Health Check and a Tailored Managed Support Program for a SharePoint Farm

Client

The Client is a local government authority in Scotland, UK. It provides a wide range of on-site and online social services to the local community and temporary residents. The services include housing, education, taxing, recycling, health and social care, leisure, public transport and tourism.

Challenge

Microsoft SharePoint Intranet and Portal services have become the heart of the Client’s interdepartmental collaboration in day-to-day operations and communication with website visitors. So, to keep its SharePoint 2010 farm at top performance, and resolve performance issues, the Client needed professional infrastructure maintenance and support services. Subsequently, the agency planned a 2-step migration to SharePoint 2013 and 2016 with the potential of moving to Office 365.

Solution

After a comprehensive online health check of the SharePoint system, ScienceSoft’s team of Microsoft certified professionals worked out a specific approach to meet the Client’s business needs. The approach includes the following stages:

Solution topology review

ScienceSoft’s professionals defined the number and types of servers within the project scope: two SharePoint web servers, two SharePoint application servers, three MS SQL servers and a backup storage.

Configuration and troubleshooting

ScienceSoft’s ICT and SharePoint specialists configured SharePoint farm, SQL farm and backup, as well as fixed 10 performance issues and made minor UI amendments in views and web parts.

Security configuration

This stage involved preparation of dedicated service accounts, HTTPS configuration, Active Directory (AD) service accounts configuration and firewall settings.

This long-term project is still in progress (as of June, 2018) and our senior SharePoint and ICT specialists are planning a series of migrations from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 version, then to 2016 version and, finally, to Office 365.

Results

The fruitful collaboration with ScienceSoft allowed the Client to resolve critical issues with the SharePoint Intranet and Internet services, thus boosting its overall performance. We continue to maintain sustainability of the Client’s solution providing a transparent managed services policy with flexible support hours, reactive problem solving (critical issues are responded within one hour) and monthly service review and risk assessment reports.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, AD.