SharePoint Infrastructure Review Provides Foundation for Future Initiatives
Project at a Glance
RDA conducted an assessment to validate the Microsoft SharePoint setup for an international organization and made recommendations to improve performance and overall site operations. The assessment helped to ensure that the client had a solid foundation to support all of their current and planned portal endeavors.
About Our Client
RDA’s client is a global organization composed of many countries focused on financial stability and trade.
Background
Our client was starting to use SharePoint 2007 for their intranet for providing collaboration workspaces, was considering it for the replacement for their Internet site, and for their proposed extranet environment. To ensure that the infrastructure was set up correctly to support all of these requirements, our client asked that RDA conduct an assessment to validate the installation, configuration settings, and infrastructure setup, and make recommendations to improve performance and overall site operations, with the end goal to ensure that they had a solid infrastructure foundation to support all of the current and planned SharePoint endeavors.
Solution Detail
RDA evaluated the existing intranet architecture with regard to the following areas:
- SharePoint administrative software features
- Architectural robustness
- Security policies for SharePoint users
- Deployment of custom code to SharePoint
As a result of the assessment, RDA delivered a variety of recommendations to enhance performance and site operations. Recommendations included the implementation of a third party tool to aid in managing SharePoint, the configuration of monitoring utilities within SharePoint to ensure that it is not growing in an out of control manner, and an increased focus on security rights.
RDA also provided a summary document recommending appropriate configuration and governance settings for a SharePoint installation. Although configuration and governance are separate concerns, both are vital to making decisions at the onset of a SharePoint project.
Configuration encompasses the physical and logical design that accommodates current and future business needs. Governance is the definition of roles and accountability to enforce configuration decisions that will ensure the future viability of the system. Configuration is valid at a point in time and will need to change as system demands and usage increase. Changes, however, should be determined by the governance decisions that are in place.
RDA consolidated and communicated these original decisions for IT and business stakeholders so all interested parties could be aware of their individual roles and responsibilities. In addition, RDA provided an overview of future direction of growth for the SharePoint environment to ensure that the system remains robust and manageable well into the future.
Benefits
The implementation of RDA’s recommendations will enhance system performance and overall site operations.
The assessment also helped to ensure that our client has a solid foundation to support all of their current and planned portal endeavors that leverage SharePoint.