Writing a SharePoint 2010 Implementation Proposal?

I've recently been asked to write a proposal for my employee on why they should upgrade to / implement SharePoint Server 2010.

The basis of this proposal is obviously based around the disadvantages of one product we currently use (MOSS/SharePoint 2007) and the advatanges of the new product.

I have constructed a list of disadvatanges and counter advantages as I see them, and think this may be useful to other SharePoint implementation engineers who wish to write a proposal based on the same task.

Obviously this list would be trimmed down to the needs of your own situation and can then form some basic pointers for your arguement.

Note that this is not intended to be a review of either product, just a foundation for your research/testing to form your own proposal.

If you have any points you wish to add please leave them in the comments.

SharePoint 2007 Shortfalls

Enterprise Content Management

• Document Metadata / Taxonomy localised to a single site collection.
• No way to version/workflow a document set as one entity
• Moving documents or renaming them breaks their respective URLs – documents tied to each library
• Users free to upload documents where they see fit, rather than a managed meta data upload
• No way to attach default metadata to documents via the use of folders/automatic tagging
• Poor categorisation in search results
• No ability to preview thumbnails of search results.
• Poor auditing facilities and lack of compliance details
• No easy way to navigate libraries via metadata
• Poor integration with Business Data systems (inability to write/delete/update data)
• No method of batch processing multiple list items
• No integration of video files
• Inline Intranet content editing is clumsy and laborious

Development

• Development must be done on a server OS, which adds expense
• No ability to modify out of the box workflows
• No ability to create workflows from user defined templates for re-use across the enterprise

Performance

• List size limited to thousands of items not millions.
• Content database performance is not optimised for binary large objects (BLOBS)
• Querys against large lists cannot be throttled.
• No isolation of workflow processing to particular servers

Social Networking

• No way to rate/tag/add notes to any item of content within the platform
• No way to navigate business data via tag clouds
Administration
• Back-end administration is laborious to navigate and execute tasks
• Native backup /recovery options are extremely limited
• Lack of health/performance monitoring
 
SharePoint 2010 Improvements

Enterprise Content Management

• Managed Meta Data service provides enterprise wide taxonomy management
• Introduction of document sets allows execution of workflows/versioning against multiple files treated as a single entity
• All documents/items have a ‘permalink’ – a unique URL that stays the same even when documents are moved across site collections.
• Content Organiser automatically places documents in the relevant location with default metadata, and can accept incoming documents forwarded from email clients.
• Documents/items and subfolders can now inherit metadata from folders.
• Improved search results categorisation, can be viewed by tags
• PowerPoint slides can be previewed as thumbnails in search results
• Compliance Details screen introduced to each document menu, providing detailed auditing information such as who deleted, who modified, who created the item.
• ‘Metadata Navigation’ web parts allow seamless navigation of project site content based on taxonomy data.
• Business Data Services replaces the BDC, and now provides a method of writing to and deleting information in business databases as well as simply reading it.
• Multiple items in a library/list can now be modified/processed in parallel.
• Seamless integration of video content (videos can be previewed in the asset picker before insertion into the web page).
• Massive improvements to inline content editing - automatic creation of new pages using the ‘wiki engine’ approach (inserting [[new page here]] will create and link to a new page).

Development

• SharePoint 2010 can be installed on Windows 7 for development purposes, saving money on server OS licenses and easing the setup of the development environment.
• Out of the box workflows can now be modified.
• Workflows can be saved as templates and re-used within multiple sites/locations.

Performance

• List size limitations increased to millions of items per list rather than thousands.
• Binary Large Objects (BLOBS) can now be stored on cheaper storage that is optimised for these types of data – speeding up the retrieval of large files.
• Queries against large lists can be throttled to return a limited result set, to reduce impact on user operations of lists. Furthermore these result sets can easily be reduced to fewer numbers via inbuilt metadata navigation.
• Workflow Processing can be offloaded to multiple application servers.

Social Networking

• Any digital asset (document/video/list item etc) can be tagged with end user terms (folksonomy) as well as corporate taxonomy. These items can also be ‘rated’ or ‘liked’ by users, which then reports their activities to their mysite (other users can then subscribe to these feeds)
• All business data can be navigated via tag clouds generated from corporate taxonomy.
Administration
• Back-end administration has been completely overhauled, tasks are much quicker to find and execute
• Native backup /recovery options are far more extensive, allowing restore of individual items, lists, sites from offline content databases.
• Introduction of health/performance monitoring of servers and services increases reliability of the overall solution through preventative and reactive maintenance.

SharePoint Batch Site Manager fails when moving Site Collection 'An error occured in stsadm.exe while moving the site. Access denied.'

Over the past day or so, I have been testing the Batch Site Manager feature of the SharePoint administration toolkit v 3.0.

Firstly, I don't have or wish to install MOSS/WSS SP2 unless it is forced upon me (lots of custom features etc which will stop working in true SharePoint fashion) which is why I didn't use v4.0 of the Administration Toolkit.

When attempting to perform a 'Move' operation with Batch Site Manager, the timer job simply disappeared and the site collection remained in the original content database.

My first port of call was the \LOGS folder in the 12 hive. BSM creates a log file, e.g. BSM_2010-4-14.log. This log file was populated with the following error:

Job Title: BSM Move Job - 4/14/2010 10:05:18 AM

Job Description:

Start Time: 4/14/2010 10:05:31 AM

http://####/sites/IT -- Operation FAILED: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: An error occured in stsadm.exe while moving the site. Access denied.

at Microsoft.Office.Server.ESCM.ESCMMoveJob.Backup(Uri Src)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.ESCM.ESCMMoveJob.JobTaskExecute(String SiteUrl)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.ESCM.ESCMJob.Execute(Guid targetInstanceId)

End Time: 4/14/2010 10:05:57 AM

I then enabled verbose logging and checked the trace log, however there were no errors relating to this problem.

I tried all the suggestions available to me via Google, which involved adding myself as a Site Collection Administrator, and check the trace logs, of which neither worked.

Before giving up, I tried one changing the service account of the 'SharePoint Timer Service' to that of the farm admin account (which was also configured as the Site Collection Administrator), and restarted the service.

I then fired off the BSM move job again, and everything worked perfectly!

It is worth noting that as I was using this tool for testing, it was on my development environment, which consists of a 'stand-alone' SharePoint installation... Therefore the timer service was configured to log on as 'NETWORK SERVICE'.

You could also potentially solve this problem by giving NETWORK SERVICE the relevant permissions to the site collection, however I haven't tested this.

If your farm configuration as a separate account for this service (following SharePoint best practice) then this may well not be an issue for you, but I feel this is worth logging for anyone who may come accross this issue in or out of a 'stand-alone' configuration.