SharePoint In The Cloud: Evaluating Impact, Pros, and Cons - SPLive360

Editor's Notes

• #10: Software as a Service (SaaS)- Finished Apps that customers rent and customize. Examples are Salesforce.com, Office365, etc.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Standardized and virtualized infrastructure hardware, software and services that can operate any set of appsExamples: Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) PlatformPlatform as a Service (PaaS)Standardized dev and app platform that abstracts the infrasturcture, OS, and middleware to drive dev productivity. Examples: Azure Services…
• #18: Keep your attention on traditional outsourcing models. Issues of technology maturity, security, legacy systems, licensing, data ownership, and weak or absent standards are still significant today, and these hurdles to cloud adoption will ensure a long life for traditional outsourced IT service delivery. Rapid changes in this space mean that IT services clients should consider cloud options now and in the future, but traditional service models will remain.
• #20: Early Adopter - Aggressively move ‘all’ content to the cloud ASAPRisk Averse - Sign up for SPO trial; Evaluate experience and ROITypical - Freeze on-premises site creation; Move some content
• #24: The way we use them now – ExtranetCreate Machines on DemandSpot Instances Allow For Bid On CapacitySpot Price HistoryExtremely Fast Provisioning of Machine < 10 MinutesFull Admin Rights (RDP)Random Unique Password GeneratedLatest Version of WindowsSQL Database ServicesLatest Version of SQLRemote Powershell EnabledCustom Firewall PortsIIS Enabled By DefaultIntegrated MonitoringDownload and Install Any AppVM Snapshots On DemandVM Snapshot Status
• #25: The way we use them now – ExtranetCreate Machines on DemandSpot Instances Allow For Bid On CapacitySpot Price HistoryExtremely Fast Provisioning of Machine < 10 MinutesFull Admin Rights (RDP)Random Unique Password GeneratedLatest Version of WindowsSQL Database ServicesLatest Version of SQLRemote Powershell EnabledCustom Firewall PortsIIS Enabled By DefaultIntegrated MonitoringDownload and Install Any AppVM Snapshots On DemandVM Snapshot Status
• #28: If you are over 5000 note that you can have Microsoft potentially be your SharePoint dedicated hosting provider. This however has a premium cost (with some advantages).
• #30: Microsoft® Office 365delivers the power of cloud productivity to businesses of all sizes, helping to save time, money and free up valued resources. Office 365 combines the familiar Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of Microsoft’s next-generation communications and collaboration services: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online. Office 365 is simple to use and easy to administer – all backed by the robust security and guaranteed reliability you expect from a world-class service provider.Microsoft Office 365 Includes:Microsoft® Office Professional PlusThe world’s leading productivity tool now seamlessly connected and delivered with cloud services – for the best productivity experience across the PC, Phone and Browser.Exchange OnlineCloud-based email, calendar and contacts with always-up-to-date protection from viruses and spam.SharePoint OnlineCloud-based service for creating sites to connect colleagues, partners and customers.Lync OnlineCloud-based instant messaging, presence, and online meeting experiences with PC-audio, video conferencing and screen sharing. Key Microsoft Office 365 Benefits:Anywhere-access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device Work seamlessly with Microsoft Office and the other programs your users already count on everydayBusiness-class features including IT-level phone support,  guaranteed 99.9% uptime, geo-redundancy, and disaster recoveryPay-as-you-go pricing options which give you predictability and flexibility for all or part of your organizationLatest version of Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which has millions of business users today Microsoft® Office 365 for small businesses offers an easy-to-use set of web-enabled tools for small businesses, independent consultants and professionals looking for business-class productivity services. Working with the tools people know and use today, Office 365 provides anywhere access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device. It’s free for the first 30 days and then just $6 per user per month. Microsoft® Office 365 for enterprises brings together cloud versions of our trusted communications and collaboration software with our familiar Office Professional Plus desktop suite. It is designed to help meet your IT needs for robust security, 24/7 reliability, and user productivity.We have a variety of plans to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes and varying IT needs. Priced from $2 - $28 per month per user, each plan has the same 99.9% uptime guarantee and includes the security and support you expect from Microsoft. Office 365 offers great flexibility by allowing businesses to provide users access to only the services they need and pay-as-you-go pricing options.
• #31: $2.3B+ Investment in cloud infrastructureGeo-Redundant Data CentersLocations in North America, Europe, and Asia to provide optimal performance99.9% guaranteed uptime (99.95% actual) – ~9 hours a yearSecure Infrastructure – ISO27001 and SAS70 certifiedBuilt from the ground up to be environmentally sustainable
• #32: Office 365 Services Can Not Be Customized. As a standard service, Office 365 cannot accommodate change requests or customizations that deviate from our Office 365 service descriptions. If customizations are required to solve the business problem, an on-premises or partner-hosted solution might be a good customer fit.  Be Transparent with Customers Regarding Real Deployment Timelines and Migration Costs. While customers know to expect lower total overall IT costs with cloud services, they need to be better informed about cloud deployment costs. Office 365 deployments range from straightforward to highly complex, depending upon variables like the complexity of their environment. Office 365 Services Are Not the Sameas On-Premises Solutions.  Our world-class offerings provide customers with the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser. Office 365 services give customers access to the most commonly used business productivity features and capabilities, supported by standardized operational processes. This model achieves the economies of scale required to pass cost savings through to our service customers. 
• #34: ‘Unified’ Search results combining online and customer site sources. (Targeted for W15)FAST Search which includes features such as thumbnails, previews, contextual search, visual best bets, and deep search refinement. Targeted for W15.PerformancePoint Services. Targeted for W15.PowerPivot is unable to connect to external services. Targeted for release in FY12.Sandbox Solutions are targeted at the site collection level. Alternatives to higher-end custom solutions (full-trust code) are targeted for FY12 and W15.
• #36: Search Improvements (Federation) - Connector so query goes to both indexes.GEST Links (Cloud Only) - Only DocumentsPower Shell enhancementsImproved BCS - Direct to SQL AzureNative Mobile Apps (Windows Phone App - SP News Feed App from MS)Powerview and PowerPivot in SP OnlineProject Online!NAPA - Developer Site Collection (For Developer Scenarios)Anonymous Access - Public Sites - 1 Public Site Per TenantSkydrive Pro (Sync Personal Library, etc) - Will go to 7GB from 500MBBI - Powerview, PowerPivot, Excel Services - Issue is using these services on data stored off cloud... (this feature set basically doesn't work for online - based on transfer ratesPowerPivot Gallery (not supported).WCF EndPoint (Translation Talk Between Both) - Wiring Up BCS - Then Model for Talking to Source SystemBCS for Profile - BCS for search - both not in o365Site Collection Deletion can be restored by tenant now (no support call!)Promoted SitesSite Collection Recycling BinBetter External SharingAdjust User Profile Properties/Level Of Self-ManagementSend To Connections for RMWay More Search ManagementIRM... Self Service Site Creation...
• #38: Flexibility Note: Some Businesses are deploying MySites on Office365 in Trusted scenarios but having the primary document management and collaboration on premises.
• #39: ADFS get’s expensive fast. First you have 2-4 additional servers. You need 2 for availability and if your AD is being connected to any one elses AD you actually probably need 4 (though 2 of those might be paid for by the other party.)Next you need to understand and manage ADFS. Not a simple decision from an investment standpoint.Enteprise class feature etc.
• #41: These non-SharePoint things need to be configured to support hybrid:Reverse Proxy and certificate authentication*Identity Provider (ADFS or Shibboleth for o365)MSOL ToolsSSO with o365DirsyncOnly required if you are consuming on-prem data in o365 (Technically not 100% required, but the risk of DoS is there, so it would not make sense to not do this).
• #44: Going from Small Business to Enterprise…20 Users… Now 40 Users… Next Year 52 Users…Manual Migration?! You can split these. Example: Internal vs external can have different plans. E1 for external. E2, E3 for internal. Named licenses which means if you can have up to 500 users on a project you might need to scope for 500 licenses. 
• #47: SharePoint Server – $4926.00 + Windows Server $726.00 x 2 + Minimum of $7,171.00 SQL license and then $9,300.00 in Standard CAL licenses.
• #48: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-4a6d-aed9-f2c1f8f23e14/Assessing_SharePoint_Server_Licensing.docxEvery Office 365 SharePoint Online customer (at the tenant level, not per subscription) includes 50 Partner Access Licenses (PALs) that can be leveraged for external sharing. Customers are not currently required to obtain additional PALs for external sharing beyond 50 users with a limit of 1000 until the next major update of the Office 365 service at which time Microsoft may choose to make it available as a paid add-on.Microsoft supports invited external users signing in to the service using a Microsoft Online Services ID.External sharing also supports Windows Live ID, including @Live.com, @Hotmail.com and @MSN.com user names, plus regional derivations of LiveID user names.EasiID, the portion of LiveID that allows external users to associate their business email address (ex: user@contoso.com) to the LiveID system, is not supported at this time.
• #55: Upgrade for 2013 is by choice for existing customers. Site collection by site collection upgrades. Or powershell etc.Eval Site Collection Copy Available (Queue data not available yet)Mysite Upgrade process is part of the core upgrade (for the MySite host then it goes through the rest in a queue process)
• #59: Navigation has to be planned – how do we create consistency between the SharePoint environments?By default the Office 365 top bar provides some additional quick access functions, so you have to determine how you want to deal with that.Each environment must have a UPA/User Profiles – Now we do have synching so that helps keep them connected, however it is entirely possible that you have two sets of social data/my sites. …
• #60: 4… Result sets are in blocks, so due to ranking challenges and relevancy they are always treated as a block of results. Refiners etc all work, but still really a distinct set of results in a unified UI.5. Metadata is managed in one location, and with proxy/synching methods you can keep consistency, but this requires effort and planning.
• #61: Subscription costs do not include implementation costs.SharePoint is a platform. So it’s not just install and configure work that needs to be done. There are implementation costs of building out your site structure, or configuration work with the OOTB vanilla sites.Really you are just shifting the costs for handling cords and basic networking/infrastructure work. Not shifting the costs for permissions issues, authentication challenges, or recovering individual documents/items. Cost of storage is expensive (much higher than on premise).Enterprises are struggling with data growth and things like the Office 365 pricing model around storage.
• #62: Cost-effective security via economies of scale (multiple clients share the cost of enterprisesecurity controls)Look at their current clients, policies…
• #63: The Security Program takes a risk-based, multi-dimensional approach to putting in place the necessary & adequate safeguards across all aspects of a service. The Program aims to define security requirements applicable to people, processes and technology, and implement corresponding controls & capabilities across the services themselves, the supporting platform and infrastructure components, as well as the hosting facilities and the hardware residing within them. Role & Responsibility of the Security Program: Help ensure services are developed in a secure manner. Microsoft’s Secure Development Lifecycle plays a critical role here. Help ensure the services are operated in a secure environment. Security controls exist across and within all layers of a given service, which supports the principle of defense-in-depth.Help ensure that services and infrastructure are monitored for configuration errors, vulnerabilities, security events and anomalous behavior.Help ensure incidents are promptly detected and a mature incident management process not only addresses the immediate issue, but identifies and corrects the cause.Help ensure personnel are adequately prepared and trained to identify security issues and provide notification through the appropriate procedure.
• #64: Australia and New Zealand – Hosted data must be in the country. Germany.
• #66: What is more reliable?Safety?Consistency?Weather effects both…
• #68: When the pipe goes down how can we still be productive? What if a cloud provider company goes out of business? What if a cloud provider decides to up its rates for service or reduces its level of service? What happens if due to some circumstance, the cloud provider looses all data that it has saved (with out having a reliable backup?) What's to keep a cloud provider (or someone else) from looking at your data? Is there insurance to cover this yet?
• #69: Note that SLAs are often merely an indication of the consequences when the service fails and not the service's actual reliability. A great example of this is GoGrid's 10,000% Guaranteed SLA. In other words, GoGrid offers a 100% uptime guarantee. Should it fail to meet that level of availability, it will compensate the customer with 100 times the fee paid for the downtime.Recovery SLAsTwo streams – the large concern is the Recovery Time Objective – P plan is backed up every 24 hours. On E plan it’s every 6 hours. The recovery time is 12 hours on P plan, and E plan it’s 1 hour. It should go without saying that the starting point should be the business case and intended use of the service, and not any legal document, such as a service level agreement (SLA). Understand what business problem the service will be solving; the intended internal and external users; when, where and how the service will be accessed; whether or not the service is business-critical; the practical consequences if the service is down or degraded for any period of time; and how the use of the service may change over time. Then, ensure the SLA reflects your needs. Almost invariably, SLAs will address availability, planned outages, critical and noncritical outages, service credits and termination rights. Typically, the sole remedy in case of a breach of the SLA is a service credit, which is usually capped based on some percentage of fees paid during the previous 12-month period. Customers should ask whether the credit is simply window dressing or actually a meaningful economic remedy that would deter the vendor from breaching the SLA.
• #70: Don’t forget that with all cloud based providers – you are also adding another layer between IT and the attorneys and paralegals.Can a law firm put a stop to a providers maintenance schedule so that a trial team can finish preparing for a case without interruption?
• #71: Termination or suspension of service. The software application and/or the data running or housed in the cloud may be critical to your business. Continuity of access and use (to both the application and data), especially when both are on a third-party server, are of utmost importance. To that end, does the cloud vendor in each instance notify you when any of the terms of the agreement may have been violated, and are you given an opportunity to remedy each violation? There is, of course, a delicate balance to be struck here. In a setting where there are multiple customers (tenants), the cloud vendor will have competing obligations to the other customers, and, inasmuch as the actions of one tenant may degrade performance for another, some level of flexibility is required. One approach is to distinguish between the service and the data; in the case of suspension, for example, agree not to lock down access to the data.
• #72: Content MigrationManually using Explorer/WebDav… doesn’t scale well.This is a question few companies ask - until it's too late. Porting data between cloud service providers is a relatively new capability and only a small number of service providers have implemented what will become a very necessary service.
• #73: The responses also indicated that this was increasing for each SharePoint version (not decreasing).50% of companies find that development of custom SharePoint solutions require more effort than expected.Support of More Complex applications was cited by 59% as a major scaling issue… along with administration.One of the best outcomes to increasing numbers of software vendors’ adoption of open interfaces and API standards in their software is customers’ ability to make the systems their organizations rely on to operate as a single system, rather than a collection of desperate applications. New business capabilities like business intelligence were now possible. What if an organization wanted this capability but relied on hosted services for some of its systems? Let’s say that an organization had an internal Active Directory and mail system, but made use of one vendors hosted ecommerce service and another vendor’s hosted CRM service. Seems reasonable so far? The organization wants to to answer a simple question: how many customers who have purchased from the organization within the past 6 months have emailed their sales representative directly after a purchase? This question requires data from the AD, email, ecommerce, and CRM systems. Getting to that data is hard, because the CRM and ecommerce systems must be accessed over a WAN connection. This makes the processes of getting to the vast data the systems hold very painful. We also hope that there is some way to correlate the various data entities between the systems: orders, customers, email addresses, sales people, etc.
• #74: WAN vs. LAN bandwidthHow much bandwidth do most organizations have on their LANs? Most have 1000 Mbps. How much bandwidth do these organizations have on their WANs? Usually less than 10 Mbps. That means that most organizations have roughly 100 times the bandwidth on the LANs as no their WANs. That’s important since the organizations’ users access cloud services through the WAN. Users will perceive even well-implemented cloud services as being much slower and unresponsive as compared to mediocrely implemented in0house services. The cloud service is slower, the problem lies with the users’ limited bandwidth in accessing the cloud service.WAN vs. LAN reliability How often does your LAN go down? How often does your WAN go down? Imagine losing access to all of your organization’s services in the event of an Internet connection loss? More is available in the previous section of this post titled “service availability”.
• #82: Unfortunately, not all clouds are created equal. It is very difficult to compare cloud service offerings as much of the detail is just not available. Take a look at the definitions of EC2 instance types and you will see terms like “virtual core”, EC2 Compute Unit (one EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. This is also the equivalent to an early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor), and high/moderate/low I/O performance. These are less than precise measures. It makes it challenging to know what you are purchasing and even more difficult to compare with other providers.There are already several standards bodies involved in defining criteria and metrics for cloud computing. The wonderful thing about standards is that there are always plenty to choose from. Until they reach a consensus, the following list is an attempt at gathering enough information to be able to make a reasonable comparison between providers:The early cloud adopters have generally been software developers and other techies that don’t need much hand-holding. Today, enterprise officers need to know they can contact someone at their cloud provider when they experience problems. Some cloud providers bundle in support services while others offer various support tiers.
• #86: Keep in mind – if you have a matter team working late and against the clock – can you cancel/stop maintenance procedures from causing an interrupt?
• #94: A lot of this can seem daunting and I know one of the hardest things is figuring out how to do some of the things I have shown today. If you are interested in further training or assistance please let me know. Based on the number of people who are interested and the areas of interest we can schedule further training sessions to help everyone better use the SharePoint portal.It's our commitment to you that we will continue to hear your feedback and identify the issues. I encourage you to give us feedback during the coming months, and we will continue to deliver more and more functionality, more and more guidance to help you be successful with your application of SharePoint.Thank You for Reading/Listening
• #99: “75% of IT budget is spent on ‘keeping the lights on’ 25% is strategic growth/new solutions. The goal is to re-align this so that IT is focused on the business. (80/20 – apparently is another review – applications is the name for biz solution work).In Nick Carr’s famous book, Does IT Matter, he argued eloquently, providing copious examples, that most business infrastructure goes through a fairly common cycle.  This cycle is well-understood and more of a force of nature than anything else.  What we are seeing now with cloud computing is nothing more than this cycle replayed again with information technology (IT), just like it has with electricity, roads/highways, banking, and telecommunications before it.”
• #100: I’m not going to go into this matrix in detail right now, but whether you disagree with aspects or not, I’m certain you can see the trend occurring in the diagram.  Cloud computing definitely appears to be an evolution of the way that we create IT.
• #101: Which brings me to the basic argument.  If the following are true about cloud computing:It is something new …… developed by the giant web businesses in order to get to massive scale… and an evolution of how IT infrastructure is createdThen we have to look carefully at how and why an Amazon or Google did what they did.  The diagram I used to explain during my keynote:Large Internet business needed scale, cost-efficiency, and agility to be competitive.  Google is 1 Million servers.  Amazon.com releases new code thousands of times per day.  Microsoft runs 2,000 physical servers per headcount.  Google runs 10,000 per headcount and aspires for 100,000.  Google and Amazon use little or no ‘enterprise computing’ solutions.So what happened?  The causation resulted in high levels of automation, a devops culture, use of standardized commodity hardware, a focus on homogeneity, etc.  The end result is a system that lends itself to being turned into a utility (aka ‘utilitization‘.  Hence the arrival of public clouds.  One of the side-effects of using cloud computing techniques to build an IT infrastructure is that now those platforms or applications built on top of it can leverage the automation to get elasticity (benefit), pay-only-for-what-you-use with metering (benefit), and other autonomous functions (benefit).Again, these benefits are essentially side effects of cloud computing, not cloud computing itself.  The gray section labeled results above represents a number of the core aspects and features of cloud computing.  This is why the arguments about the existence of internal ‘private’ clouds can be so bitter[1].  From a public cloud provider perspective, an internal infrastructure cloud is simply an automated virtual server on-demand system, missing many of the aspects of cloud computing above.
• #119: An information worker logs on to their SharePoint Online tenancy and opens an app for SharePoint or external list that needs data from an on-premises OData data source.The external list creates a request for the data and sends it to Business Connectivity Services. BCS looks at the connection settings object and the external content type to see how to connect to the data source and what credentials to use.BCS retrieves the client SSL certificate from the Secure Store in SharePoint Online. This is used for SharePoint Online authentication to the reverse proxy. BCS retrieves an OAuth token from the Access Control Service. These are the user’s credentials used for user authentication to the SharePoint 2013 on-premises farm. The Access Control Service is part of every SharePoint Online subscription. It is a Security Token Service that manages security tokens for users of SharePoint Online. BCS sends an HTTPs request to the published endpoint for the data source. The request includes the client certificate from the Secure Store and the user’s OAuth security token as well as a request for the data. The reverse proxy authenticates the request by using the client certificate and forwards it to the CSOM pipeline of the on-premises SharePoint 2013 farm.The CSOM pipeline consults the User Profile Service to look for a mapping between the user’s OAuth security token from ACS and the user’s domain credentials from AD DS. If one exists, the user’s domain credentials are returned to the request.The user’s domain credentials are used to authenticate to the SharePoint on-premises site that receives Hybrid requests and the request is passed to the SharePoint on-premises BCS serviceThe SharePoint on-premises BCS retrieves the credentials that are used to authenticate to the external data source from the SharePoint on-premises Secure Store ServiceThe SharePoint on-premises BCS service passes the request for data along with the external data credentials to the OData service head which then performs the desired operations on the external data and returns the results to the SharePoint Online user.
• #121: A lot of this can seem daunting and I know one of the hardest things is figuring out how to do some of the things I have shown today. If you are interested in further training or assistance please let me know. Based on the number of people who are interested and the areas of interest we can schedule further training sessions to help everyone better use the SharePoint portal.It's our commitment to you that we will continue to hear your feedback and identify the issues. I encourage you to give us feedback during the coming months, and we will continue to deliver more and more functionality, more and more guidance to help you be successful with your application of SharePoint.Thank You for Reading/Listening