The Business Challenge
Your company has SharePoint installed and is using the application "out of the box" with some third-party applications and some minor ‘coded' customizations. Your teams are using SharePoint but seeking more capability and you are not sure where to start.
You have WSS or MOSS in use, but stood it up in a "good enough to get things going" environment, and now that it has become a mission-critical application, you need to ensure you're doing the right things for failover, backup/restore, and performance.
Perhaps you "inherited" a SharePoint environment set up by a predecessor or an outside consultant and just want to be sure you're following best practices that have emerged since the installation.
Maybe you just need a set of "as built" documentation for your SharePoint environment to satisfy ITIL or audit requirements.
Or you're starting to look at SharePoint 2010 and need some advice on planning your upgrade and what the project will entail.
The KMA Solution
Because our team has been involved with hundreds of SharePoint implementation projects, we can help. Our SharePoint Health Check is a limited-scope, fixed-fee engagement to review and document your company's SharePoint environment relative to Microsoft-prescribed and KMA-learned best practices, and make initial recommendations for remedial action.
SharePoint Health Check Overview
We will perform the following:
1. Review and document service pack and patch levels for SharePoint and component technologies (Windows, SQL Server, etc.)
2. Review and document SharePoint farm server configuration.
3. Review and document Service Accounts and their uses.
4. Review and document web applications and databases, and how the logical architecture of SharePoint has been built.
5. Review and document scheduled tasks and processes related to SharePoint.
6. Review logs, and document recommendations for remedial actions and/or log grooming.
7. Review your backup and disaster recovery (DR) processes related to SharePoint, and make recommendations for DR readiness.
8. Review your security model around "edge" and malware protection, and make recommendations for remediation as needed.
9. Perform "best practices" analysis using automated utilities, document findings, and make recommendations for remediation as needed.
10. Review other SharePoint configuration checkpoints as needed around such areas as Search, Usage Reporting, Content Deployment, SMTP configuration, etc., and make recommendations for remediation as needed.
11. Review and document SQL databases relative to prescribed best practices, maintenance plans, etc. and make recommendations for remediation as needed.
12. Review other SharePoint-related issues, such as:
- Best practices for staging and development environments
- Best practices for virtualization with SharePoint
- Use of integrated SharePoint training content
- Preparation for future migration to SharePoint 2010