SharePoint Business Analyst

Tonight was my first visit to the London SharePoint User Group (SUGUK) in over 6 Months! So.. I thought it was an opportune time to update the SharePoint Business Analyst Blog.

This lapse was caused partly by me being extremely busy but also due to lack of events, due to the fact that (apparently) Microsoft have pulled the funding (and thus sponsoring) of the events at their flagship office in Victoria. (That Pizza they serve up at half time doesn’t pay for itself I suppose!)

Overall, last nights session was perfect for a SharePoint Business Analyst or SharePoint Project Manager, as there was little Dev focus. (sorry Devs!) This was split into two sections, as follows.

Microsoft Office 365 | Alex Pearce |BFC Networks

For me, Microsoft Office 365 is going to be massive in the next 3-4 years, especially for SME’s who are looking for a low cost entry point to SharePoint. Alex confirmed that Microsoft has over 1500 developers currently working on Office 365, which will include:

• Office Professional Plus
  
• Exchange
  
• SharePoint Online
  
• Lync (Lync can be used to ‘federate’ between two Office 365 environments, so that video chat can be possible between users in sister companies for example)

SharePoint Online Includes:

• My Sites
  
• Team Sites
  
• Intranet
  
• Extranet
  
• Workspaces
  
• Public Facing Website
  

Main exclusions to Microsoft Office 365 are:

• Web Analytics (lack of)
  
• BCS – ( This is a biggie for me and not expected until 2012)
  
• The SharePoint Timer Job
  
• Records Centre
  

Disappointingly there is no Audio or dial in for (what used to be) Live Meeting, so if you need to be speaking with someone who has audio on their PC’s. (I am sure this is a cue for developers and companies to create a product, like http://www.gotomeeting.com)

Pricing is not out yet for the UK but the estimated price is meant to be on a par with BPOS, so around £6-£10 per user, per month.

Search Decoupled | Steve Smith |Combined Knowledge

Steve put together a really interesting presentation and covered the items listed below. In essence, he was talking about how you can configure different boxes to perform different jobs for search. This included mirroring and playing around with fallover settings.

This would ideally be for companies with over 5 Million Documents. (I can think of a few companies that are still using two boxes for everything!)

He stated that when Scaling Search to consider the following:

• Crawl Server
  
• Query Server
  
• Search Administration
  
  • Inc Best Bets
    
• Property Database
  
• Crawl Database
  
• Crawling Target Server
  

   

A number of rendering Issues were mentioned with deployments that were not planned effectively. These included.

• Lack of memory
  
• Active Directory Lookups are slow
  
• User Profile Service access is slow for people queries
  

   

Steve mentioned that Search is becoming so big that you will have people that will know Search and Fast and nothing else

Oh and an150m Documents should become FAST. Now that’s a different story!