SharePoint Environment Assessment

Before taking any SharePoint project your must ask the following question with the customer to get clear information about the requirement and architecture;

·         What is the primary business objective of the SharePoint environment? (What needs of your business are met by the existing system – Communication, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Dashboards, Complete Intranet Solution, Extranet for suppliers, customers etc?)

·         Total users for each SharePoint Site on Production (Top level)

·         Number of Top level sites

·         What is the size of Content DB?

·         What is the peak site usage in last one month?

·         Please share the Backup and Recovery Process?

·         Please provide details or preferably Physical and Logical Architecture Diagrams for Production, Staging and Development Environment

·         Please enlist all Integration points (Interfaces) with LOB and other applications/ Software (Ex: imaging solution)

·         Please give a brief about all Web Applications and Shared Service Provider (SSPs) in scope.

·         Please provide the list of all 3rd party software (BPM, Search, Analytics, and BI – integrated to SharePoint) installed?

·         Is any sort of load balancing done for the intranet?

·         Is there any mirroring or clustering done on SharePoint DBs?

·         Please enlist the main kind of content (Text content, Documents, Images, flash, Audios, Videos, other formats)

·         Is there any other Content Management or Document management tool in place along with SharePoint?

·         Are there any secured sites? (Using SSL, encryption)

·         What is the current Authentication mechanism? (Windows Authentication, Forms based Authentication or Kerberos, AD, LDAP )

·         Who is supporting the existing environment? Please provide existing SLA and priorities for incident management.

·         Please give a brief about team structure for Support (OS, Hardware, SQL server, Security, Exchange server, SharePoint)

·         Do you have a distributed development team across multiple locations/geographies? Please provide details.

·         Do you have a distributed team of site owners?

·         Approximate number of departments

·         Approximate number of workflows 

·         Approximate number of Static forms and pages

·         Approximate number of dynamic forms and pages

·         Do you need any new theme or branding for your new SharePoint site?

·         Permission Level Expectations

·         Approximate number of Reports

·         Approximate number of Dash Boards and KPI’s

·         Do you need Bilingual option in your Portal