The SharePoint Journey

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The SharePoint Journey

• It Always Feels Like You Are Almost There

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Discussion Points

• Background
• Operating Environment
• Why We Did The Sharepoint Thing
• Internal Web Communication Collaboration
• Workflow Workflow Workflow
• Records Management Integration
• Implementation Challenges
• Active Directory
• Being Early could Make You Late
• ACL Limitation The Bane of Our Existence
• Service Pack 2.0 Breaks Everything
• The Future

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Lets Get Grounded
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Omnicom Background

• Largest Marketing Advertising Holding company
  in the world
• Agencies in the forefront
• Substantial Industry consolidation in past 20
  years
• Managed in a decentralized manner
• Agencies compete with each other for business
• Few common systems

Omnicom is The Best!!!
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My Team

• Dolphin Intelligent mammal that communicates
  with each other
• Dolphin Speak Technical IT Speak that only
  other IT People Understand
• The number of dolphins for each of my team
  members illustrates their ability to communicate
  in Dolphin Speak.
• Code UK Excellent Sharepoint Development Team
• Contact Matt McNeany 212 824 4036
• Peter IT Infrastructure
• Sarmad IT Applications
• Craig Sharepoint Development
• Bob Ed Project Management
• Billy Business Man
• Anne Anthony Process Owner

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So Why Did We Do It?

• Well we
• Didnt have a burning platform scenario
• Agencies run themselves in an autonomous and
  competitive manner
• Agencies and Networks do not really want their
  internal competitors to know what they are doing
• But
• The entrepreneurial environment strives on cost
  efficiency
• Decentralization means lots of different ways to
  do the same thing so each can learn from the
  others
• Some things just dont require a complex system
  to make things better

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Why I Really Love Sharepoint!!!

• Collaboration amidst competition
• Tough row to hoe
• Facilitated by Sharepoint flexible security model
• Business is about diversity of needs and changing
  requirements
• Sharepoint is a flexible platform that puts
  development design power into the business user
• The Sharepoint Toolkit helps drive communication
  and business collaboration to a new level

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Operational Benefits and Limitations

• Benefits
• Immediate process improvement (manual process can
  be automated in a day in many cases)
• Minimal to no additional Cost to the agency
• Centrally hosted, locally managed
• Minimal administration
• Easy to learn
• Rapid Deployment
• Limitations
• Functionality/workflow customization requires
  additional development (not supported directly by
  my team)
• Limited branding (site look/feel)

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Workflow Workflow Workflow

• Workflows are repeatable processes that can be
  engineered and automated to
• Improve throughput
• Reduce handling
• Eliminate steps
• Reduce process time
• Multiple workflows can be easily woven together
  in SharePoint with to address a relatively
  complex processes.
• Processes interact with each other
• Exist within collaborative workspaces
• Share functionality
• Workflows vary from
• Agency to Agency
• Function
• Project to project
• In order to create an automated workflow the
  process must be
• Definable
• Repeatable

Users dont know how easy this can be.. They
dont know how hard it can be once you start.
We sometimes go through several iterations to get
it right. But it is still faster than our
agencies asking for a solution from their IT
groups.
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OmnicomLink Read Sharepoint/.Net (Its good-
Its good)

• Portal, knowledge base, channels, key workflows
  deployed
• Sarbanes Oxley
• Cognos Reporting
• Single Active Directory for users 60,000
  users.
• Entity manager service - Single source of Omnicom
  company data
• Records Management
• Business Leadership training
• Real Estate management applications
• Training Portal
• Intercompany Statement Communication Process
• Credit Evaluation Tool

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Some Issues to Consider

• Our Challenges
• We own but dont tell our agencies how to
  operate.
• Getting business people to adopt this technology
  is not always easy.
• Usually, once the business community understands
  the power they either use ours or ask their IT
  groups about it.
• Why do employees go to OmnicomLink? (Use
  SharePoint)
• Relevant information tools that help agency
  employees do there job
• Content that comes bottom up, across as well as
  top down
• Confidence in confidentiality is vital
• Need to assure differing levels of
  confidentiality
• Agencies can be paranoid of each other even
  though they are part of the same family
• Information needs to be relevant, accessible and
  secured
• Processes enabled by the technology must work

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Our Challenges
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Active Directory Our Challenge or Sharepoint
Weakness?

• Active Directory is a central component of an
  organization wide Sharepoint implementation.
• There are more email domains at Omnicom than
  stars in the Milky Way.
• We use a directory synchronization tool (Simple
  Sync) to create an Omnicom Quasi Active
  Directory.
• SharePoint sucks in our quasi Active Directory
  to create SharePoint User Profiles
• SharePoint user profile changes stay in
  Sharepoint and do not update our little quasi
  Active Directory nothing like keeping two sets
  of user data in synch
• Although the above can be achieved by using Third
  Party tools they can be very costly depending on
  the size of the Active Directory.

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Active Directory The Dead Accounts Problem

• Dead Accounts are accounts that exist in
  SharePoint but no longer in the Active Directory
• When a user account is deleted from the active
  directory, the SharePoint crawl does not delete
  the corresponding user profile from its database,
  hence creating a Dead Account.
• This does not mean that the person has access to
  the SharePoint environment/portal but can lead to
  a lot of confusion when searching or adding users
  to sites and groups.
• A Third Party tool like AvePoint/DocAve is
  required to identify and remove dead accounts
  from your SharePoint farm.

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Access Control List The Bane of Our Existence

• ACL simply put, lists of users, permissions
  roles to an object such as a document
• Sharepoint allows many unique permissions for
  users to be assigned to lists
• For us this is akin to Nirvana
• Also a BIG PROBLEM since there is a limitation on
  the size of the ACL File
• We have Several Site collections that hang off
  our Corporate Portal.
• More than 60,000 users have permissions to the
  corporate portal and various site collections.
• Our security Model uses a hybrid between AD
  groups and SharePoint Groups

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Access Control List Why Size Matters?
Strange for a product that is touted as a company
wide collaboration system

• Surprise Surprise we identified a truly
  undocumented limitation on the number of
  permissions an ACL could contain. It seems that
  size does matter
• It seems the ACL could only be 64kb in size
  not so good for us
• People are aware of this limitation today but,
  lucky us, as early implementers we were one of
  the first to run into it and at the time could
  find only one obscure reference to it on a Blog.
• Though we first encountered the problem because
  of a contact management system we develop, it
  really hit us hard with an application
  we use to manage intercompany activity.
  Basically knocking us to the ground each quarter
  as the intercompany process was executed.

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Fixing the ACL Problem

• Heres a real surprise proving to Microsoft that
  this was a fundamental flaw was not easy and
  getting them to address it was even harder.
• To date we have managed the number of ACLs by
  aggressively deleting items in our recycle bin,
  creating new site collections and modifying to a
  small extent how our SharePoint developed
  application security works. - Talk about
  annoying
• Microsoft did eventually supply us with a custom
  fix that we are testing as I speak.
• We identified the issue more than 18 months ago.
• By the way, the beauty of this particular issue
  is that not only does it break stuff it appears
  to break seemingly unrelated stuff like crawl
  and search functionality.

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Service Pack 2 Breaks Everything

• The best thing about Sharepoint is it is a
  flexible platform that promotes creative workflow
  development
• But, as with all application, when you customize
  the path to upgrade is cloudy at
  best
• Some stuff just stops working
• The Fabulous 40!!! Not so Fabulous anymore
• Nintex Workflow compatibility issues
• Multi-level filtering a great feature to help
  us communicate amongst our organizational
  complexities doesnt work!!!
• Known issues
• License expiration changes your license status
  to trial and sets expiration in 180 days without
  warning fix now available
• Corrupt service pack download problems
• Local issues with user-facing functionality

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The Future
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SharePoint Lets us Dream Just a Bit
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Contact Information

• Need help in Sharepoint Development? Please
  contact Matt McNeany - 212 824 4036
  matt.mcneany_at_codeworldwide.com
• Want to contact me for some reason? You can email
  me at Frank.manzi_at_omnicomgroup.com or call me at
  203 618 1516. Please dont call me to try and
  sell me something because I have a lot going on
  and I pretty much know what I need