SharePoint as an IT Service Offering
Was talking to a IT TDM (Technical Decision Maker) today who was looking for a way he could "manage" SharePoint (either WSS or MOSS) from a standards perspective. His example was, today he can choose specific hardware and specific settings for his exchange or AD servers. It's an entire configuration/release management function from a hardware and software perspective. With SharePoint technology, he's finding out it isn't as easy to do a full end to end provisioning with it, he needs to know more about what they want to do.
The tough part of his deployment is, WSS and MOSS is not a service in a box. It is a business producity platform that can provide a portal, a collaboration environment, a report center, a search center, a document management or records repository. It's the swiss army knife (if I can say so) and a very maleable one size fits all, but requires some thinking as a service. He also can't necessarily choose a specific server for it. WSS itself may commonly look and feel like a workspace provisioning tool, but even that it's much more than. Though it may be tough to get your head around it, this business productivity platform for hosting applications or hosting collaboration sites is so flexible it makes the life of the standards guy tough.
Sean Livingston, previously of MS IT, now the Upgrade PM in WSS, did an excellent job outlining the MS IT policies and procedures around customization in a recent whitepaper. Much of my thoughts on the topic can be attributed to his work on MS IT's three tiered offering. (Check out his TechNet Radio on the MS IT deployment.)
I like to break it down in 3 common ways to host for simplicity.
1) Hosted Collaboration - (basic) - Commodity Site Hosting - if you're simply trying to host blogs or team sites or even site collections with various templates, here's your model. You create your quota template, create your web application, and enable self service provisioning or simply give the group such as help desk to create the sites. Typical charge back would be at the site collection level, but IT shouldn't be excited about being a barrier to entry... thus leads to shares on desktops and culture change is harder if IT is in the way or cost is in the way of adoption. (If you want more control around site provisioning, consider the SharePoint Solutions Provisioning Assistant.)
2) Application Hosting (Advanced) - Multi tenant application hosting. Here you can support "portals" and full web application hosting. You don't want to give the entire keys to the kingdom, but you do need to keep costs down. Since a division or business unit really owns the entire web app, you can easily do charge back at the database and storage level.
3) Dedicated Hosting - (Premium) - Just as in an ISP/ASP model, to get entire full value, to get access to the site definitions or to get access to the GAC a business unit or division or whoever has the money and business or technical requirements, wants their own environment. This can either be virtual or physical, but in a sense you've got a dedicated config db and essentially a dedicated farm. Since this is all about building application, it is *strongly* recommended that you have separate dev, test, and optionally a UAT (user acceptance)/staging environment. Charge back here is essential to scale unless this is exclusively for the central portal in an organization. Charge back is at the farm level here.
Other brand new, hot off the presses (6/07) whitepapers that could help you figure out if you want to host site collections or web apps, and how to setup policies and procedures around a service are:
White paper: Steps for building governance into SharePoint Server 2007
White paper: Windows SharePoint Services manageability controls
White paper: Supporting information architecture with Windows SharePoint Services manageability controls
White paper: Implementing Windows SharePoint Services governance
More info at the TechNet SharePoint Governance site. You can also get more on the Microsoft IT internal hosted environment in this new (May 22, 07) Microsoft IT paper titled "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Hosting" Technical whitepaper which includes info on their global deployment, best practices on upgrade, and a bit on their 3 tiered service offering:
The Platinum tier:
| • |
Hosts dedicated hardware for one or many properties owned by a single business team at Microsoft. |
| • |
Offers the maximum support for server-side customization. |
| • |
Is generally represented by high-value Web properties within the company. |
The Gold tier:
| • |
Hosts several customers on the same hardware but provides isolation via application pools for each customer. |
| • |
Permits some customization on the platform. |
| • |
Distributes the costs of hardware and hosting across customers. |
The Silver tier:
| • |
Supports thousands of customers per server. |
| • |
Allows no server-side customizations. |
| • |
Hosts the utility service at no charge but limits the amount of supported storage. |
