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SharePoint Newsletter - Week 37

This week includes a fantastic 'top 10 reasons why SharePoint projects fail' and also highlights a discussion about what the ideal length of a sprint (scrum) should be on a SharePoint project. We have also found a great resource on costings for SharePoint, plus a comparison chart highlighting the features that are available with all 3 SKU's of SharePoint. More and more of you are sending us content to feature in the Newsletter which is fantastic, so keep it coming! (details at the bottom).

Featured Discussion

What's the ideal length of a Sprint for a Sharepoint project?

Featured Discussion ImageI find, unless you have a completely automated build + test cycle (with CI setup), then it's extremely challenging to do anything less than 3 (maybe 2 week) sprint and still expect to go live. However, if you are on a greenfield project then it's easier as you don't have to worry about a live infrastructure with a constantly moving target. Has anyone managed to do weekly sprints with SharePoint, against an already existing live SharePoint infrastructure? Mark Jones

Hi Mark. I worked on the project for a year where we had 2 weeks sprints. It was a greenfield project. Team of developers had their own testing environment that was the same as target staging/production environment (we couldn't have access to the target staging/prod environments because of some other reasons). We also had a dedicated build server that produced a build (WSPs and other artefacts) on each check in (Tfs was used for that). We didn't do automated deployments though... At the end of each sprint the cd was burnt and handed over to another team for deployment into target environment(s).  We also had to provide deployment guide/scripts and sometimes asked to provide support during deployment process... Denis Shorin

Take part in the discussion on LinkedIn

LinkedIn the Spotlight

Balamurugan Kailasam

Bala has been working with SharePoint since 2006. He has worked for organisations such as the NHS, HBOS and more recently O2 - the leading mobile phone provider in the UK. Bala's passion is predominantly as a developer, although he does enjoy the role of Solution Architect in SharePoint too.

Bala has also been a major contributor on the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF), which is an open source project that allows SharePoint deployments to be fully automated utlising actions. Learn more about Bala on LinkedIn.

Featured Sites and News from around the web

Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

Featured SharePoint SitePaul Thurrott continues his Inside SharePoint 2010 series with Part 3 : Social Networking Features : "When you think about "sharing" things online today, you probably think of social networking services like Facebook, Google+, or Twitter, which let you broadcast information to some group of users--friends, family members, the whole world, whatever--in ways that have become increasingly familiar. Wouldn't it be cool if SharePoint provided this type of functionality, but tied into the incredible content management backend it already supplies, and aimed at the needs of a knowledge worker looking to collaborate with his coworkers?"

Indicative SharePoint 2010 licensing costs

Featured SharePoint SiteIf you want a rough idea on how much SharePoint will cost you then Ari's post is it! SharePoint licensing is a complex subject. As well as there being multiple product configuration options, license prices often depend on a number of factors such as the type of organisation, the relationship with Microsoft and/or licensing retailer etc. It is useful, however, to have a rough indication of how much a product will cost when planning a project. For example if you are interested in giving all internal users access to FAST search you are looking at roughly twice the licensing costs of an installation using the standard features. Check out Ari Bakker on Twitter.

Technical Diagrams for SharePoint

Featured SharePoint SiteMany of these resources are visual representations of recommended solutions. They include poster-sized documents available in formats including Microsoft Office Visio 2007 or Microsoft Visio 2010 files (.vsd), PDF files, and XPS files.

Compare SharePoint editions - quickly

Featured SharePoint SiteThis awesome comparision chart breaks down what features are available with SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server and SharePoint Enterprise. It also allows you to view by sites, communities, content, search, insights and composites.

Editors Choice

Vinewave Document Analytics is an audit and reporting add-on for SharePoint 2010 that provides detailed statistics for any document or item in your SharePoint portal.

  • Keen to see who viewed, edited or checked out a document or presentation?
  • Want to find out who changed permissions on a document and why?

Document Analytics provides this information and more in a simple yet powerful audit report that tells you everything you need to know about a document's activity in SharePoint.

Visit the Vinewave website for more information.

Cool Tool

SharePoint Manager 2010

Cool Tool ImageThe SharePoint Manager 2010 is a GUI that allows you to explore all of the main objects in SharePoint (Farm, Web App, Site, Web and so on). It effectively enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. In some cases, it also enables you to update the properties as well as view them. 

To download SharePoint Manager 2010 navigate to http://spm.codeplex.com and click on the download button.

Top 10

10 Reasons Why SharePoint Projects Fail

Symon Garfield has written several great articles and last month presented a quick-start guide to the art of SharePoint success, a framework he developed that aims to ensure that investments in SharePoint deliver measurable returns. The framework consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Architecture and Transition, and over the next few months he will be presenting a series of articles examining each of these elements in more detail. This month he takes a look at the top 10 reasons why SharePoint projects fail; which are some of the issues that his framework addresses. He writes:

The most common causes of SharePoint failure in my experience are:

  1. Politics
  2. Not knowing what SharePoint is
  3. Lack of information and knowledge management skills
  4. Vision, the business case and measuring success
  5. Executive support
  6. User adoption
  7. Individual choices derail SharePoint initiatives
  8. Information management
  9. Defining requirements
  10. Technical skills

This top 10 list is provided, with thanks from Symon Garfield

Best of Blogs

Alpesh Nakar

Profile ImageAlpesh Nakar is a SharePoint Architect, Consultant, Trainer, Speaker and Evangelist based in Brisbane, Australia. He is a contributing author for SharePoint 2010 Unleashed by Michael Noel and Colin Spencer. He was an organiser and speaker at SharePoint Saturday, Brisbane 2010 and has spoken at many other events including SharePoint Conference SouthEast Asia 2010. He runs his Alpesh Nakars blog and also the JustSharePoint blog!

For the diary

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Help usWe strive for this newsletter to be the latest and greatest about SharePoint from those involved with our 'SharePoint 2007 & 2010' LinkedIn group. If you want to suggest content for any of our sections, please email us at info@collaboris.co.uk and we will do our very best to include it.

To join in with the discussions, why not visit the group on LinkedIn now?

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