Phases of SharePoint Transition Plan: SharePoint 2010

Dear readers as stated in my last article, today I am going to discuss on components of transition plan. First we will discuss about the Transition plan.

What is a transition planning?

To make sure service transitions projects are planned in accordance with the organization's Project Management guidelines, and to coordinate activities and resources across projects. Executing these activities in an organized structured way is called Transition Plan.

This process is not responsible for detailed planning of project phases but triggers planning activities performed by other processes. 

There could be two kinds of Transition Plans: 

High level Plan: Consist of the overview layout of the transitions Plan with timelines of all the phases of the transition plan. 

Detailed level Plan: Consist of detailed information with each activity of each phase along with the time in days each activity will take.  

Let’s discuss Phases of Transition Plan in Details: 

Planning Phase: This phase involves the initial Planning of appropriate capacity and resources to package a release, build, release, test, deploy and establish the new or changed service into production. Provide support for the Service Transition teams and people. Plan the changes required in a manner that ensures the integrity of all identified customer assets, service assets and configurations can be maintained as they evolve through Service Transition, Ensure that Service Transition issues, risks and deviations are reported to the appropriate stakeholders and decision makers.

KAP Phase: Knowledge acquisition phase can make or break a project. Experts refer to that phase of project when they start it, and when knowledge is acquired from either client or vendor, as Knowledge acquisition phase. The success of knowledge acquisition lies in understanding and monitoring it quantitatively. Successful technology use (Web 2.0, video /audio etc.) is also an important element.

Secondary Support Phase: At this phase of transition, we basically observe what we acquire in the knowledge acquisition phase. We hold the responsibility to detect if there is any ambiguity in the knowledge acquired. This phase is also referred to as YOU DO WE OBSEVER.

Primary Support: In Primary support phase support team is partially take over functions of the Production support from the current teams or vendors. WE DO YOU OBSERVER approach is followed with this phase.

Production Support Go Live: After removing all ambiguities from the all the above phases at this phase Production Team will take over the complete support functions from the current teams or vendors. Here WE ARE RESPONSIBLE approach is followed.

Note: it is always important to have a checklist created at each phase of transition. These checklists could be Entry level check list and Exit Checklist. It is also important to get sign-off from the customer for audit evidences during the tractions phases.   

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know.

I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Applies To: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013.

What does it take to become Transition Manager: SharePoint 2010?

I have been busy to serve the requirement of one of our clients. Till now I have been working on the SharePoint Production/Operations and Maintenance support projects. This is first time I have been asked to take up the opportunity of a SharePoint Production support from another vendor to our client. 

I am learning allot of new things being on this assignments and I wish to share those concepts with all my readers.

When we talk about winning a deal with the client from our competitors, our bidding team come in to picture and based on the requirements of the client we need to project the solution to the client. This is point where a Solution Architect comes in to picture.  

When solution is projected to the client and accepted, then it comes to delivery part of the commitments made. These include SOW and SLA signoffs, Resource Planning, Budgeting, Resource Allocation; Technology Skill required etc. Delivery Manager (refer to the PDF at the link for details of a delivery mangers role) is basically responsible for all these things to carry forward. 

In between these roles an integral role also comes in the picture which needs to be carried by either a Program manager or a Transition Manager. 

Transition management (refer to the link for generic definition), in IT provides a powerful combination of technologies and standard operating procedures to drive the successful transfer and startup of a new service-delivery environment.

In other terms, Transition Management in IT is the planning, coordination and implementation of a change to the institutional investment structure.

For executing the transition of a technology based on a service model, you need an expert with the specific skill set termed as Transition Manager.  There are allot of expert with the specific skill set are available in the outside world. However, I can count myself lucky enough to take this opportunity being a Transition Manager. 

I will be focusing on some of the major components such as creating Transition plan, RACI Matrix, Skill Matrix, and Knowledge Acquisition Plan. 

Till then have a nice day….! 

Applies to: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint site are slow intermittently: SharePoint 2010.

Issue: We have been experiencing intermittent slowness on the SharePoint Farm.

Background: We are getting intermittent partial outage on the SharePoint Farm. We have assigned dedicated set of WFE’s for different set of web applications and all of sudden without any alert or alarming, user started reporting that SharePoint is taking long time to load or its keep on clocking. Lead time for the sites is min 3-5 min.

Troubleshooting:

We have checked if this issue is occurring for an individual user. It was happening for the large number of groups and people and not region specific.

We have checked on the specific server and sites are slow on the web servers as well.

We have checked on the SAAS, SCOM Alerts and Site Scope system from HP, however, no alert was triggered.

No blocking reported on the SQL server.

From server Event logs we only see an error message that “Cannot connect to SQL Server .”

Temporary Resolution: As a temporary resolution we had recycled the app pool on the webserver running that applications and it worked fine. However, I was not sure that there would be a huge service destruction coming in the next coming day.

You know what; this issue started occurring three to four times a day. And recycling app pool was not the correct choice always.

Permanent Resolution: So one day we have decided to involve the SQL Team as we see from the Event Logs that we get an Error message “Cannot connect to SQL ”.

Based on the MS analysis, we saw there were so many page latches on the TEMP DB by running the sys.dm_os_latch_stats and see what type of latches have increased contention and wait types, compared to previous base-line.

MS recommended splitting the 20 GB of Temp DB in smaller chunks. We divided Temp DB in 5 GB in size with 4 Databases on each SQL Server we have in the farm.

KB Article which support this resolution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307487.

Reference:

Diagnosing and Resolving Latch Contention on SQL Server: http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=26665

What is the temp Database: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190768.aspx

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131021/sql-server-2005-investigate-what-caused-tempdb-to-grow-huge.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know.

I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Applies to:  SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.

Invalid field name {} _layouts/changesitemasterpage.aspx: SharePoint 2007.

Issue:  User reported that one of the sub-site on his site is not using the same layouts as of on the Parent site.

Background: We have a branding feature activated on all the site collection we create in the environment. However, when browsing the sub-site it was opening with the default look and feel of the SharePoint 2007 site.

Troubleshooting:

Tried to open the master page gallery, but only default.master page was showing.

Checked to open the Changesitematerpage.apsx page, however, got the above error message.

Checked feature Office SharePoint Server Publishing on the sub-site level and it was deactivated.

Checked feature Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure on the site collection level and it was also deactivated.

Resolution:

Activate the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature from the site collection level features list and Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature from the sub-site level features list.

The try to access the site: http://webapplication/sites/parentsite/sub-site/_layouts/changesitemasterpage.aspx.

Select the appropriate master or branding page from the list.

Click ok, and try to browse the site. It should be having the same template as of the parent site.

You would also have the option to deactivate the both of the features from the site collection and site levels.

Applies To: SharePoint Server 2007, WSS 3.0 

Issues with SharePoint Audit Logs Reports after migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

Problem Description: While saving an audit logs to a library user is getting “An Unexpected error has occurred” following a correlation.

Error Message: An unexpected Error has occurred.

Troubleshooting:

We have checked this Audit logs settings and it was enabled.

We have run all the reports one by one and all of them were having problem.

There is only site which was having issue.

Based on the correlation ID in the error message, Checked the ULS logs from the server and found the below logs.

Resolution:

Tried Goggling on the same issue with the keyword: System.InvalidCastException: Specified cast is not valid. at Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.Reporting.ReportData.GenerateNextReport().

Found only one reference which talks about the resolution: 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadminprevious/thread/41bd6179-d955-4379-9509-eed0ee7b8182/

Resolution Steps:

Go to Site Actions.

Choose to select Site Settings.

Under Site collection administration tab.

Choose to select Site collections features.

Look for Reporting feature. (It should be activated by default).

Click Deactivate and a warning message would appear, Select Deactivate this feature.

You will be taken to the site collection administration Feature list. Choose to click Activate. 

And now try to run the Audit Logs Report and now you should be able to save the reports to desired library.

Note: You should have the site collection rights to perform the above given steps.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know.

I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint 2010.