Executive Overview
Situation: Microsoft IT (MSIT)
first deployed Microsoft SharePoint in 2000 before Microsoft shipped the
product. MSIT didn’t do a lot of governance at the time. Within a few years,
there were approximately 250,000 SharePoint sites at Microsoft with 200 to 500
new sites added per day. To rein in this tremendous growth, MSIT created a
logical service infrastructure and applied strict governance policies.
Why You Should Care:
- MSIT
administers a staggering number of SharePoint sites, including approximately
224,000 top-level sites and 545,000 sub-sites. Total amount of data: 29.9 TB.
- MSIT
has two main services: a Standard service (used by most employees) and a Custom
service for users and groups that require more than the Standard service.
- In
its SharePoint implementations, MSIT experienced growing pains like other IT
organizations. Other companies can make use of MSIT’s lessons learned to avoid the
same pitfalls or to get in front of demand.
- With
each new version of SharePoint, MSIT has been able to use less and less custom
code since the out-of-the-box product offers coverage for areas that previously
required custom code.
History
of SharePoint on MSIT—Timeline
|
Year
|
Action
|
|
2000
|
First deployed as a team collaboration space
|
|
2003
|
- Consolidated
into three datacenters with SharePoint 2003
- Introduced
personal sites (My Sites)
- Began
hosting portals
|
|
2006
|
Broke
into tiered, hosted offerings
|
|
Today
|
MSIT
hosts almost all corporate portals
|
SharePoint
Sites By Region
MSIT
operates three farms with SharePoint infrastructure: Americas (Tukwila); EMEA
(Dublin); APJ (Singapore).
|
Region
|
#
Top-Level Sites
|
# Sub-Sites
|
% of Total
|
Total
Data (TB)
|
|
Americas
|
128,000
|
346,000
|
65
|
19.4
|
|
EMEA
|
50,000
|
117,000
|
22
|
6.4
|
|
APJ
|
46,000
|
82,000
|
13
|
4.1
|
|
Totals
|
224,000
|
545,000
|
100
|
29.9
|
Service
Offerings
|
Service
|
Description
|
|
Standard
(Utility)
|
- The
primary SharePoint service that most employees utilize
- Includes
My Sites and team collaboration sites
- Offered
at no cost to end users/groups
- Fixed
resource allocation/site collection
- Employees
use a self-provisioning tool (Autosites) to quickly create sites
- Storage
above quota limits can be purchased at cost
- Employees
can do small customizations for a charge (limited to Microsoft SharePoint
Designer)
- Shares
a single host name
- Best
for business-critical (not mission-critical) business needs
|
|
Custom
|
- Targeted
at groups that need more than the Standard service
- Includes
vanity URLs, dedicated hardware, and custom SLAs
- Flexible
resource allocation
- Customizations
permitted in addition to SharePoint Designer
- Offered
at cost to sponsor; charged quarterly
- Single
tenant isolated hosting
- Used
for mission-critical LOB applications
- Used
by the major portals (MSW, MSLibrary, InfoWeb, HRWeb, LCAWeb, and ITWeb)
|
|
Extranet
|
- Service
offering for Microsoft partners
|
|
Dogfood
|
- MSIT
operates multiple versions of SharePoint across its infrastructure for
dogfooding purposes
- Old
team sites have been
maintained as a perpetual dogfood environment so employees can play with new
features that may not have been rolled out to production
|
In addition to these services, some departments prefer to
manage their own infrastructure because even the custom SLAs don’t meet their
requirements. These groups provide all of their own resources, including
expertise to run their own SharePoint farm.
Service
Level Agreement—Standard Service
- Covered
by FastHelp and technical support 24x7.
|
Priority
|
Impact
|
SLA
|
|
1
|
50+
users
|
4
hours
|
|
2
|
2+
users
|
24
hours
|
|
3
|
Normal
scheduled work
|
3
days
|
|
4
|
Low
priority
|
8
days
|
- Availability
goal: 99.9%
- Business-critical
level of service (not mission-critical)
- Broken
customizations not fixed by MSIT
- Help
for SharePoint questions on a “best-effort” basis
- Databases
backed up once every 24 hours and maintained for 14 days
- Site
restores require GM approval
- Maintenance
windows reserved
Daily: 6 pm to 6 am local server time
Weekends: Friday 12 pm to Monday 6 am
- Quota
progression: 500 MB (default), 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, 4GB, 5GB, 10GB. Above 10 GB, MSIT
charges an extra fee back to the organization.
Autosites
Self-Provisioning Tool
Employees
use self-provisioning tool to:
- Create
sites very quickly
- Set
site expirations
- Assign
data classifications
- Set
quotas and determine costs for quota upgrades
Major
Portals
The
major portals at Microsoft all have a similar underlying structure. For
example, they all include search, and most include “top search” terms. All of
the portals recognize the user and some provide content specific to the user’s
role. The portals are designed to get users in and out quickly with the
information that they need to stay productive.
|
Portal
|
Description
|
|
MSW
|
The
Microsoft Web. The hub of knowledge for employees at Microsoft that links via
web parts, direct links, or search to all site collections across Microsoft
farms. Many employees use MSW as a starting point to be able to get where
they want within the web of SharePoint at Microsoft.
|
|
ITWeb
|
MSIT
intranet. Offers dashboard, Helpdesk links, and productivity and best
practices information
|
|
MSLibrary
|
Microsoft
Library intranet
|
|
InfoPedia
|
Sales
Department intranet
|
|
HRWeb
|
Human
Resources Department intranet
|
|
LCAWeb
|
Legal
and Corporate Affairs intranet
|
MSW Details/Business
Benefits
- Originally
run as a portal that had lots of custom code. It was complex and hard to
maintain. When MSIT moved MSW to SharePoint 2007, they didn’t have to bring
over all of the custom code because the 2007 version provided out-of-the-box
coverage for areas that previously required custom code. When MSIT upgraded to
SharePoint 2010, they were able to eliminate even more custom code. So support
requirements have decreased over time.
- Helps
global employees find the information they need
- Laid
the groundwork for the other portals
- Offers
hosting services packages
- Provides
feedback to product teams
- Extremely
flexible—can provide anything and everything, not just articles and links. For
example, if employees are on distribution lists, they can receive email that
alerts them to certain news articles.
- Used
so often by Microsoft employees that it has become a testing ground for MSIT.
For example, FastSearch was initially piloted on MSW because MSW provided a great
testing ground to run at a large scale.
Lessons
Learned
- Viral
Site Growth.
It’s very important to get in front of demand before it gets out of control.
MSIT uses governance policies and lifecycle management (LCM) to control growth.
- Data
Classification.
To protect intellectual property, MSIT classifies data into High Business
Impact (HBI), Medium Business Impact (MBI), and Low Business Impact (LBI).
These classifications are built into the self-provisioning tool. As employees
create sites, they are required to assign data classifications.
- LifeCycle
Management.
Failure to effectively manage site lifecycle results in: uncontrolled growth,
decreased quality of intellectual property, increased management costs, and the
inability to find information quickly. MSIT uses the Autosites
self-provisioning tool for LCM.
Implementing
Governance At MSIT
Governance
is the answer to lessons learned. MSIT established a Governance committee, which
included a cross-section of roles and businesses. The committee:
- Defined
goals and policies
- Reviewed
the information architecture to identify potential inefficiencies and
supportability issues
- Laid
content out in an organized fashion and looked for ways to tie different
portals together into a web of knowledge and data
- Defined
the education strategy
Governance
strategies require ongoing assessments and improvements.
Best
Practices—Service Governance
- Governance
is a crucial step to take before installing SharePoint. Set policies, roles,
and responsibilities not just for how sites will be provisioned but also for how
they will be managed.
- Define
the audience and build the site for that audience.
- State
the service opportunity.
- Create
strong partnerships with service partners and stakeholders. MSIT uses their
dogfood program to establish relationships with partners who will help drive
adoption of the software.
- Create
a logical service architecture.
- Clearly
state operational requirements. To create trust, create realistic SLAs.
- Clearly
state service elements (scope, enabled features, service gaps, etc.).
- Communication
is key. Solicit feedback, work with partners on service outage times, get employees
involved, and communicate successes.
- Create
an operational level agreement for partners or service dependencies.
- Provide
service success criteria.
Measuring
Success
NSAT
- All
products and services are graded quarterly by Microsoft employees. NSAT scores
are tied directly to reviews and compensation.
- Outlines
biggest pain points and focus areas
- Determines
highest usage patterns
Adoption
vs. Deployment
- Use
traffic statistics to determine adoption levels
- Train
end users in Work Smart productivity sessions to turn deployments into adoption
and to train end users on best practices
Education
Resources
Questions & Answers
How
much of the MSIT infrastructure is running on SharePoint 2010?
The
Americas, EMEA, and APJ regional farms (Standard service) are running on
SharePoint 2010. The custom portals are currently in the process of being upgraded.
The initial Redmond dogfood farm has also been upgraded to SharePoint 2010.
How
does MSIT control site growth?
MSIT
uses the following governance policies to control site growth:
- The
Autosites self-provisioning tool enforces site expiration dates.
- MSIT
enforces strict site quota limits. If a site reaches its quota, no one can save
to the site until data is removed or the group has the quota limit increased by
MSIT. Each site has multiple owners, so if an employee leaves the company,
someone is always accountable for the site.
Why
do site restores require GM approval?
Backups/restores
are currently a lengthy and expensive process. It’s a lot of work to restore a
whole site at the IT level and also at the customer level (determining what
changed since the last backup). SharePoint 2007 added a site recycle bin for
individual item, web part, and site level recovery, which makes the need for
site restores less common, but MSIT is also working on improving SLAs for
backups/restores.
How
does MSIT keep people from using the Standard service for mission-critical
applications?
MSIT
counsels organizations on what type of information is appropriate for the standard
and custom site types. If MSIT sees a site that would be more appropriate for
the custom service, it works with the site owners to provide information on why
it would be a good idea to pay the costs to move to the Custom service.
Why
are the maintenance windows so big?
MSIT
builds generous maintenance windows into SLAs for back-end management
maintenance services so that they don’t have to fight for that time.
Maintenance windows are only used when MSIT has to do actual maintenance, which
isn’t that often. Maintenance windows are based on local server time—wherever
the infrastructure is hosted.