Sharepoint ... no longer a pet project?

You may recall my prior post talking about our intranet pet project using the new WSS 3.0 beta (Windows Sharepoint Services).  [note: I incorrectly called Sharepoint Services MOSS in my prior post ... MOSS 2007 stands for 'Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server' which is the big daddy to WSS and is not free.]

Well, last Tuesday at 4pm Andy and John came up to chat with Ed and I (or is it Ed and me?) about Sharepoint stuff.  The gist was that higher up folks caught wind of this pet project ... and thought it might be a good option for some upcoming building campaign related project management.  That sounded all good until the timeframe was mentioned...

We'd need to have a fully functioning campaign subsite (not the whole intranet) ready to go within 2 weeks ... and a proof-of-concept ready by Thursday morning (that's only a day and half)!  After my initial thoughts of "who's been smoking crack?!" we got down to business ...

Could we pull this off well in such a short timeframe?  Both staff and volunteers would be accessing it from on and offsite ... so it needs to have seemless access for staff, easy access for volunteers from offsite, and of there's all the security issues.

After about 2 hours of discussion, uber volunteer and sharepoint whiz Dustin showed up and we hit Applebee's down the street for grub and more discussion.

By 1am we had completely rebuilt the WSS Virtual Server, tied it to our SQL database, and had a test site up and cranking along.  A master task list was created and we were on our way.  MEGA KUDOS to Dustin ... he knocked it out of the park! :-)  Now the handoff was to Andy and John to create a subsite design by Thursday morning for a little show-n-tell. 

The show-n-tell Thursday was well received and we got a list of functional requirements which WSS will easily exceed ... AND the deadline was loosened ... whew!  It's still not a for sure, but we've got a good proof of concept to build upon.

Now the tricky part ... non-staff access and permissions.  We're being told to plan for "several hundred" volunteers to be accessing this campaign sharepoint site for the next 2 years.  Zowee!  This tuesday we're going to nail down the next steps for volunteer access.  The leading idea at this point is to create their own OU in AD and lock the snot out of it.  We'll upgrade our ISA2004 box to ISA2006 which has nice hooks for offsite WSS access with forms based authentication.  Now to find a way for non-IT staff to be able to easily (via webpage?) add/remove users from the sharepoint OU.  Dustin says he has an idea for this.

Thankfully, Sharepoint Services 3.0 is now out of beta as of 11/17/06 ... get the final version here which is free for Windows Server 2003 owners.

Couple screenshots of our test site to follow.  Looks like we may end up with an actual Intranet sooner than anyone planned :-)

Comments

[Trace Pupke]

Jason,

I can't wait to give it try myself. I had the 2.0 up and running for awhile, testing it for our intranet, but I felt it was lacking. Then I read about the changes in 3.0 and had been looking forward to it. I didn't know it was out of beta until your post.

Any modules you find useful, yet?

Enjoy and I hope it works out!

[Corey]

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I clicked on to "DUSTIN" and also had no idea what he was talking about.
But apparently it's pretty awesome, helpful, and will be valuable in these next few months.

You rock, even though I have no idea what you are talking about.

Can you play Pong on it?

[Bryan Johnson]

I've looked at WSS off and on for quite some time. As you go about enabling your "several hundred" volunteers, I'd love to hear about your thougts on the following topics:

1) Which version of SQL server are you using? How did you license it? Per CPU? Per User?

2) Do you need Win 2k3 CALs for each named user in your "Volunteer" OU?

3) How are you doing backup for WSS?

4) Do you consider anti-virus solutions for WSS necessary?

5) What tools do you use to customize WSS?

6) Did you give church email addresses to the volunteers?

[Dustin]

Bryan - Jason will have a better followup with some links on licensing. There are a couple of gotchas. Here are my thoughts on 3 - 5

3. The new version of WSS includes a recycle bin. The amount of time an object is retained in the recycle bin is configurable from both an end user standpoint and a sharepoint admin standpoint. Sharepoint also includes the stsadmin utility which can be used to backup the full site collection. Now with all of that fun marketing stuff out of the way the best solution is a combination of the Microsoft tools and 3rd party solutions. Veritas and CommVault both provide good backup solutions for Sharepoint but will cost you where the Microsoft solutions are free. Look for more options with the next release of Microsoft Data Protection Manager now in beta.

4. Within Sharepoint you can prevent certain file extensions from being uploaded and this may be acceptable today but I think your best bet is to check out the new upcoming ForeFront Security for Sharepoint. I would suspect 3rd party guys will also participate in this arena.

5. Jason will have to answer this for what he plans to use but Sharepoint Designer (aka the new Frontpage) is the Microsoft Answer to customization. You can also use the .Net development suite to do customizations. Note Microsoft does not support making direct changes to sharepoint SQL tables, views, etc.

[Jason Powell]

Bryan ... here's a couple answers for ya

1) We're using our existing SQL2000 server. We already had per processor licensing ... but yes, you either have to do that or get 1 SQL cal per sharepoint user.

2) Anyone you put in AD needs a server cal. However, it appears you can purchase a one time connector license ($600) that sounds like it covers an unlimited number of "external" users. We're still trying to decifer the licensing, but that's certainly the way we read it.

3) We're still investigating the best way to back it up ... but we're leaning towards the veritas sharepoint module.

4) Good question. Given all our other antivirus layers I guess at this point I'm going to not add another AV layer ... but it's certainly worth pondering some more.

5) I'm guessing we'll use the new sharepoint designer ... very little $

6) No, volunteers will not be getting gcc email accounts.

It's still a work in progress, but I'll post more once we get a good test site developed.