SharePoint Infrastructure & Integration Services

Leveraging a combination of Microsoft’s published SharePoint best practices, planning tools, the Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF), the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), and TrueTandem’s “Make It Real” process, we will work with you in tandem to ensure that you have an optimized SharePoint infrastructure that will ensure the success of our SharePoint integration efforts. This class of services is primarily focused on providing largely “out-of-the-box” SharePoint functionality to meet your business needs, so as to avoid the risk, time, money and complexity involved in Custom Development.

TrueTandem consultants work very diligently to avoid custom development whenever and wherever possible in order to keep risk, complexity and the level of financial investments necessary to meet your business needs as low as possible.

SharePoint Infrastructure Services

Project teams often overlook defining the elements of a SharePoint solution that can be standardized. This step is important to define elements are managed at a global level which feeds into the implementation of Governance for the SharePoint environment. Once our team collaboratively defines these elements, we focus on what the environment should contain to facilitate the proper management of your SharePoint environment.

Commonly a SharePoint environment has the following managing environments:

An authoring environment in which solutions are authored, tested and approved for production. This SharePoint farm is what our designers use to create layouts, master pages, and other site artifacts. Site designers, authors and editors should have access to this environment from their workstations.
A development environment in which custom site elements will be developed. This environment is usually a small SharePoint development farm with access by developer workstations for integrating and testing various custom solutions, web parts, integration modules and APIs. This environment would have sample data that is possibly replicated from other production or line of business environments.
A production environment in which SharePoint is available to users, which includes two server farms: the primary solution farm and a parallel (perhaps smaller) farm that provides failover in case the primary farm becomes unavailable, and that also will be used to pilot new site features.

Our team works collaboratively with our clients to define how data and content will flow through each SharePoint environment using content deployment jobs and workflow. These SharePoint environments, coupled with a defined process for the propagation of data, content and design elements, allow our team to create a solution management architecture for your SharePoint Infrastructure.

SharePoint Integration Services

TrueTandem’s SharePoint Integration Services focus on meeting as many client business requirements as reasonably possible through “out-of-the-box” SharePoint functionality. When this is possible, our integration services can revolve around the deployment of the SharePoint infrastructure as well as the native functionality within the six major SharePoint functional areas (Sites, Content, Search, Insights, Communities and Composites).

As we deliver our SharePoint Integration Services, the design is developed and ready for deployment once the client approves all documentation. Once the client approves the documentation and that the necessary infrastructure is available, TrueTandem will deploy the SharePoint solution environment. Using the implementation / migration plans created during the infrastructure planning, our team deploys each SharePoint environment defined in the finalized and approved design document.

After each of the solution environments are deployed, our team utilizes the implementation plans and Microsoft best practices to configure the environments for peak performance. Our team follows the implementation plans with the benefit of in-depth knowledge of SharePoint, BizTalk and the broader Microsoft stack.

Our implementation plan will outline at a minimum the configuration for the following:

SharePoint Farm. A configuration is defined for each farm (authoring, integration, production and production failover) to ensure all required services within each farm are available and meet best practice guidelines. In addition, all required web applications and site collections are pre-created with configurations to meet their individual purposes.
Failover. This focuses on the configuration of SQL Server database mirroring between the production and production failover environments to deliver high availability and high performance for the production environment.
Backup and Recovery. This configuration not only covers the SharePoint content, but the environment as a whole. This includes server level backups and snapshots if the solution is deployed into a virtual environment.
Archival. This configuration leverages records management and the compliance with any commercial or Government standards, such as the National Archives Records Administration guidelines.
Database Maintenance. This configuration ensures the databases are operating at optimal strength with performance and security in mind.
Content Deployment. This is a vital configuration within the solution environment. In content deployment, a content deployment job copies specified content on a specified schedule from environment to environment. This is the mechanism that will transfer approved content from the authoring environment to the staging environment to the production environment.

Upon completing the configuration of the environments, TrueTandem provides the client with the solution Configuration manual that serves as a snapshot of the client’s SharePoint "DNA" and indicates the aspect of implemented configuration that meets the defined business needs.