Normally, we don’t look to HR folks for insights about SharePoint.  And I’ll admit to feeling some inner resistance initially, and only went to this session because I was geeked out on earlier ones.  However, I was surprised that I discovered great value in this presentation from the 2009 SharePoint conference in Las Vegas:

  •  business motivations for technology change
  • good thoughts on implementing SharePoint
  • social changes impacting our corporate technological evolution

 

1.  The Story

Patricia Romeo explained the background: Deloitte HR had noticed many millennials leaving after less than a year, and discovered that younger people felt great difficulty in connecting with others, and never felt a sense of kinship around them.  This is especially true when compared with the vast (if shallow) networks they developed on FaceBook and similar sites.  As a result, Romeo started an effort to develop an internal equivalent which would permit people to connect in the course of their work, make a large organization feel smaller, and overcome deep silos. 

Her demonstration of the self-branding site was a typical, very straightforward SharePoint site, with business card information on the left (along with people she knows), “About Me” and interests/favorites in the middle, and resume/documents/publications in the right column.    The most curious elements to me were the many personalization ones, such as interests, sports teams, and even things to do in her city when visiting her office.    This reflects the millennial predisposition for mixing the professional and the personal in life.    In the case of D Street, a blog is also integrated; in the case of Deloitte, professional and personal topics are featured.  The end result has been 24,000 active profiles, 2000 blogs, and hundreds of visitors a day, and an application which is rivaled only by T&E. 

 

2.      The Technology

Rob Foster then came on explaining more of the infrastructure aspects of D Street.  In particular, he outlined the feeds from SAP that pre-populate “business card” components, and ways for users to incorporate and control feedback and guestbook inputs, delegations, etc.  Even Deloitte partners got involved in creating and editing their own profiles. 

The system was build to accommodate 50,000 users, <3 second load times, consistent look and feel across profiles, and ways to monitor/moderate use and misuse.  Their legal and risk departments were surprised to find that few issues emerged from the D Street implementation; it seems that the maturity and professionalism of their work force pleasantly surprised them.

Scalability.  He found SharePoint scaled very well for D Street- they found that two WFEs for 50,000 users using blogs, personal sites, and collaboration sites.  Similarly, for the Deloitte user base they found that a single indexing and a single search/query server were enough.  One major (and surprising) weakness here was Foster’s failure to include specs on the machines used for this: RAM, proc type and count, etc.  Points off for this.  One customization in their architecture reflected the large amounts of information users were posting.  This necessitated multiple content databases.    Foster gave a logical application view of the architecture, but the material was too difficult to read (even with a freezeframeable video!) and too little explained to make much sense.  This is very regrettable, since the material seemed very promising.  In fact, for the techs in the audience (probably 90%, conservatively), this was some of the most fascinating content.  It deserved more. 

The deployment was incremental, in groups of almost 10,000 users.  The standard version of SharePoint 2007 was used, and all profiles were provisioned within seven days (!). 

Mercury tools (Load-Runner) were used for load-testing, and showed very high load-test times; this was addressed through a caching layer over the top of the web parts.   Keeping environments in sync for the load-testing was also a challenge.   

Lessons Learned.  Foster spoke to lessons learned from all this, post-rollout.  One, blogs should only be generated at user request, to avoid “dead air” in SharePoint and improve loading times.  Doing this reduced their indexing time from weeks to about three days.  Two, the site creation process is key to performance, stability, and maintenance.  Foster’s process was to create sites when accessed (i.e., on demand).    Also, the process no longer relies on site templates, leading to improvements both in site creation and subsequent performance.  Finally, they needed to improve the search to handle wild-card searches for people.    

Future Plans.  In the future, they plan to integrate D Street with the Deloitte internal portal.  Dashboards will allow them to personalize this for each employee; widgets can easily be added at will.    Social networking has also been added to make it easier to make connections throughout the organizations.   They also discussed the development of communities information, to create more levels for employees to network, and to even achieve business purposes on occasion. 

Audience questions started with the toughest: How does this add to productivity?  Romeo took this one and said that it was comparable to email.  No one can imagine not having email now, but what numbers could be provided to prove this?   

Conclusion:  Overall, this seemed like a fairly generic implementation of SharePoint 2010, and it’s not intuitive why this was rated a 300-level session.  But that’s not a slam; the presentation was noteworthy for its exploration of business imperatives at work in technology design and implementation, and especially for the way that larger social trends inform business technological change.