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Business Productivity at Its Best Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint

White Paper

Why upgrade to SharePoint 2010?

A scenario-based illustration of how SharePoint 2010 can benefit your business

White Paper

May 2010

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Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 3

Abstract

This paper shows that Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the

enterprise and the Internet. It can deliver business benefits to organizations, by enabling IT to achieve

three main objectives:

Deliver the best productivity experience

Cut costs through a unified infrastructure

Rapidly respond to business needs

In the current economic climate, it is essential for organizations to enable their people to achieve higher

level of productivity and to extract more value from their IT infrastructure. Organizations need to harness

the collaborative power of the both of these, to deliver a flexible and agile business model, where solution

and platform deployment, development, and management integrate to provide an easy to use, easy to

own business environment.

SharePoint 2010 builds on the capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to deliver leadership

in each of these areas. This paper looks at the enhanced capabilities and functionality offered by

SharePoint 2010 by outlining a series of common business scenarios that show how deployment of

SharePoint 2010 can lead to direct benefits for users, administrators, and developers, which, of course,

means bottom-line benefits for the whole organization.

This paper highlights some of the main investment areas decision makers need to be aware of when

evaluating SharePoint 2010. It is not a comprehensive review of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 or

a comparison to earlier releases or to alternative products. This paper also describes key areas where

SharePoint 2010 extends the capabilities business users have already enjoyed with Office SharePoint

Server 2007.


Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5

Deliver the Best Productivity Experience ........................................................................ 7

Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure ........................................................................ 13

Rapidly Respond to Business Needs .............................................................................. 20

So What Is Your Next Step? ............................................................................................ 26


Introduction

SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform that enables you to deliver the best productivity

experience through a user interface that is very similar to Microsoft Office and so I familiar to most

business users. Productivity is further enhanced by SharePoint 2010 through formal and informal business

communities, within the enterprise and beyond. SharePoint 2010 also delivers the ability to manage

content for enterprise businesses, from creation to disposition and throughout the information life-cycle.

Whether deployed on-premise or as hosted services, these integrated capabilities are enhanced by Search

technologies and make it possible to rapidly respond to business needs through self-service business

insight and faster solution deployment. The consolidation of business collaboration solutions in

SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to save money through lower training costs, increased IT productivity,

and enterprise-wide management tools, all as part of a governable and platform.

This Magic Quadrant graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner reports are available upon request from Microsoft.

In the 2009 Gartner reviews, Microsoft is placed in the leader quadrant in Gartner Magic Quadrant1 reports for Enterprise Content Management, Horizontal Portals, Information Access, Unified Communications, and Social Software platforms.

1 The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a

marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology…


This Magic Quadrant graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner reports are available upon request from Microsoft.

Microsoft has upgraded the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform to extend the platform’s capabilities,

to deliver greater functionality to its customers. It might seem easy to say, ―We are already using the

market leader, so why upgrade?‖ but the most effective and profitable businesses know that it is essential

to always move forward; just as Microsoft has done by delivering additional functionality in the SharePoint

2010 platform.

The focus of this paper is to highlight how SharePoint 2010 builds on a position of market leadership and

strength that you have already recognized, to enable you to further develop your organization. In addition

to this, SharePoint 2010 enables you to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your IT services,

through enhanced management tools and flexible deployment options.

…users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant

to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.


Deliver the Best Productivity Experience

The current economic climate means that it is more important than ever for companies to invest in

business solutions that enable staff to become more productive, quickly. For IT, this means delivering new,

but familiar, user platforms that enable users to collaborate and communicate with colleagues in a way

that fits seamlessly with the way that they work; whether that is in an office, at home, or on the road.

Effective IT solutions need to go beyond basic communication. It is essential to empower users, so that

they can complete their work more efficiently, without the need to involve IT staff to complete business

tasks. These requirements sound tough to deliver, but SharePoint 2010 provides a unique blend of high-

function technology and ease of use that enables you to deliver the best productivity experience to your

staff, so that they can deliver business benefit, while maintaining the governance and compliance of your

platform.

Scenario

Help people be more productive, while accelerating technology adoption and innovation.

Let’s have a look at some day-to-day business situations where the productivity features of SharePoint

2010 can really deliver value. In the first scenario a project manager, Chris, needs to pull together a project

team fast. She has a new project on gears, which has short timescales and, to hit the first milestone, she

knows that she will need to draw on expertise and experience from across the company; that means

across the world.

Chris prioritizes the tasks that she needs to complete. First she needs a site where she can put the project

information and where her team – once she has one – will be able to collaborate on getting the

documentation they need.

Delivering project sites quickly

As a project manager, Chris has the authority to create sites on SharePoint 2010. She can use the Ribbon user

interface to manage site permissions, rather than having to go to an administrator. This means that the site is

up and running quickly, and without taking up valuable IT resources.

The Ribbon User Interface, now part of each SharePoint 2010 site, provides users with a familiar and rich user

experience that maximizes productivity and minimizes training. This means that Chris can start to edit her site

without having to get specialist help or even open a manual.

Just like the Ribbon on Chris’ copy of Office 2010, the SharePoint Ribbon is contextual and only shows as

active actions she can perform.


Delivering project sites quickly

The site is usable straight away, so

Chris can start populating it with

project documents and even insert rich

media, replacing the default graphic

with some relevant video footage, to

introduce the project and help her

team become productive more

quickly.

Wiki-style editing makes creating and

updating SharePoint sites easier and

more efficient. Chris has got used to

the Wikis that are available in Office

SharePoint Server 2007, but now she

can edit the look and feel of any page with the same ease.

The new Ribbon Edit menu, together with

the ability to edit a team site using wiki-

style editing, makes it easy and intuitive

to share data with colleagues in a clear

and visual manner. Once the data is in

place, Chris can apply a theme to the

team site that uses either the company’s

PowerPoint template or the company’s

branding colors.

Within a fraction of the time it would

have taken otherwise, and by using

functionality that is both easy and

intuitive, Chris has a team site that is

ready-to-go, so she can mobilize her new

team quickly and effectively. She has

achieved all of this without the need to involve the IT department, saving IT resources and time. All she needs

to do now is to assemble her project team.

Find the right people for your project

Once the project site is set-up and ready to go, the project manager needs to identify the people in the

company who can help with their expertise on gears and provide advice on the relevant shipping

requirements. The company is structured by disciplines—marketing, engineering, and so forth—and not by

products, so there are people in all of the divisions that could potentially help on this project. Traditionally this

would have meant Chris sending out speculative e-mails to contacts she already knows in the organization, or,

even worse, global e-mails. Results would be slow to gather and good fortune would play a big part in finding


Find the right people for your project

the right people.

Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 removes the

element of chance from the team

development process. Chris uses the

Expertise Search facility to run a simple

search query using ―gears‖ as the search

criteria, and people who have gears

experience are listed in order of relevance.

She can then refine the result set by

selecting the discipline she’s interested in,

through the context sensitive Refine

Results pane.

When she has a list of potential team

members, such as Tai Lee, she can explore

relevant expertise by entering to the My

Site of each of the people shown on the

results and by viewing content their

recently authored content, relevant blog

posts, and so forth. This link between the

SharePoint Search capabilities and

SharePoint Communities means that Chris

can review up-to-date personal

information in users’ My Sites. The

company encourages users to keep these

personal profiles updated, and also

synchronizes user profile information from a range of external sources automatically through SharePoint User

Profile Synchronization.

By using the SharePoint 2010 Organizational Browser, Chris can review each team member’s reporting

structure. When potential experts are identified, she can use the new Note Board or integrated presence

provided by Office Communications Server to contact the right people and initiate a discussion with them

about her project requirements. No hopeful e-mails and fast, accurate results, which is exactly what Chris

needs at the moment.

Managing content within organizational governance

Now that Chris has her team together she needs to get the right documentation out to them. However, she

knows that there is a currently a hold on some of the documentation by the legal department, as there is an

investigation because of a query by the vendor’s competitors. Normally this would mean a lot of painstaking

research, but Chris knows that she can search for the relevant documents using the metadata-driven



navigation features available to her in Office Word 2010.

By using this she can identify the controlled documents as they are in a single Document Set, which means

that they are associated together. She can declare these documents a record. This activates an associated

Workflow that notifies her team that these documents are currently under hold from the legal team.

Chris decides to keep the teams focused on their work by publishing a chart of the top performers. This will

motivate the both those who are delivering and those who may be falling behind in their work. It is essential

that this is a real-time system, so that team members get immediate feedback on their efforts. She has also

been asked to provide this information to team member line managers for the senior management personnel

reports.

Currently the content development tasks

are captured in a shared Excel workbook,

which all of the team can access through

Excel Services, and an external line-of-

business (LOB) system. She uses the Excel

Web Parts to deploy a team dashboard that

displays a graph of content output against

team members. This does not show the

underlying data, just the graphical analysis,

so that it is clear to each team member

how they are performing against their

targets and the other project members. She

also deploys a Visio Services graphical

representation of data on the LOB platform.

All of this information appears on the

project home page for all team members

when they open the team site.

For the management reports she can

produce both the graphical output and the

granular data represented in each graphic.

She uses PerformancePoint Services, which is now an integral component of the SharePoint 2010 enterprise

license, to develop a dashboard that shows the Excel chart, together with key performance indicators, and a

scorecard. Line managers for each team member can review the performance of their staff, automating

performance reporting and streamlining the flow of business information.



Use of dashboards

visualizes insights into

business information far

more easily than was

previously the case—even

with shared documents.

The team, and their

managers, can readily see

progress, without the need

to generate or request

updated information.

Enabling user access, anywhere, anytime

A sales team receives an RFP from a new customer who is taking bids from multiple vendors. It’s a

competitive account, so it is important to respond quickly and put the company’s best foot forward with a

professional and error free response document. The sales team needs input from the account sales team and

some of Chris’s project team

members. It is not possible to pull

all of these people together to

develop the response, as some are

on-site with customers and others

are located at different offices.

Usually this would mean a series of

e-mails requests, with different

contributors adding content to a

single document—when they can

access it on their laptop computers.

Worse, this could mean that there

are multiple documents that have

to be merged, with contradictory

changes, and a time consuming set


Enabling user access, anywhere, anytime

of e-mail threads to finally get consensus.

Thanks to the extensive content delivery options in SharePoint 2010, sales staff can access and edit the

response document on a medium that suits them. This saves time as they can collaborate regardless of

whether they’re on the road or at a customer location, where they don’t have access to Internet Explorer or

their Office applications. Users who are travelling can access the RPF and response documents by using

mobile access with SharePoint Mobile. Users who do not have access to their Office Suite applications can use

Office Web Applications, irrespective of which browser they have installed, because SharePoint 2010 supports

Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

For users who are

away from the office,

SharePoint 2010

provides SharePoint

Workspaces. With

these users can take

content offline and

synchronized

updates later, so they

can be productive

when they have no

access to their

corporate network.

When everyone has

finished, there’s no

need to spend time

or risk introducing

errors by combining

multiple documents.

The sales executive

can review and polish

the response document with the easy-to-use formatting options that Microsoft Word 2010 provides. Now the

sales team has a professional, complete proposal to deliver to the customer in a flash before the competition!


Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure

It is always important to get the most out of your IT infrastructure, but in the current economic climate it

is essential for business systems to be flexible and offer efficiencies across a variety of business areas, to

minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Getting the most out of business systems is a common goal across all organization; but how can you unify

your infrastructure without compromising on functionality? There are many core benefits for a business

when it deploys a unified infrastructure; some of the main ones are:

Consolidation of licensing and hardware costs

Streamlined system management including less training and maintenance

Fewer system interfaces business users need to learn and interact with

Visualization of business information through streamlined data integration

Agile, yet secure, content publishing, both inside and outside the organization

For many companies the most expensive part of IT is the ability to integrate diverse systems, so you need

to invest in a business platform that enables users to see their data—irrespective of which database is it

stored in—through familiar applications. You also need this to be easy to do, so you do not compound

the cost of solution provision with the need to employ expensive IT resources to design, deploy, and then

manage your business applications.

Closely associated with this is the need to put publishing into the hands of those who create the

information, but without the need to worry about information sensitivity or governance. For most

businesses information publishing, particularly on to public Web sites, involves employing a professional

designers and developer to take copy, images, and multimedia from the business and transform it into

Web content. Each step of must be managed, because the people who publish the content are not

experts in what the content says.

Some companies feel forced to deploy multiple platforms to deliver intranet, extranet, and Internet

solutions. This may be because they have concerns about security, scalability, or functionality. Each

additional platform increases the TCO of your business infrastructure. Perhaps outsourcing looks like the

right solution, but you may be worried that this is a difficult decision to reverse; once you go to an outside

hosted solution, will you be able to bring your Internet or intranet Web sites back in-house?

Of course, multiple platforms come with intrinsic administration costs, in both management tools and

skills. You want to have the best system management possible, but this can prove expensive to maintain.

You may also need to employ additional support and development resources, and pay to maintain or buy

in specialist knowledge.

Scenario

Deliver end-to-end business productivity by using a single platform.

While Office SharePoint Server 2007 always offered intranet and Internet publishing capabilities,

SharePoint 2010 extends this functionality by updates to line of business integration with Business

Connectivity Services (BCS), which offers easier connectivity integration and read/write capabilities against

external data sources, and even closer compliance with widely used World Wide Web Consortium


standards for Web page design. This package means that you can minimize support and development

overheads, focusing on core, reusable skills both in your IT department and across your wider business

community. You can develop in-house design, development, and management skills based on a

consistent architecture, minimizing duplication of effort, training, and consultancy costs. For business

users you can provide secure access to business information through familiar business tools, such as Excel,

Visio, and Access. They can interrogate business information repositories by means of predefined

connections, available through BCS.

SharePoint 2010 is also designed for deployment either on-premise or in a hosted, or cloud, environment.

This means that companies can reassess their infrastructure and flexibly deploy SharePoint solutions

across a range of platform tiers, maximizing their IT dollar expenditure. This unified Web collaboration

and publishing environment means that you can streamline your environment without compromising on

functionality.

Let’s see how a unified infrastructure can benefit Contoso, and help Chris with her development of the

Gear project. Teams are often fluid in their make-up, as business changes and new challenges arise. As a

PM, Chris needs to have agile platforms to ensure that her team can perform at maximum efficiency. But

this also has to happen within a budget, so it is essential that Contoso has flexibility that is tightly

integrated with cost management.

Consolidating information access to streamline user productivity

The Gears project team members need to access data from a range of existing LOB systems across the

organization. Some of these are Microsoft platform data sources, such as SQL Server database engines. Others

are datasets managed as part of an SAP implementation. Away from the line of business data access, the team

commonly uses social computing functionality to share their thoughts and discuss ideas informally.

Traditionally this meant Chris, and the team members, would need access to a range of business solutions,

some of which may be browser-based, while others required client applications to access applications and

information.

Rather than have project team members use interfaces specific to each of these data sources, Chris uses the

Business Connectivity Services to surface information in the SharePoint 2010 environment.


Consolidating information access to streamline user productivity

She can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create the connections and even the page for the Gears site. Just

like SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer has the Ribbon UI, so that she can immediately see which tools and

components are available for use.

Much of this data can be rendered for browsers by using out-of-the-box Web Parts and other services

available with SharePoint 2010, such as PerformancePoint Services and Excel Services. These enable Chris to

deploy common dashboards for users, which she can tailor to render data specific to each of the users in the

team. This centralizes project data and minimizes business costs and inefficiency. Users do not need to train

on new interfaces and Contoso can minimize costs on the purchase, deployment, and support of additional

client software licenses.

The SharePoint Designer development environment provides the right tool to deploy content access pages

without the need to employ developer resources for the project, minimizing costs and providing streamlined

development. In addition to these cost and time savings, this means that users do not need to retrain or be

furnished with additional client software.

The extensible nature of search means that Chris’ team can also search LOB data repositories through the

connections made available through BCS. There is no impact on security, because SharePoint 2010 trims all

search results, so that if a user does not have access to a document or record he or she does not see them

displayed in their search results.


Taking SharePoint to the Internet for easy content publishing

The Gear Project proceeds on schedule, with some documentation and marketing content from Chris’ team

published on a section of the Contoso Internet-facing Web site. The Marketing Director contacts Chris when a

competitor launches a new gear assembly unexpectedly. He says that it is essential that Contoso gets

information about their new product range into the marketplace in order to maintain their competitive edge.

He requests that Chris puts additional pre-launch collateral on to the company Web site.

Because Contoso uses SharePoint for the Internet to publish information on the Web, Chris can quickly create

professional pages that she can populate with information already available on the company intranet, because

she has be granted appropriate permissions to do so by Central IT, as part of her role. The Ribbon UI provides

easy to use options for formatting and populating the new page. She selects lists, so that she can render

product documentation, and the SharePoint 2010 Silverlight video Web Part. SharePoint 2010 supports a

range of metadata options, and Chris enables site users to rate and comment on the movie so that she can

monitor market reaction.

Contoso includes FAST search technology for its internal and Internet users. The enhanced rich user

experience, particularly provision of thumbnail previews for a range of content, including multimedia, has

proved to be very popular with users – both in Contoso and externally.


Taking SharePoint to the Internet for easy content publishing

She tasks several team members to populate the new site with market ready information. This is easy to do,

because the team members are already familiar with the one-click publishing capabilities of SharePoint 2010

and, of course, they can continue to use their familiar Office 2010 tools to develop content. The team can

select from the gear assembly videos to populate the video Web Part, so that the page is more informative

and engaging for users.

In addition to this she configures a blog so that her team can add new information quickly regarding new

features. Bloggers can publish direct from Word 2010, which streamlines the process, saving time and effort.

She extends this functionality to enable customers to add comments and ask questions by adding a

discussion page. Through this she can gauge customer opinion of the new gear assembly and respond to

questions that arise. The blog and the discussion page are controlled by an approval workflow, so she can be

sure that no information that is not yet ready to be published appears in the public domain.

Chris achieves all of this without the need to involve the IT department. This clearly saves time and cost, and

the unified platform also ensure that IT does not need to expend additional support or development staff for

on unplanned projects, because the project team skills and experience of working on the intranet site are

directly transferable to the Internet site.


Deploying platforms to fit business needs

The project scope widens, as Contoso acquires a new company. This change means that the project needs to

include input from staff from the additional group. Currently, this subsidiary does not have a SharePoint

Products and Technologies platform, so there is no option for direct integration of information. However,

there are several options open to the project manager to make project information available to the new team

members:

• Deploy a new SharePoint 2010 environment in the new division

• Extend access to the new team members by enabling them to work as remote users

• Implement SharePoint On-line in a hosted environment

The IT department of the recent acquisition is fully committed maintaining their current infrastructure, so the

decision is made to implement a hosted SharePoint 2010 environment hosted by Microsoft.

This cloud-based solution addresses the short term requirements, with users able to share information and

work collaboratively. There is also great flexibility, as the project can extend the functionality of the hosted

environment as required, with no additional pressure on the in-house support staff.

This solution may continue into the longer term or the organization can decide to extend the in-house

SharePoint 2010 environment. There are several benefits to this option, beyond the inclusion of remote staff

on the team. The flexible nature of SharePoint 2010 means that there will be no need to retrain staff as

policies change or new business challenges arise. It also limits the danger of islands of technical expertise and

business information across the organization.


Providing enterprise scalable business solutions

The Internet site for the new Gear Project is proving very popular with team members, who are blogging on a

range of issues. New pages, in addition to the discussions forum and blogs are starting to appear, and Chris

wants to be sure that the Web-facing content is appropriate to the market. She can see from the rating tags

that the movie is popular, but she wants some more general details, without having to ask users to rate every

page. She discusses this with one of the SharePoint administrators, Alan, who says he can tell her which pages

take the most hits by reviewing the report logs for the site, which shows which pages are receiving the most

visitors.

The analysis is simple for the administrator, because SharePoint 2010 provides Web Analytics out-of-the-box.

From the review information Chris can see that the social computing features of the Gear pages are proving

very popular. Browsers seem to enjoy adding discussion points and questions to the forum, and the team

blog consistently gets lots of hits; consumers seem to enjoy having access to the project team. She decides

that she should extend the social computing capabilities of the site. She approaches the product team, who

are designing the gear assembly and other Contoso products, and suggests that they should also start to blog

on the site. The product team also uses SharePoint 2010 to manage their development documentation on the

intranet. They have a team wiki where they maintain a central resource for product design and maintenance

documentation, so it is easy for them to start blogging on the Contoso Internet site.

It is also clear that

page with the

Silverlight movie she

included for the

Marketing Director

has proved very

popular with Contoso

customers. This

feedback means that

she can ensure that

the site provides the

most engaging

content, based on

metrics for user page

hits, rather than

speculation.

She asks the site

administrator to provide reports on changes to the site activity, so that she can continue to monitor customer

usage, which will help to indicate when it would be beneficial to encourage design and functionality changes

across the Contoso Internet site. Because Contoso uses a single platform it is easy and quick to assess the

popularity of pages across the site. Chris also expresses her concern that as the number of hits increase and

the content becomes more complex there may be degradation in performance. Alan assures her that he is

already monitoring the health of the site, through the integral SharePoint 2010 analysis reports.


Providing enterprise scalable business solutions

These reports preempt problems by warning him of potential issues in areas such as security, performance,

and configuration. Alan explains that he can even define responses to problems that arise, so that SharePoint

2010 will take remedial actions automatically.

Rapidly Respond to Business Needs

Increased pressure on organization to deliver within tighter budgets means that it is even more important

to minimize time-to-market and encourage manageable innovation. SharePoint 2010 enables users—end

users through to professional developers—to build business customization on a single, centrally

administered platform. This means that the people who best understand the business have the tools and

infrastructure to enable them to deploy the right solution—fast. As an example, SharePoint 2010 includes

SharePoint Designer 2010, which makes it possible to develop solutions without the need to program any

code. It works with Business Connectivity Services to provide all users with bi-directional interaction with

line-of-business data. This means faster solutions and minimizes demands on the IT department, by

enabling users to develop solutions that conform to an organization’s governance and compliance

policies.

But how can you provide this responsive, rich development environment for users and professional

development staff? You need to provide an application development platform that provides user tools, as

well as developer tools, that fit within a secure solution strategy.

Scenario

Enable people across the organization to customize the platform to fit their needs.

SharePoint 2010 delivers business agility, by providing tools and functionality that enables information

workers to respond to business challenges. Importantly, this is not done in an improvised fashion.

SharePoint 2010 is built to ensure that organizations can maintain control and governance, while

providing flexibility and performance to their staff. Central to this is the ability of staff to integrate line of

business information into composite solutions. Composite Applications, or composites, enable

information workers to combine business functions, often by using SharePoint Designer, to deliver a

unique business solution that fits their business requirement exactly. When you have ensured that the

solution is robust, you can provision this functionality to others in the organization. This means that

business users can design their own solutions securely, without the need to employ IT developer

resources, who are working on more complex SharePoint 2010 business applications

For more complex tasks, specialist developers can use popular professional tools, such as Visual Studio

2010, to create business solutions. Visual Studio 2010 has SharePoint specific components to streamline

application development. Let’s see how SharePoint 2010 agile solution development can extend the

business impact of the Chris and the Gears project.


Chris and the Gear Project are delivering real business benefits, and they are now working closely with

other parts of the company who are designing and running test manufacturing runs of the gear

assemblies. This often means that Chris and her team have to request information and data from divisions

who use specialist software in their work. Let’s see how SharePoint 2010 enables the team to deliver new

solutions to these business challenges.

Enabling users to create business solutions

The Gear Project needs to maintain close correspondence with the Production and Test Division, which is

working on product manufacture. One of the key elements of this is to maintain awareness of production

issues, such as missing the KPIs for the Mean Time Between Failure targets. It would be time-consuming to

have production staff reporting this data throughout the product development, so Chris proposes that they

should have a workflow that automatically flags exceptions from the production line.

This streamlines information flow, and also means that they can isolate the exact point at which an error

occurs. Chris proposes that they should incorporate the workflow with the existing process flow diagrams that

are available in Microsoft Visio. This enables them to visualize the issues, rather than needing to decipher

technical analysis.


Enabling users to create business solutions

By using Visio Services Chris integrates her workflow with the production line steps in the development and

testing of the gear assembly. The Visio diagram is exported into SharePoint Designer, where she adds the

business logic that tracks the product development success criteria. She sets triggers that flag test failures

which send alerts to the key team members; so that they can review any problems and initiate appropriate

action.

The workflow development requires no coding, so the new workflow can be built to Chris’ specification by her

and her team, without the need to bring in external development resources.

Integrating Line of Business platforms to deliver business information

Chris wants to extend the current dashboard information to include key performance indicators on the

production process. The manufacture and test information is currently held on an external line of business

platform, for which Chris does not have client access software. She needs to render information on production

volumes and product failures on to her SharePoint 2010 site, so she uses the KPI Web Part, which is available

out-of-the-box.

Because she has sufficient permissions, she can connect to the production system by using Business

Connectivity Services to create an external list that is populated from the production monitoring platform. She

takes the raw production volumes data and the quality analysis information on product failures to calculate a

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) figure. She renders this on to a site Web page by implementing the KPI

Web Part. The MTBF information for each gear assembly model is provided to the team member responsible

for that product, so that her team can quickly react to issues that occur in the manufacturing process.


Integrating Line of Business platforms to deliver business information

This visibility means that all production MTBF information is presented in a scorecard, so that the team can

analyze trends, rather than just responding to issues. This real-time information makes it possible to pre-empt

minor problems before they become business issues.

Ensuring development productivity and security

Chris and her team have found that there are some issues with the MTBF of a particular gear assembly. While

this is not currently outside the KPI production boundaries, she would like to keep a closer check on the three

manufacturing lines that produce this gearing, so she asks the team’s information architect to customize a

Web Part that queries production information from each of these systems.

The architect customizes the Query Web Part to complete the task and tests it against the development

system. When he is happy he deploys it in a Sandboxed environment.



In this way he can manage the impact of the Web Part when he deploys it on the production system. With a

Sandboxed Solution he can limit the code CPU time, SQL execution time, and the number of allowable

exception that the Web Part can consume. This practice means that Web Parts developed by non-

development staff do not run the risk of causing problems on production systems.

It is lucky that does this, as the Web Part does not perform as he expected in the production environment; it

starts to consume far more CPU cycles than are allowed in its quota, so the process is terminated.

Chris asks for a developer to come in and with the information architect to identify the problem with the

rogue Web Part. Simon, the developer, uses the Developer Dashboard to analyze the performance of the

individual elements of the Web Part, and notices that it is making an excessive number of read requests to the

LOB database. This is quickly rectified and the Web Part is retested in the Sandbox environment.


So What Is Your Next Step?

You have seen, through the Gear Project scenario, how SharePoint 2010 can deliver business benefits to

business organizations that have already chosen to benefit from the Microsoft investment in Office

SharePoint Server 2007. Whether you need to improve your business productivity, reduce infrastructure

TCO, or improve you agility in responding to business change, SharePoint 2010 delivers business

opportunity solutions. So you need to start preparing to leverage these benefits as soon as possible.

Preparing for Your Upgrade

Any platform upgrade is a significant undertaking and often organizations have to balance the business

benefits against the potential pain of the upgrade process. The SharePoint 2010 Product Group has put an

unprecedented amount of effort into ensuring that the upgrade experience is a smooth and fast as

possible. There are a range of upgrade and migration options, which means that organizations can select

the ones that work best for each business area and sites.

This preparation has included early release of hardware requirement specifications and the inclusion of

upgrade preparation tools in the latest Office SharePoint Server 2007 service packs. These tools enable

organization to assess their current environment and prepare sites and content for the upgrade. There is

an entire TechNet SharePoint site dedicated to assisting in the planning and upgrade of content, including

hardware and associated platform software migration. Any organization looking to upgrade to SharePoint

2010 can find insights, best practice, and product information at the following locations.

Additional Resources

General

Product web-site – http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

SharePoint 2010 evaluation guide for decision makers - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727161 A study by Forrester Research about the ecomonic impact of SharePoint 2010 - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730143

IT Administrators

Technet—http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

SharePoint 2010 evaluation guide for IT professionals - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727162

Developers

MSDN—http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint

SharePoint 2010 evaluation guide for professional developers - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727163

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