Function1

Who says you can’t teach an old elephant new tricks?  In an effort to offer the best portal services available, Function1 has been spending a lot of time with Microsoft Office SharePoint server. Microsoft is a traditional market leader and its most recent incarnation of SharePoint has the technology baked-in to live up to the hype. Instead of just taking Microsoft’s word for how totally radical the software is, we did our own digging into the benefits and problems SharePoint has had over the years. We’ve been quite impressed by the integration of server and client side software, and by the general architecture of the MOSS solution. So much so, we believe the most recent SharePoint release is a viable contender for customers who want to migrate away from WCI to another  enterprise portal solution.

Before we get started, some terminology:

• WebCenter Interaction (WCI) – The Plumtree->BEA Product Stack that you’re probably running now.
• WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) – The foundation of the SharePoint server platform. This is also the gateway for developers to interact with SharePoint behind the scenes.
• MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) – The presentation layer and pre-built components that make up the portal aspect of SharePoint.
• Web Parts – The individual components that make up a Sharepoint site.  For WCI users, these are portlets.
• Web Sites – The areas of pages and web parts that combine to create a portal. For WCI users, this is the equivalent of a community.

From here on, I’ll refer to MOSS as simply SharePoint.

The History, Myth, and Legend

SharePoint has been competing in the portal space for a long time. SharePoint 2001 was Microsoft’s first endeavor in portal technology and was primarily a document storage solution. SharePoint 2003 built on this technology, but was plagued with scalability and usability issues. By the time 2007 rolled around, Microsoft had already been given a bad wrap for their portal technology and the myths surrounding the product became legend.  But the Sharepoint 2007 release went a long way to discrediting Microsoft’s critics.  With the 2007 release, in our opinion, Microsoft made the jump from “departmental document sharing sites” to “ready-for-primetime enterprise solution”.

SharePoint makes sense for customers with a heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office)

Microsoft was not at the forefront of Portal technology in 2003, but this gave the company the late adopter advantage of learning from other company’s mistakes. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Microsoft took the very best of portal technology from competing products and created a fully integrated suite of tools. Tight integration has been built from the Web to the Desktop through Office Tools, and from the Web to the Developer’s desktop through Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. There’s also WEB 2.0 goodies like blogs and wikis, as well as a workflow and document management solution right out of the box.

What you need to install to get started

The reasoning for integrating middleware is similar for both Oracle and Microsoft. If you buy the portal product, life will be so much easier if you just buy all their connecting products too. Microsoft SharePoint is no exception with tight integration in Microsoft Office, Exchange, and Developer tools.

There are a few moving parts needed for for a basic SharePoint installation.

• Microsoft Server 2003/2008 – This is self-explanatory, but the point we’d like to make is that you can use 32 or 64bit flavors of the server software. This is something we’ve been missing from Oracle WCI 10gR3.
• Active Directory – Although not required for a SharePoint installation, many of the security features and some of the add-ons require an AD source.
• IIS (Internet Information Services) – Microsoft’s web hosting platform handles application pools, memory management, and the .NET framework. SharePoint plugs right into existing IIS environments as a new website.
• SQL Server – Continuing on the theme of one company to rule them all, the database needs to be a SQL Server flavor. There are no alternatives to this, unlike WCI 10gR3 which had a number of database options.
• .NET Framework – Microsoft’s development container (it actually contains a number of languages) for the development of custom applications. Also the development base for WSS and MOSS.
• WSS (Windows Shared Services) – The nuts and bolts of any SharePoint deployment. This set of services includes web farm management, a persistence layer, workflow, content management, and search.
• MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) – The interface, websites, and web parts that make up the user experience. Also includes integration with Office tools and SharePoint Designer.
• Visual Studio 2008 – Although not a requirement to get started, any development with the .NET framework will include Visual Studio. If you’d like a solution that includes source control, we suggest the team edition.

A Familiar Face

One of the benefits to having a Microsoft development team working on a portal product is the common user interface found in the SharePoint administrator and user experiences. Many of the menus are “office-like” and have been made even more so in SharePoint 2010 where the ribbon style interface has been employed. Behind the scenes, SharePoint employs AJAX and rich-text editing throughout the SharePoint experience. What Microsoft lacks in cutting-edge portal technology, it makes up for in robust engineering of the portal components.

Scalability and Availability

In the past, the weakest link in SharePoint deployments has been the limited amount of scalability and availability options for a systems administrator. SharePoint 2007 changes all that. With the 2007 release, Microsoft dismantled the SharePoint solution into a number of independent services that can be deployed on clustered, distributed, and virtual machines. Services communicate through the common WSS interface allowing for stateless services across a server farm. For smaller organizations, we found scalability goes both ways. SharePoint can actually run on a single computer (although highly frowned upon). Resource usage for a small organization is nominal compared to Oracle’s WebCenter 11g base deployment. Microsoft has also allowed organizations to expand on an existing SharePoint installation by reconfiguring and adding to server farms as needed.

On the availability front, load balancing can be employed through a hardware device or Microsoft’s load balancing software solution. SQL Server contains Mirroring capabilities, and content can be distributed between multiple data stores to maximize server hardware.

Thank Goodness for Documentation

Plumtree Portal/ALUI/WCI  has never been credited to have a broad base of documentation, knowledgebase articles, examples, and blogs from users. As a former BEA consultant, I have felt the pain customer’s go through when trying to troubleshoot an undocumented problem. Oracle, similarly, has little documentation from real world WebCenter 11g users, because the product is so new to the market. SharePoint, on the other hand, has been widely used in various industries and there is a ton of documentation out there to support a SharePoint shop. From developer examples to 3rd party add-ons to UI Themes, the SharePoint community is verbose.

I’m sold, lets get on the SharePoint train!

Not so fast. Much like Oracle WebCenter 11g, there is no real clear path on migrating content from WCI to SharePoint. Although the technologies have similar portal components, SharePoint is a database driven solution whereas WCI was split between databases and file system storage. Don’t expect a migration plan from Microsoft’s rival, but that’s where we are hoping to help. As portal experts, we have the tools and knowledge to help you make the move from WCI to SharePoint. No, we haven’t received payola from Microsoft, we just want our customers to have the best solution for their investment. If you’re thinking about moving from WCI to SharePoint, or are just interested in more information about SharePoint Server in general, contact us. We’re happy to get you up to speed on your options.