SharePoint Environment Assessment Questionnaire

The questionnaire is designed to assess the existing SharePoint environment for Support transition and to collect key Information to propose the right support model for the transition
1.    Business

• What is the primary business objective of the SharePoint environment? (What needs of your business are met by the existing system – Communication, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Dashboards, Complete Intranet Solution, Extranet for suppliers, customers etc.?)
• Please share the status of all ongoing and planned activities for SharePoint (Development, migration and upgrade)?
• Please enlist the sites that are most critical to business? 

2.    SharePoint

• What is the level of custom development on current SharePoint environment? Please provide documentation.
• Is there any custom development done by any other 3^rd Party vendor? Do you have the source code, business requirements, design document, installation guidelines, and test cases for the changes?

• Please provide us with the following statistics

1.       Total users for each SharePoint Site on Production (Top level)

2.       Number of Top level sites

3.       What is the size of Content DB?

4.       What is the peak site usage in last one month?

• Please share the Backup and Recovery Process?

3.    Infrastructure

• Please provide details or preferably Physical and Logical Architecture Diagrams for Production, Staging and Development Environment

(Farm Topology, deployment diagrams, Virtual environment, SharePoint version details, Directory Services)

• Please enlist all Integration points (Interfaces) with LOB and other applications/ Software (Ex: imaging solution)
• Please give a brief about all Web Applications and SSPs in scope.
• Please provide the list of all 3rd party software (BPM, Search, Analytics, and BI – integrated to SharePoint) installed?
• Is any sort of load balancing done for the intranet?
• Is there any mirroring done on SharePoint DBs?

4.    Portals

• Please share the brief about the most critical sites (in scope) on existing environment?
• Please share the Site map.

5.           Content management

• Please enlist the main kind of content (Text content, Documents, Images, flash, Audios, Videos, other formats)
• Is there any other Content Management or Document management tool in place along with SharePoint?

6.    Security

• Are there any secured sites? (Using SSL, encryption)
• What is the current Authentication mechanism? (Windows Authentication, Forms based Authentication or Kerberos, AD, LDAP )

7.    Team

• Who is supporting the existing environment? Please provide existing SLA and priorities for incident management.
• Please give a brief about team structure for Support (OS, Hardware, SQL server, Security, Exchange server, SharePoint)
• Do you have a distributed development team across multiple locations/geographies? Please provide details.
• Do you have a distributed team of site owners?

8.    Support

• What is the Support Type (L1, L2 or L3) expected? 
• Please provide the call flow process. Find below a sample process flow.

SharePoint Environment Diagram

Determine your SharePoint Server Farm which woupld support your SharePoint structure
and Data flow within your organization.

 

 

Call Flow Process / Diagram

Call flow
 

Incident Management

• Do you have any system in place for Incident Management that is expected to use? If yes, please give details.
• Please explain the Incident classification criteria. Find below the sample classification

• What is the mode of communication for Support (Email only, Incident management, Phone, Pager)?

• What is the scope of proposed SLA? Please select one of the following.

1.       Large enhancement including custom development (20 person days or more)

2.       small enhancement in existing code ( Less than 20 person days)

3.       Trouble shooting existing development

4.       Admin support

• Please share the SLAs/ OLAs with existing vendors for 3^rd party software, Infrastructure, Exchange Server, Security, SQL Server, OS and hardware.
• It is assumed that content and configuration DB of all SharePoint sites are in scope for support. Please confirm?
• Please confirm if following is out of scope for SharePoint Support

1.       OS level support like Server Performance Management, Memory Management, Disk Space and SQL Server Uptime.

2.       Installation, Implementation, Deployment of any Software

3.       Design, Development, Implementation or any issue on Development and Test servers.

4.       Evaluation of any Software, Tool and Processes and Results

5.       Design, Development and Implementation of Proof of Concepts

6.       Development and Enhancements of 3rd Party Products

7.       Environment Management / Infrastructure Support

8.       Platform Troubleshooting

9.       Application Migration & Upgrades

10.    Optimizing search for website or any other design changes to website

Recommended SHAREPOINT 2010 Books:  (CLICK on the book title to review)

Inside Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 by Ted Pattison

SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 (Microsoft .NET Development Series) 
by Eric Carter

Professional SharePoint 2010 Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)
by Reza Alirezaei

InfoPath with SharePoint 2010 How-To by Steve Mann

Business Intelligence in Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 by Stacia Misner

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Unleashed 
by Steven Mann

Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) by Sahil Malik

Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)
Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration by Todd Klintd

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-667): Configuring Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 (Training Kits) by Dan Holme

Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Administrator's Companion
by Bill English

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Unleashed
by Steven Mann

Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)
by Sivamumar Harinath

Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs (Wrox
Programmer to Programmer)
by Randy Disgrill

Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development (Wrox Beginning Guides)by Steven Fox

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed
by Michael Noel


Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 BOOKS: (CLICK on the book title to review)


The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset by Joy Mundy

Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 & Office 2010 
by Philo Janus

Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Analytics & Data Visualization
by Doug Harts

Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 & Office 2010
by Philo Janus & Stacia Misner

Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Pro Developer)

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed by Ross Mistry

Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Step by Step (Step by Step (Microsoft))
by Mike Hotek

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services
by Tyler Graham

Microsoft Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer
by Brian Knight

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-432): Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Implementation and Maintenance (Pro-Certification) by Mike Hotek

Pro SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Solutions
by Srini Sisla

The MicrosoftData Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server2005 and the
MicrosoftBusiness Intelligence Toolset
by Joy Mundy

Foundations of SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence 
by Guy Fouche'


SharePoint 2010 For Dummies by Vanessa Williams

Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration 
by Todd KlindtMicrosoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) by Sahil Malik