Joel Oleson in Depth Interview, New Admin Blog, and SharePoint WSRP Producer Samples

One of the last things I did with Bamboo just released.  I did an interview with John Anderson of Bamboo side by side with the launch of a new Admin area on their community efforts.  John’s probing deep questions really brought out areas that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.  They also stretched my thoughts into the future.  They were written in such a way that it really captured some unique insights.

The Joel Oleson SharePoint Interview is captured in the Rock Stars area.

Here are some examples of the questions:

• Can you briefly sketch out, from your firsthand experience, the evolution of (what came to be known as) SharePoint from its inception to the current MOSS 2007 version?
• What would you say was the biggest challenge the SharePoint team faced during your tenure?
• Just a few weeks ago, you announced your acceptance of a position at Quest Software.  Can you tell us a bit about your role at Quest?  I understand that one of your responsibilities will be designing new tools to help IT administrators…
• More in the interview…

And a snippet of one of my answers:

What is your vision of collaborative computing five years from now?

The rapid development that happens on the Internet in social computing will converge.  One example is the number of social bookmarking platforms.  There are literally hundreds, and the value is still low and personal since there are so many.  The FriendFeeds, Facebooks, and Twitters of today will encompass more of these features and functionality, but the base of applications that span to give us different interfaces to tag.  I expect Digg, Del.icio.us, and the others to be much more clearly led by one or two market leaders that have integrated search.  Google’s Readers, Chrome, and its Web client apps come together with tighter integration with the social platforms, and Microsoft’s Azure embraced with Office Web Applications and choice in the browser space.  The way we add properties today in documents will be tagging, and we’ll know when people create docs in the enterprise that relate to us.  It’s rich multi-user editing in Word, OneNote, etc…  The value in followings in companies is going to be interesting.  You don’t want to fire the guy who has hundreds of internal people following his document authoring and blogging.  The masses will rise up!  I love that idea of someone at the bottom in the long tail influencing management so much that they are following him visibly, and soon he’s a secret executive such as distinguished engineers.  These ICs (individual contributors) can have more flexibility in their jobs because their value is understood and appreciated by the execs.  How would that be?

Launch of the SharePoint for Administrators Bamboo Blog

In the new portal I provided an intro article in this area includes some information on Metrics and Measures for the Tier 1 support team, the Tier 2 ops team, and Engineering including some info on Information architecture.  This article lays out SharePoint Administration in a tiered structure and may provide insight not previously considered.

Including a list of good SLA metrics for Tier 1:

Average Time To Resolution

# of Tickets open

# of Tickets closed

% of Tickets closed within SLA (72 hrs service level agreement for example)

# of Tickets opened beyond SLA

% of Tickets closed – User Response Dissatisfied

% of Tickets closed – Satisfied

% of Tickets closed – Highly Satisfied

Tickets flagged to be reviewed/escalated

 

What does Tier 2 Operations do on a day to day basis?

Installation

Upgrade

Maintenance: hotfixes, service packs

Backup/restore – they will often have to work with another team to manage the TAPES or other devices

Disaster recovery solutions – may be another farm or virtual solution

Optional – Cluster and Load Balancing Support

Security and Authorization (DC support/Firewalls)

SQL Support and Maintenance (This may be outsourced to SQL team)   

   o DBCC – Database Consistency Checks
   o Database Backups
   o Database Index Maintenance
   o Defrag
   o Whitespace and Growth management
   o Disk

Disk Management

Virtualization Support (may be outsourced to another team)

Dev environment support

Test environment support

Staging or Pre-Production

Deployment of solutions and features (hint: require .WSP)

 

Tier 3 or Engineering

• Planning for high availability
• Upgrade validation and steps
• Storage management
• Performance management over time
• Risk management
• Oversight on change management
• ITIL and MOF implementation with the PMO (Project Management Office) team
• Database management plans and optimization techniques
• Operations best practices
• Cluster solutions
• Virtualization and imaging solutions and testing (may be outsourced)
• Reviewing usage reports and making recommendations for scale up / scale out
• Firewall and security management reviews
• Optimization plans and techniques
• Meeting with the dev teams to ensure best practices
• Investigating list scale, database scale, and site and site collection scale issues, and providing guidance and best practices

As well in this new area you can find a lot of deployment essentials as well as good resources on deployment and optimization.

Finally, some good work has been done in making SharePoint the defacto portal and upping it’s compliance in the community.  WSRP Producer Toolkit.  For those people on the Java side of the house, or for those in a mixed environment this means.  Many in mixed environments have been looking for SharePoint to not just consume WSRP compliant information, but also to produce it so it can be consumed by WSRP consumers like BEA’s Portal, WebSphere, SAP, etc…  Check out more at TechNet Office SharePoint Server Interoperability TechCenter

Thanks Ryan on the WSRP Producer MSDN samples announcement at the SharePoint Team site.  Nice vids.  This will just make it even easier to put a check box in how SharePoint can do whatever you need it to.