Case Study: Plante Moran is saving $260,000 By Automating Creation of New Sites

Approving new SharePoint site requests and creating and provisioning these sites, while struggling to maintain the uniformity of your taxonomy, look-and-feel, and governance standards, can quickly eat up your IT department's time and resources. Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 (SPGA) is a tool from SharePoint Solutions which can completely automate this process from request right through to provisioning, saving your IT department countless hours of labor.  A completely automated “set it and forget it” site creation solution! In our new Case Study, read how Plante Moran, one of the nation’s largest CPA and business advisory firms, has saved more than $260,000 and in excess of 3,500 man hours –so far—using this remarkable product.   In case you’re concerned that that number may be a typo, I assure you it is not. These statistics come from the firm’s SharePoint \ Database Architect. Plante Moran is saving well over a quarter of a million dollars annually, just by employing this one tool.  Now that is serious ROI! Just as importantly, its IT personnel, who used to struggle to keep up with new site requests, provisioning, uniformity and more, no longer have to concern themselves with any of that. The load of site creation busywork has been lifted off their backs, and now happens automatically, leaving them free to do the really important IT tasks. Could your company be saving money by using SPGA?  Use our SPGA ROI Calculator tool to find out.   The case study is a quick 2-minute read which you will find informative and compelling.  I encourage you to take a moment to read it. Imagine the difference site creation automation could make in your organization!

Does Dumping On-Premises Software Make Good Business Sense? (Part 1)

by Jeff Cate

I could have chosen a title for this article like “What are the Benefits of Moving to the Cloud” or something similar, but there have already been thousands of articles written over the last few years that have titles that come from that angle.

Instead, I would like to talk about some serious benefits of on-premises software that might get overlooked in the rush to the Cloud.

First, I think it is helpful to know where I am coming from - 

Background

I am a business decision-maker who has directed our company’s use of both on-premise and Cloud software for several years.  Our first use of “big time” Cloud software was in 2007, when we began using Salesforce.com (SFDC) as our CRM system.  We used it for about four years and decided to bring CRM back on-premises in late 2011 using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. (Some of the reasons that we brought it back on-premises have to do with a couple of the benefits of on-premises software that I will explain later in the article).

We have used, and continue to use, a variety of on-premise and Cloud software products.  In general, if we have a business need for a software application, we have always let the specific need drive the selection of the solution.  We have had situations where the functionality of on-premises software has far outpaced Cloud competitors, and we have also had situations where Cloud software far outpaced on-premises competitors. (This was the case in 2007 – SFDC was far superior, functionally, to on-premises Microsoft CRM at the time.)

We have had both good experiences with Cloud software and very bad experiences.  (By the way, the same is true for our on-premises software).  The performance and availability of SFDC was very good for the four years we used it.  We had very few outages and our people rarely complained that it was slow.  The functionality provided was outstanding and overall we had a very good experience, although we certainly paid handsomely for what we got - SFDC is a pretty pricey system to use.  

In another example—our use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Cloud—we experienced a major failure that cost us money, time and hurt our business.  We started using AWS virtual machines for our student labs in our SharePoint training classes around the U.S.  Everything worked pretty well until AWS had a storage failure, our “Gold” images got lost and there was no recovery option.  (At the time, AWS was a “closed garden” and there weren’t easy-to-implement backup solutions for AWS virtual machine images, so we lost everything and had to frantically upgrade the capacity of our internal data center and re-engineer all of our training class images to be Hyper-v based.)  So, this was definitely a BAD Cloud experience for us.

Like I said earlier, there are a lot of other applications that we use in our company; some are on-premises and some are in the Cloud.  What we have found is that there are pluses and minuses in every case, but we have plenty of examples of applications that are on-premises that work really well for us and other examples of Cloud applications that work really well for us as well.  We also have had examples of both on-premises and Cloud applications that have FAILED, and we have moved on from those as quickly as possible.
 

So, does dumping on-premises software make business sense?

Now that you know “where I am coming from,” let me give you my opinion on this subject.

I truly believe that the answer to this question will differ on an application-by-application basis for individual companies and that there will be both on-premises and Cloud application software for many years into the future - regardless of what the IT news media and vendors are currently saying.  On-premises software is not going to die anytime soon – that is, as long as business leaders are involved in the final decisions.

Why do I believe this?  I’ll explain my reasoning, but first let me say that there are undoubtedly a lot of great things about the Cloud, and I don’t want to go straight to what I think are the unique benefits of on-premises software before acknowledging some of the likewise unique benefits of the Cloud.

So, for the record, here are some of the unique benefits of the Cloud that I particularly like:

·        Cloud software can be updated/refreshed much more frequently than on-premises software. At our company, we saw this clearly with SFDC’s three-times-per-year update cycle.  In comparison, we had been used to Microsoft’s on-premises client and server software being updated “every three years.”

·        Cloud software frequently has an “App Store” for extending the base software with other vendors’ add-ons. Again, this was one of the things that I liked the best about SFDC.  They really pioneered this concept with their App Exchange.

·        The cash outlay for Cloud software can be spread evenly by paying a monthly subscription fee. While this is definitely true, unfortunately it also a double-edged sword.  If you come upon hard times and can’t keep paying the monthly fee, you can’t use your applications that are in the Cloud until you can come up with the cash.  Without being able to use your Cloud applications, you may not be able to come up with the cash.  So, this could end up being a vicious cycle.

·        Many, if not all, of the technical headaches with deploying and maintaining enterprise-grade software can be eliminated with the Cloud . This, along with the more frequent updates benefit (my first bullet point), is one of the best arguments for the Cloud, in my opinion.

 

Now, doesn’t it stand to reason that if the Cloud has some unique benefits that on-premises would as well?  I think so, and a couple of them are so tied to the mission of the business that it gives me the boldness to stick by my original statement:  On-premises software is not going to die anytime soon. 

In my next post, I’ll share my short-list of unique benefits that on-premises software offers over Cloud software.

Customizing Mail Messages in Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM)

by Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM), a comprehensive solution to manage and streamline the use of SharePoint 2010 extranets, uses a template-based mail messaging system. We provide four messages “out of the box:”

Each message is completely customizable, but the defaults are usually sufficient for the needs of most of our customers. Here is how the Invitation Message appears to an invitee. Notice the default hyperlinks:

The first link (“Demo” in this case) is simply a link to the site itself, and the name is generated from the title given during the initial creation within Central Administration. The second link takes the user to the actual registration page where they can enter their information:

We’ve all been guilty from time to time of not “reading the manual” thoroughly…especially in the IT world. :) Let’s assume for this post that the user receives the invitation and is so excited to join an ExCM-powered extranet site that they click the first link instead of “register.” Unless the root level site were anonymously accessible, they would be taken to the Sign In page for the site:

Since they have not yet created an account, they obviously cannot sign in. Also, because we are not allowing Anonymous Registration for this site, there is no link directly to the registration page available. Frustration sets in, and the user never follows through with their dream of becoming a registered user of an ExCM site.

Of course, this all could have been avoided if the invitee had just “read the manual” (or email in this case). So how can we prevent further dreams from being crushed in the future? By creating a custom template for the Invitation Mail Message that removes the hyperlink.

The first thing we need to do is create a new Mail Definitions list and item containing the customized template. To do this, we need to navigate to Site Actions – More Options:

From there, we select “Mail Definitions” and give the new list a name:

After clicking “Create,” we are taken to the new list. Now we to select “New Item” from the menu:

Now we need to give our new template a name, mail subject, and mail body. The first two are self-explanatory, but the mail body itself needs to be in HTML format. Here is a sample of the existing Invitation Mail Message found on our help site:

I am going to copy and paste that section into Notepad so we can take a closer look at the edits we need to make. In this scenario, I am looking for the following value:

<a href="$invitationWebUri.AbsoluteUri">$HttpUtility.HtmlEncode($invitationWeb.Title)</a>

I am just going to replace the entire reference with regular text so that it will now read:

“…the best ExCM-powered Extranet site on the planet!”

After that, I copy and paste our text from the Notepad file into the mail body area for the template:

After clicking “Save,” we can now see that our new template has been successfully created:

Now, let’s use this new template for our ExCM invitations. We'll navigate to Site Actions – Site Settings and select “Mail Settings” from the ExCM management menu. From there, we'll select the “Invitation” message under “Mail Messages:”

In the middle of the pop-up window, we need to select “Use Custom Template” and select the one we just created and click “Save:”

We can now see that the Invitation Mail Message is using our custom template:

Now, let’s test it out. After inviting another user and opening the email, we now see this:

Our custom template is now working and we have prevented future invitees from despair!

Of course, you can get MUCH more detailed in the customization of your messages. You can use HTML to change the colors and fonts, include graphics, etc. Regardless of complexity, however, the process remains the same.

Working with Registration Receivers in Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM) – Part 2 – The “MembershipProfile” Receiver

By Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM) contains a framework called Registration Receivers that can be used to inject custom programming activities into the ExCM registration pipeline. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the “SPUser” receiver and its function.

In this part, we will discuss the “MembershipProfile” receiver which is used to update the membership profile fields with the values provided by the user at the time of registration. Similar to the “SPUser” receiver, this feature modifies the behavior of your SharePoint Extranet site so that external users’ experience is more consistent with that of your internal users.

First, let’s take a look at what happens when the receiver is not used. I have simply commented out the RegistrationReceiver section of the web.config file:

Now I will create a new user with the Anonymous Registration link:

Note the values I supplied for First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Job Title, and Phone Number below:

After clicking “Finish” and successfully creating the user, I log back into the site using the System Account and navigate to the Extranet Users link:

Then I select the newly created user and then “View User” from the “Users” tab. Notice that the profile information is blank:

Next, I add the Registration Receivers back and create another user. Again, notice the values specified for the registration fields:

Now I'll log in and view the new user:

You’ll notice that the “MembershipProfile” receiver has taken the values I specified on the registration form and merged them into the user’s Account Profile. Extranet Users will now have profile information similar to internal users (whose information is pulled from Active Directory).

 

SPGA Now Provides Site Lifecycle Management for SharePoint 2010

by Tony Bierman

Today we’ve released a significant update to our Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 product. Prior to this release, SPGA was already a great tool for managing the process of requesting and creating new SharePoint 2010 sites. With the addition of these new site lifecycle management features, SPGA users can now manage the entire SharePoint 2010 site lifecycle from creation to expiration and decommissioning.

SPGA provides SharePoint 2010 site lifecycle management through the creation of Asset Lifecycle Policies. As you can see from the screen shots below, administrators are able to easily define site closure and expiration values in a few easy steps.

 

To learn more and download the latest SPGA 2010 release, visit our Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 product page.