Sharepoint 2010! What’s new In a nutshell

Sharepoint Licensing cost – demystified !!

SharePoint has unquestionably garnered a lot of attention from CIOs worldwide and has been called “nothing short of a phenomenon” by Toby Bell, Gartner Inc.’s research vice president. Now with advent of its new version Sharepoint 2010, the business collaboration platform, interest in Sharepoint has increased manifold.

However, most of the organizations are still struggling to calculate the TCO and ROI for the sharepoint.

Total cost of ownership can be calculated by including various costs like Software licenses, Server and SQL Server Licenses, Hardware and Infrastructure, IT staff for Planning, designing, Development, testing and Support, user training ,  Antivirus, 3rd party products and last but not the least indirect costs like having other MS products like Office, AD, Exchange, Live meeting, OCS, Groove, Performance point as part of your IT stack.

Calculating Software Licensing costs for Sharepoint itself is quite a tricky business. Only if your Solution Architect and stakeholders can answer the following questions with confidence, you can be comfortable calculating the license model:

1. Do you understand the difference between the feature set of WSS, MOSS 2007 Standard and Enterprise Version and Internet version?
2. How many users are going to use MOSS 2007 Standard/ Enterprise version? How many users will be using after 2-5 years?
3. Do you want Sharepoint to act as ECM/ Collaboration tool for your public facing/ internet site?
4. What is the existing content size in your organization? What is the content size expected in 2-5 years?
5. Do you want to automate your business process? If yes, answer following sub questions: What is the complexity level of your business processes? Do you want to use Inforpath forms? Do you want to use 3rd party Workflow tool?
6. What are the search requirements? Do you want to index more than 5,00,000 items?
7. Which shared services do you want to use? Have you identified them?
8. What are your integration points?
9. Do you want to use Loadbalancing for your WFEs? Do you want clustering for the DBs?
10. Do you want to manage Indexing in a separate server apart from Application server?

If you cant answer to one or more questions, I would suggest that you do your homework first and come up with the Logical and Physical Architecture. Calculating a ballpark figure for licenses would then be a cakewalk.

Next step would be to go the Bamboo solutions site and use the calculator. For your quick reference I am posting the following table for 3 scenarios

Option 1:100 users, 2 WFE, 2 SQL, 1 App Server

Option 2:500 users, 2 WFE, 2 SQL, 1 App Server

Option 3: 1000 users, 2 WFE, 2 SQL, 1 App Server, 1 Index Server

Sharepoint Licensing Ballpark estimate

 The scenarios assumes that you would need to search more than 5,00,000 documents, all users would need Enterprise CALs, you need  minimum of 2 WFEs and 2 DBs and you don’t want to have a public facing site.

Not to mention, if you are good at negotiating and if you are already into Microsoft infrastructure, you can get yourself a good bargain.

I will be talking about calculating ROI for Sharepoint in next post.

Till then have fun exploring the new features of Sharepoint 2010 and my new post on Sharepoint 2010 licensing

What to expect in Sharepoint 2010?

 

What to expect from Sharepoint 2010– when the expactations are sky high? This can be fairly attributed to the immense success of its predecessor sharepoint 2007 . Well there hasn’t been any official communication yet from Redmond but following list has been compiled partially based on my wishes and whims and rest to rumors floating around which are keeping the sharepoint buzz alive.

Enterprise Content Management features

• Document imaging and reports management
• Records Management and better Archiving Policies – Sharepoint desperately needs them to maintain leadership in the ECM marketplace.
• Better taxonomy management – We desperately need this !!!
• Email management – User/ Project can create a repository for managing important emails.
• Better offline support – I guess MS Groove or Workspace will be more effectively used for all its worth.
• Better support for Internet facing sites – WCM capabilities has a good scope of improvement
• Should support more content storage options – storage architecture can be composed of SAN, NAS, RAID, tape, etc. Currently it supports only SQL server.

Web 2.0 Features

• Enhanced collaboration tools – Wikis, Blogs, Discussion forums, Surveys etc. Community Toolkit on Codeplex can be handy here. 

Security features

• More OOTB permissions type and better flexibility to create custom roles and permissions to implement Role based access control
• Support for other LDAP and Identity management solutions
• Wizards for configuring SSO and Kerberos
• Claims based Authentication to use any other Authentication mechanism

Integration features

•  Integration with other CMS product – Documentum, Imaging solution
• Webparts to integrate CRM products other than MS Dynamics
• Seamless integration with Silverlight. I am expecting a collection of silverlight web parts.

Business Intelligence and Reporting features

 There are reports and some official communication that few features (read analystics and scorecarding) of Performance Point server will be part of next version of Sharepoint.

You should also expect a Dashboard designer and more webparts dedicated for reporting and analytics. There should also be easy interfaces to effectively utilize SSAS and SSRS.

Development ease

• Easy support of Silverlight and other RIA technologies
• More ready to use templates and OOTB web parts
• Easier Content deployment

Search

• FAST Search Integration – This is more or less confirmed news.
• Faceted Search
• iFilters for ODF and PDF files and native support for other non MS doc formats.

Business Process Management

• Powerful Infopath form capabilities
• More OOTB workflow types
• A workflow modeller for State machine workflows

Admin Capabilities

• Snapshot backup and recovery
• Recovery at finer item level
• Painless Migration from SPS 2003, Sharepoint 2007, Lotus Notes

 Usability Features

• Native support of browsers other than IE
• Better Rich text control
• Better support for Mobile devices – That holds an important key for future mobile apps that will run across major smartphone browsers. Check the link out Mobile Entrée
• Auto save features
• XHTML compliant
• Compliance to Accessibilty standards 
• Ribbon Interface

Few items that have been confirmed or heard on grapevine

• The SharePoint 2010 will be shipped only as x64 installation
• Sharepoint lists will be more powerful and will allow operations like SQL tables.
• Fast Search Integration
• CMIS support to facilitate integration with EMC documentum

Performance

• Master Data Management for maintaining master data at one place to reduce redundancy of data. This data store will also support views, business rules, hierarchichal relationships

What not to expect?

• Sharepoint to be OS agnostic. Forget it :(. Atleast its not going to happen in next release
• Much action happening on Digital Asset Management and Rights Management.
• MOSS  – Sharepoint is no more associated to Office Family. “Office” moniker is out.
• Support for IE 6.0, SQL Server 2000, 32 bit SQL Server 2005