SharePoint 2013: Released in 2012, end of product life will be 2023

• Office 365: Upgraded in 2013 (with SharePoint2013 interface)

Office 365 + SharePoint Online as a product offering is both robust and affordable via the subscription model

The “barriers” between the two product lines (Office and SharePoint) are disappearing. Both products enjoy updates about once a month. For many smaller companies, this offering has provided an affordable path to bringing SharePoint in-house.

With the commitment to Office 365 (and SharePoint Online) and the release of SharePoint 2016 with features to support a finessed “hybrid” SharePoint solution, a whole new model has opened up.

End-user features

Sites page pinning (to see all sites you are following), just like the very popular feature found in many social media apps.

There are a number of enhancements to the Document Library with SPO:

• Document pinning

• New Details pane shows information like properties, versioning

• A new Grid View

• Uploading or downloading files larger than 2 GB

There is now an Image and Video Preview for any images and videos posted to a document library. This "popup" is activated with via hover or click.

UI Changes and App Launcher are now aligned, the suite bar which had a blue back ground and is now been black. This means there is an almost seamless aligninment with Office 365 supporting the App launcher and the ability to quickly launch the apps.

Expanded Support for file names including special characters, like the &, ~, {, and } characters, file names with leading dots, file names that had a GUID, and file names which were longer than 128 characters. Note that characters such as % and # are still restricted and cannot be used in file names.

The Document Library UI has been enhanced to support sync, share, more directly next to the file name from the document list. And the document upload process is now much more robust with an improved UI that shows the progress.

Data + tool features

Sensitive Information Types and Data Loss Prevention

There are now 51 Sensitive Information Types like SSN, Credit Card No etc. that can used to write pattern rules to find out documents that exposed sensitive information. You can configure a filter using the Sensitive Type to drive management of these documents.

Fast Site Collection Creation improves the Site Collection creation performance by reducing Feature activation overhead. The time has been reduced from 40 sec to 2 sec which is an exponential improvement.

Centralized Document Deletion Policies are now available.

In-Place Hold Policy Centre site template helps manage policies defined across site collections.

And FINALLY, there is SMTP Connection encryption for outgoing email.

Server administration + performance features

Enhanced Software boundaries in support of:

• Content DB Size has been increased to TB’s vs 2013 recommendation of 200GB

• Number of Site Collections per Content DB is now 100,000 vs. 2013 recommendation of 2000

• Max File Upload Size increased to 10 GB vs 2013 Default is 250 MB (which could be increased to 2 GB)

• Search Indexing is increased to 500 million items per Service Application vs 2013 which stated “up to 100 million items”

Mini Roles that optimize the functioning of the servers in a Share Point farm based on the role they have been assigned – limit to just what makes sense resulting in more efficient servers

Microsoft Project Server 2016 (PWA) integrated to SharePoint 2016 – it comes as a Service Application in SharePoint 2016

Zero downtime patching, with SharePoint 2016 patching can be done online by minimizing the down time, if any.

Enhanced PowerShell scripts (for SharePoint administrators) added 115 new PowerShell scripts have been added to support SharePoint.

But the really big news is “hybrid” features

Cloud Hybrid Search allowing you to index all your crawled content, across on-premise and Office 365. Search results contain both on-premises and Office 365 content. (Note that this will also be pushed to Share Point 2013 as an update.)

Hybrid OneDrive and Site Features is a new feature that allowing users to use OneDrive as their personal repository instead of the On-premises OneDrive or MySites. This feature basically allows users to continue using their On-premises SharePoint farm while providing users with an easy way to store, share, and collaborate in the cloud with OneDrive for Business in Office 365. So you really get a One-stop shop for results.

Durable links introduced in Share Point 2016 mean a file can have its name changed, or even move locations and the link will still work. You have a permanent URL for each documents.

Increased number of Timer jobs with a total count of 226 – many in support of new Retention Policy Site templates and Auto Indexing .

SharePoint Logging API (SLAPI) extending existing analytics component to understand how users interact with SharePoint.

SharePoint 2016’s goal is to bridge Office 365 with on-premises installations for those who can’t put everything in the cloud. Now you know! Or you know more now.

So what are the key criteria to help you decide?

One size doesn't fit all. The answer really is – it depends – there is some complexity to the answer.

What is your current SP investment?

Where you are in your SP lifecycle? What version of SharePoint are you currently running?Maybe you’ve just migrated to 2013 and only stuck your toe into the shallow end of Office 365 (or you aren’t using it at all). If that is the case, then it may not be a good time to take on a rather massive effort.

What kind of Microsoft Licensing contract do you currently have, and when does it expire?If you have a 5-year subscription, you need to time this...

How much customization have you already done to SharePoint?Customization using Farm Solutions and Custom Web Parts (olde way) has been deprecated -- not supported in the cloud -- you are running code in locally that you won't be allowed to run in the cloud.

 

What about the costs?

What is your budget?For many organizations, the cost of what it takes to set up SharePoint is a real consideration. And is it capital expenses or operating expenses.On-Premise – include additional software costs (MS SQL), server hardware costs and staff support costs at a minimum.SharePoint Online is part of your Office 365 plan and is billed monthly per user.

Where are you in your IT purchase cycle?How are you currently paying for your licenses?Where are you in your upgrade cycle? 

 

Comfort with the cloud

What is your comfort level on cloud? What is your MS Office suite strategy? As you know, there is a global trend toward subscription-based software in the cloud

What is your company’s culture as it relates to “controlling” your data? Where are your backups? How do you manage ownership of data? Do you operate in countries that control your ability to export data?
 

Sizing up your IT department

How big is your IT department? And what is your allocation of IT resources? Do you have resources to support / manage the hardware and software (e.g. MS SQL) that run your on premise solutions?

How much of you IT department do you want to devote to SharePoint? Many will reasonably argue that keeping hardware and systems up and running is may not be the best use of IT. Instead they should be focused on solving business problems. This is one of the big advantages of going with a cloud solution.

If this is you… then consider this SharePoint strategy

You decided to skip upgrading to SharePoint 2013. Now may be the time migrate to the latest version and move to a cloud environment.

You have a lot of Farm Solutions and Custom Web Parts. You should probably stick with on premise while you migrate your custom code to the new App Model.

You are already on SharePoint 2013. Setup a hybrid solution with part of your SharePoint installation remaining on premise with other part moving to the cloud. E.g. Team / Departmental / Project sites move to the cloud, and your custom solutions stay on site.

You are due for a brand new information architecture review of your SharePoint installation. Use SharePoint online as your proof of design / sketch board while you work through how you want to re-architect your intranet.

Thank you for your time today.

Coming up next month Tuesday, June 7^th at 10 am PT, 1 pm ET