SharePoint as a Tier 1 Application

We all know that SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest revenue generating product in company history.  Currently 80% of enterprises have bought it; Microsoft has more than 68,000 SharePoint customers today.  At Synesis IT, our Collaboration service line is growing at the same pace. However, we are not planning for business continuity and high availability for our clients during the planning and sales stages and continue to ignore this aspect during development and deployment of the solutions.  Because of this failure, SharePoint is not considered a Tier1 application in most companies.

  SharePoint poses general challenges, such as:

·         Spread of environments

·         Inconsistent development

·         Different governance models

·         Poor operations management

 All these factors give SharePoint Tier 1 status.  Unfortunately, whether SharePoint is used as the platform for a company’s Internet presence or as a departmental collaboration solution, most organizations still consider it a Tier 2 application even though collaboration is set to become even more important and integral to their business.  The maturing of cloud, mobility and social networking bring new benefits and challenges.   

Most businesses operate under the assumption that only downtime on email results in financial loss to the corporation. Therefore, their primary means of collaboration, messaging/email, is considered to be a Tier 1 system.  The messaging system has to maintain SLA 99.999 (five nines), which means a maximum of 5.26 minutes of downtime in a year.  What about 99.99 (four nines) or 99.9 (three nines)? These SLA levels mean 52.60 minutes and 8.77 hours of downtime in a year.  When considering SLAs, we need to remind ourselves to question our customers about what their planned downtime is for the solution we will be building.  Of course downtime cannot be avoided due to patches, upgrades, and so on. Our customers’ executive teams know very well that email downtime causes a trade stop, ultimately resulting in potentially huge financial losses. They do not assign the same importance to SharePoint, even though inaccessibility to files during downtime can lead to the same financial losses as inaccessibility to email can.  What can we do to change their perception of the value of SharePoint downtime? 

First we need to change our own perception of the value of this downtime. Think about high availability and business continuity technologies to protect against outages.  We can incorporate load balance technology today to build our solution for high availability, but forget to consider disaster recovery.  Before we put a SharePoint environment into production, very often we forget to test it against a number of simulated situations, such as the following:

·         Failure of hardware components

·         Data corruption

·         Loss of a server

·         Network outage

·         Loss of data center

The penalty for failure is to have to re-seed the secondary Web Front End (WFE) (re-starting from scratch) — a time-consuming process that leaves the enterprise temporarily vulnerable to data loss and, potentially, very unhappy customers.  We need to remind our customers during the beginning of our engagement that a business continuity plan is as valuable as any other part of the SharePoint farm design.

Strict business continuity management constraints have low RTO and RPO. RTO refers to Recovery Time Objective, or effectively the mean time between failure and restoration of service on one or more sites. RPO refers to Recovery Point Objective, or the amount of data (measured by time) that can be acceptably lost (for example, 5 minutes).  If we fail to do a business impact analysis for SharePoint within our engagement model, we will fail to provide good value of SharePoint service.  Our customers’ organizations will be impacted by the lack of a suitable business continuity management plan, and associated service level agreements (SLAs) for the service. If you do not know the business importance of a service, or the costs associated with outage and data loss, you cannot effectively define SLAs for that service. These SLAs will not only define the agreements for recovery objectives and service availability, they will often help determine what backup, recovery, and availability solutions are required to meet them. Moreover, they are likely to feed into other key design aspects for a SharePoint deployment, ranging from storage planning to governance guidance for the creation and deployment of customizations.

I hope no developer will use SharePoint without first understanding the important people and business considerations to every SharePoint-based solution.  Let us all work together to stay alert while making SharePoint a Tier1 application. We have to change our way of thinking and realize that SharePoint should be considered as a service, but this can only happen if it first it becomes Tier 1. It is imperative that our clients understand the value of having SharePoint as Tier 1 for their Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, and everybody at any organizations should strive to reach this goal.

Synesis IT, Managing in healthcare with Microsoft dynamics GP

When it comes to Managing the Healthcare environment, COMPLEXITY is the single biggest challenge organizations face from diverse perspectives. Functions like Administration, HR, Payroll, Supply Chain, Finances, Data & Information Management, Security, and Compliances all represent their respective level of complexity in a Hospital Environment and they need to be handled accordingly. So, maintaining a Healthcare service meeting all these demands & compliances while also staying profitable is becoming a tough business.

To practice a smart and proactive Healthcare service, organizations need to arm themselves with a technological solution that will give them total control on their finances, HR & other resources as well as meet the compliances. It is like a fitness question for the organizations when they need to perform so many complex activities at the same time keeping the highest level of service quality.

In this regard, Microsoft Dynamics GP is increasingly gaining more & more attention from the Healthcare Organizations with its robust functionality & effectiveness. Microsoft’s overall vision on Collaborative Health Initiatives through the Microsoft Dynamics ERP has enabled the organizations achieve flexibility, efficiency & functionality in the same package which is rare in the HealthCare Industry.

The typical structuring of IT infrastructure in a Healthcare environment usually goes through an extensive analysis & implementation time and obviously demands a huge budget. But in terms of innovation or efficiency they provide very little value and what more, most of the time they can’t provide a solid Business Framework suitable for the Healthcare environment. Anyone can check the validity of these assessments but Microsoft Dynamics seems the only exception.

Microsoft Dynamics provides a set of powerful but easy to use, easy to deploy & easy to integrate tools, starting from financial integration to data integrity & security, while meeting a wide range of compliances like HIPAA, JCAHO, HHS-OIG & Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. With a combination of Microsoft Dynamics GP, the back-end server system & Microsoft SharePoint, we service Microsoft provides the most efficient and integrated solution where the ‘Healthcare Management Mechanism’ is highly optimized while the Data Security & Integrity & Access is properly maintained. Achieving this kind of solution framework that raises the overall productivity & maintains quality from other IT vendors in the market will be difficult in many ways.

The biggest promise Microsoft Dynamics holds is the efficient transformation of a Healthcare Organization. What more, it is all done with a very flexible infrastructure & investment. The total cost of ownership is usually paid back within 18 to 24 months and in terms of ROI, this is the highest in the industry. Integrating the Financial Information, Streamlining the Human Resource, Improving Supply Chain Management, an Efficient and Effective Data Security & Integrity, an easy to use & familiar productivity tools, all comprise a multifold benefit for Healthcare facilities. With Microsoft Dynamics, life is not only becoming easier for the Healthcare Staffs, but also allows them to be more efficient and focused on their core operation, Healthcare.

In-house Strategy, Outsourced Operation: IT Managed Service from a Service Providers Perspectives

As the IT Managed Service trend continues towards more industry consolidation & expansion in service varieties, it is facing basic questions about ‘In-house Strategy & Outsourced Operation’? And it seems like most industry experts are divided in their opinions.
The IT Managed Service trends are enjoying increasing service expansion ranging from anti-virus service and software upgrading to complete infrastructure solutions. Moreover the increasing spending budget among the corporate houses and newly emerging SMB’s is stretching the boundaries of Managed Service.
The issue has become a raising concern among a number of IT Experts who actually see this as an inevitable future of Managed Service: The split of Strategy & Operation of IT Service. As organizations focus more and more on optimizing their IT budget and operations, Managed Service is becoming more & more commoditized. All the recent researches also stand by this point where companies are showing increasing interest in Managed Service, Hosted Service, Network & Server Supports, etc.
But if this split is seriously inevitable, then we should prepare for some fundamental changes within the organizations, both for the clients & service providers. Although from an organization’s point of view, it will bring more control on their business operations since they won’t have to hire, manage and train more IT employees which is a continuous challenge. The scenario is the same when it comes to Infrastructure Management as day by day, IT infrastructures are becoming more & more complicated. So this split will make more room for strategies for organizations with less weight on in-house IT professionals & infrastructure. On the other hand, service providers will have to get their baggage ready with improved skills & professionalism as they will be playing the central operational role for business success. What more, increased commitment will also be a major factor for their overall success.
So this split will lead us towards a more focused and professional level as companies will have more resources to concentrate on their core business and service providers will be more focused in service delivery. But the term ‘In-house Strategy, Outsourced Operation’ also raises another question: Who will develop the IT Strategy for the organization? Especially for SMB’s with a limited budget? At this point, we should go back to the commitments of Managed Service. Managed services are based on Partnership Spirits. So with this spirit on high, the split of ‘In-House Strategy, Outsourced Operation’ will provide its promised outcomes as well as a fine balance of both Strategy & Operations is imperative.

Microsoft CRM for SMB : A Path to Business Success

The recent Microsoft partner programs & technology roadmaps released throughout July 2007 makes it very clear that the software giant is getting serious towards Small & Medium Businesses. The latest version of Office 2007, Vista & Dynamics show Microsoft’s integrated approach for building stronger enterprise IT infrastructure while the new pricing & partner program makes it really competitive in the market with its network of a few thousand partners.

The Small & Medium Business houses are increasingly gaining maturity in their business operations and becoming more & more concerned towards customer satisfaction, loyalty & acquisition. But the IT budget, infrastructure and staffing have always been a hurdle for the SMB companies. With Microsoft’s new partner program and pricing, Microsoft has extended its services to the Small & Medium Businesses not only with a justified budget but also with a suitable infrastructural solution.

The newly introduced Multi-Tenant architecture of Microsoft Dynamics CRM takes it one step closer to the SMB’s as the application can be hosted on either the Partner Systems or the Client System and is also hosted by Microsoft itself. This is truly a Software-as-a-Service approach for the growing number of SMB’s interested in enterprise solution within a reasonable budget. The real value of Microsoft’s technology solution & Multi-Tenancy approach reaches SMB’s of any size or industry.

Apart from the benefits of Dynamics CRM, the extended partner program goes a long way in the adoption, integration, deployment & support of SMB’s. Having the largest partner network program, Microsoft shows strong commitment towards its clients. Moreover, the flexibility of the Multi-Tenant program, seamless upgrading & other Microsoft Software Integration are the key features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM which will definitely differentiate them in the market.

Understanding the similarities and differences between SMB needs was the key drive for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And they did it smartly with the right solution, through the most suitable infrastructure and distributed it widely with the Microsoft partner program. A nicely tailored CRM solution for the emerging SMB’s of today.