Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Intranet in Health at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (formerly known as UBHT)

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1 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Intranet in Health at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (formerly known as UBHT) A Deployment and Implementation Experience Overview Technical White Paper Published: April 2008

2 CONTENTS Executive Summary... 3 Introduction... 4 Deployment of Office SharePoint Server Previous Environment 5 Service Goal 5 Supported Audiences 5 Desired Features 5 Business Benefits of the Move to Office SharePoint Server Solution Design 6 Deployment Process Choosing an architecture 10 Planning 10 Preparing the environment 10 Implementing the architecture 10 Creating the Intranet 11 Setup and Configuration Steps Network Load Balancing Configuration 12 Front-end Web Servers 12 Application/Witness Server 12 Primary Database Server 12 Mirror Database Server 12 Deployment Results Performance 14 High Availability 14 Services 14 Future Services 14 Lessons Learned Conclusion For More Information... 18

3 Situation The UHBRISTOL intranet consisted of HTML pages hosted on IIS with FrontPage Server Extensions. Different groups and departments maintained the content independently of each other. This caused each site in the intranet to have a different look and feel without standardized structures. This makes content hard to find when a user gets to a new site. Another issue is that the staff work 24 hours per day, but the IT support staff work core business hours. This means that any system must be very robust and highly available, as possible problems could only be addressed during core business hours. Solution UHBRISTOL decided to make use of the MOSS 2007 publishing capabilities to replace the HTML based intranet sites. This allows decentralization of some administration tasks, while control of styling and structure could be centrally enforced. A high availability farm was deployed to ensure up time even in the event of loss of an entire server room. EXECUTIVE S UMMARY This white paper is for Microsoft customers in the Health Care Industry who plan to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) on their networks. It shares the experience of deploying and implementing MOSS 2007 to replace the existing Intranet at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (formerly known as UHBRISTOL). Therefore, this paper should provide helpful guidance for any Microsoft customer who is planning to deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 at an NHS Trust The University Hospitals Bristol (UHBristol) NHS Foundation Trust is a group of hospitals in the centre of Bristol. It has 7,000 members of staff and provides more than 10 different clinical services. The previous UHBRISTOL intranet consisted of 55,000 static HTML pages hosted on ISS with FrontPage Serve Extensions. The different sites were not consistent and FSE was nearing end of life. UHBRISTOL decided that MOSS 2007 would provide a framework to host the intranet in a more controlled environment. It also provides additional benefits such as collaborative features. The paper describes the SharePoint infrastructure at UHBRISTOL. It then describes the deployment of MOSS 2007 and the approach taken to customize it specifically for use within an NHS Trust. Finally, the paper details lessons learned. Note: For security reasons, the sample names of internal resources, organizations, and internally developed security file names used in this paper do not represent real resource names used within UHBRISTOL and are for illustration purposes only. Benefits Certain administrative tasks can be decentralized, relieving the administrative burden on the IT team. MOSS allows central enforcing of styling and structure to ensure a consistent user experience across all sites. Load balancing and database mirroring allow for a highavailability configuration of the farm. MOSS supplies collaboration capabilities that will be rolled out over time to streamline teamwork within UHBRISTOL. Products & Technologies Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Microsoft Office system Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

4 INTRODUCTION Windows SharePoint Services is the technology in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that enables workers to collaborate in browser-based workspaces. Because it provides a manageable infrastructure and extensible application platform, Windows SharePoint Services offers a foundation for collaboration applications that includes a common framework for document management and a common repository for storing documents of all types. In addition, it provides common, flexible administration and deployment tools, and it builds on and exposes key Windows Server services like Windows Workflow Services and Windows Rights Management Services. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers highly scalable collaboration solutions that connect sites, people, and business processes, and as a result facilitates knowledge sharing. It also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization. Figure 1 provides a high-level overview of the technologies that support Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Figure 1. Technologies that support Office SharePoint Server 2007 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 unifies portal and content management, business insight, search, and business process capabilities to help enterprises improve their organizational effectiveness. By supporting all of the intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform, it helps reduce the number of platforms that must be maintained. In addition, it greatly simplifies the end-user experience through integration with browsers, , and familiar desktop applications in the Microsoft Office system. Initially, the most important component of MOSS for UHBRISTOL was the content management and publishing capabilities. The immediate need was to replace the aging intranet with a new one based on MOSS.

5 DEPLOYMENT OF OFFICE S HAREP OINT S ERVER 2007 Previous Environment The previous intranet consisted of 55,000 HTML files hosted on IIS with FrontPage Server Extensions. There was no central control of content, and different departments were completely responsible for their own content. This included site structure and style. This lead to inconsistency in the way sites looked and operated, and to the types of information that different departments published. This situation made it difficult for users to use these sites and find information. FrontPage Sever Extensions are nearing end of life, so it was important to move the content of the intranet to a new framework for the future. Service Goal The goal of the solution is to provide information on a continuous basis to members of staff. The information must be available at all times, as UHBRISTOL operates on a 24-hour basis. This is challenging, because the IT department normally operates during core business hours. To ensure proper availability, focus and care was given to design a highly fault tolerant solutions for the intranet. Supported Audiences IT Staff. The IT staff is primarily responsible for defining styles, overall management of structure and creating new sites. Management of the sites is then delegated to the owning department. The IT staff also uses collaboration features as part of their planning and management of the intranet. General Staff. The general staff will mostly use the intranet for retrieving content and for searching. Some staff members are trained to maintain content and to manage departmental sites. As usage of the intranet increases, the general staff will be able to use more advanced collaboration features within the intranet. Desired Features Quick, simple and easy content publishing Central control of style and structure Distributed management and publishing of content High availability Business Benefits of the Move to Office SharePoint Server 2007 UHBRISTOL have started to quantify the full range of benefits gained by moving to Office SharePoint Server Further benefits will become apparent when the collaboration tools are made generally available and the system is in full use throughout the trust, but many business advantages have already surfaced: More intuitive tools. The simplified content publishing process helps publishers present content to users more quickly.

6 Improved site-level management. Administrators of upgraded sites can better manage their own site security, storage, distribution, and management. The tools that enable them to do so are easy to use and integrated into the 2007 Office system applications. More consistent style and structure. Web sites are based on standardized templates. This means that all new sites share the same look and feel and a similar content structure. This allows users to find content more easily and in a more consistent manner. Scheduled content approval and deployment. Content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to the intranet. Improved search. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search provides improved indexing and searching of intranet content. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the relevance of the results. High availability. The high-availability architecture means that the intranet is available, and failure is less likely, even though IT support is only available during core business hours. This improves access to information and means the intranet is used more regularly and more reliably. Solution Design Considerations and features UHBRISTOL considered many important requirements during the solutions design, including: 24 hour availability required IT support only available during core business hours Content management was the most urgent requirement A phased approach for other functionality was required to lessen the impact of the deployment and training requirements Simple and easy content management and publishing is required Centralized control over structure and styling is required 7,000 employees 55,000 pages of content Architecture UHBRISTOL decided on an architecture based on seven servers. All seven of the servers are identical to facilitate easy reassignment of servers if required. The server specifications are: 8 GB RAM 80 GB System drive - Mirrored 200 GB Data drive - RAID 5 2 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 2 Network Cards

7 Server configurations: 4 SharePoint front-end web servers 1 Application server (also acts as witness to SQL mirroring) 2 database servers (mirrored) These servers are split between two server rooms, with load balancing configured between all four front-end servers. Primary room: 2 web front-end servers Primary database server Secondary room: 2 web front-end servers Application / witness server Secondary (mirrored) database server. The following software is installed on each server. Web front-end servers: Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 Windows SharePoint Services 3 SP1 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 Application/Witness server: Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 Windows SharePoint Services 3 SP1 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition SP 2 Database servers: Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition SP 2 Network Load Balancing (NLB) Load balancing allows multiple front-end web servers to share the incoming traffic. It also provides high availability, by allowing the remaining servers to serve requests if one or more of the front-end web servers become unavailable. NLB uses a distributed algorithm to load balance network traffic across a number of hosts, helping to improve the scalability and availability of applications. It automatically detects host failures and redirects requests accordingly.

8 SQL Server Infrastructure SQL Server 2005 is implemented with database mirroring. The primary server is mirrored onto a secondary server in a second server room. The second server room also contained a witness server. The role of the witness server is to check for availability of the primary server. When the primary server becomes unavailable, the witness server will automatically do a failover to the secondary server. Service Levels The system must be available 24 hours per day. Based on capacity planning tools, the architecture is more than sufficient for the number of users. The number of servers in the solution is higher than performance requirements would have suggested, but this is purely to ensure an enterprise grade, high availability configuration. Logical Architecture Diagram

9 Physical Architecture Diagram

10 DEPLOYMENT P ROCESS UHBRISTOL has implemented Office SharePoint Server 2007 in multiple phases, from a single server deployment of an HR site to serve as a pilot, to a full fault tolerant farm with the main Intranet deployed, with a planned rollout of additional collaboration features later in This section focuses on the general process that UHBRISTOL used in implementing the final fault tolerant architecture: Choosing an architecture Planning Preparing the environment Implementing the architecture Creating the intranet Choosing an architecture The most important requirement in terms of architecture was high availability. The system must be able to recover automatically from the loss of an entire server room. To this end, an architecture that used four front-end servers (two per room) and SQL Server mirroring with a witness server and automatic failover was chosen. In this scenario, some additional script is required after the automatic failover to re-point all the front-end servers to the new primary database server. A tool such as psexec can be used to remotely execute batch files to re-point each available front-end server. Planning Proper planning in any deployment is very necessary. The newness of SharePoint Technologies to UHBRISTOL users required additional planning. User training would be too much of a burden if the process were not approached in a phased manner. UHBRISTOL decided to first pilot a single server solution using an HR content site as a pilot site. Once this was successfully deployed, the full server farm could be implemented. Many of the more powerful features were however not exposed to users initially. This was specifically done to limit the initial training requirements. Preparing the environment The following steps were completed to prepare the environment: Servers were acquired Servers were installed in the appropriate server rooms Operating systems installed Backup procedures were defined Additional software was installed on each server Health checks were performed on each server Implementing the architecture Each server was configured for its specific role and added to the farm

11 Central administration and Shared Service Provider were created Services were started and stopped based on the role of each server Search scopes and content sources was configured Required sites were created Creating the Intranet The intranet is based on a standard publishing portal. Create a new web application Create a new site collection based on the publishing portal site definition Customize the master pages Deploy any custom solutions, features and web parts Create the site structures Assign user rights for editors and departments

12 S ETUP AND CONFIGURATION S TEPS Based on the role of the server, a number of setup and configuration steps were required after all the software was installed. Network Load Balancing Configuration Network Load Balancing Manager is used to configure Load Balancing. A new Load Balancing Cluster is created. This cluster is assigned an IP address, which is used in the DNS record for the main intranet domain name. Requests to this address will then be load balanced. The cluster should be configured to use Unicast operation mode. Once the cluster is created, each of the front-end web servers must be added to the cluster as a Load Balancing Node. Front-end Web Servers The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard is run to configure each member of the farm. For the first Server, a farm must be created. On subsequent servers, each server must be added to an existing farm. None of the Front-end web servers are configured to host the Central Administration web application, except for the initial server used for creating the farm. The central administration application will also be hosted on the Application Server for high availability purposes. The front-end web servers are configured to serve only web content and server query requests. All other application services, including the Shared Services Provider, are only hosted on the Application server. Application/Witnes s Server The application server is not part of the Network Load Balancing Cluster. The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard is run to configure it, and the Central Administration Web Application must also run on it. Using the Services on Server functionality under the Operations section of the Central Administration application, all required services must be enabled on this server. Using the Application Management section of the Central Administration application, a Shared Services Provider must be created and configured to run on this machine. This server is also the only server responsible for indexing content, as this is not a mission critical process, so it does not need redundancy. This server will also act as the witness server for automatic failover, so it must be set as the witness server in the SQL mirroring that is configured on the database servers. Primary Database Server This server hosts all the databases used by SharePoint. This includes the configuration and content databases. For each of these databases, mirroring must be configured from the SQL Server Management Studio. The High safety with automatic failover option must be selected. Mirror Database Server Backups of the configuration and content databases from the primary server must be restored onto this machine. For each of these databases, mirroring must be configured from

13 the SQL Server Management Studio. The High safety with automatic failover option must be selected. Search and the Shared Services Providers databases are not mirrored, as these are not required for the high-availability solution.

14 DEPLOYMENT RES ULTS Performance The hardware requirements proposed by performance- and capacity planning tools were scaled for the Trusts needs. The first full stage of the implementation covers 5,000 users across 8 locations in a large distributed campus of buildings. High Availability The fail-over scenarios were successfully tested. A robust, highly fault tolerant farm was deployed and is performing and operating as expected. Services This section provides an overview of various Portal and Collaboration Hospital end-user services provided by the configuration choices that UHBRISTOL made after the deployment of Office SharePoint Server Content Publishing The built-in content management and publishing functionality of MOSS 2007 provides the ability for users the easily manage and publish information without the need for additional tools. Through components such as master pages and layout pages, the style and structure of the sites can be centrally controlled. This ensures consistency between all the different sites while users at each department can do the management of content. Search and Crawl All content in the intranet is available for searching. The indexing process makes it quicker and easier for users to find specific information. Additional document stores can be included in the index to allow for a global view of content throughout the trust. UHBRISTOL plans to crawl a custom document management system and make the information available as part of the search functionality of the intranet. My Site Personal Workspace sites to allow users to store personal documents and share information related to their roles. Access news, announcements, and shared calendars Presence and Instant Messaging UHBRISTOL have started to use Office Live Communication Server to add presence information about staff members to the intranet. This will make the process of finding available staff members much easier Future Services Meeting Workspaces Committees, teams and groups will use meeting workspaces to plan and manage meeting. They will also use it to track tasks and outcomes of meetings. Document Workspaces This will allow teams and departments to collaborate on document generation. A team can discuss documents, share drafts and publish final versions.

15 Hosting of Additional Applications The trust has a number of other custom web applications. These applications will be migrated to the new infrastructure over time. Over time, some of these applications will also be converted to run as web parts inside the SharePoint framework, to allow for closer interaction between the intranet and custom applications. Additional Future Efforts UHBRISTOL also plans to implement Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager to automate identity and access management across the trust.

16 LESSONS LEARNED The lessons learnt during the process of deploying and implementing the specified architecture and solution: High availability of clinical content is a very high priority requirement at health-care institutions The most important functional requirement for clinical data is simplified content publishing SQL Server Mirroring is a complex configuration and must be well planned The easiest way to deploy custom features is to create wsp solution files, as this automates the deployment to front-end servers in a farm Custom functionality must be implemented using the feature framework, allowing activation and de-activation via the standard interface

17 CONCLUSION Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 facilitates the creation and deployment of featurerich and content-rich Web sites and helps organizations integrate business processes and applications through a full set of collaboration and personalization features for information workers. Enhanced features as compared to previous versions include an improved administration model, new compliance features and capabilities, better support for network configuration, and enhanced extensibility of the object model that makes custom applications and components easier to deploy. These key benefits help streamline business processes and make information easy to share through integration with familiar desktop applications and tools. In addition, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems, customers can now take advantage of a single integrated platform in Office SharePoint Server 2007 that can support all of the intranets, extranets, and Web applications across an enterprise. UHBRISTOL primarily use Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a content, publishing, search and collaboration engine. It eases the administrative burden and allows easier management and publication of content by different departments. It also ensures a consistent look and feel and structure. The chosen architecture provides a highly fault tolerant solutions to ensure that users can access the required content even in the event of failure of an entire server room.

18 FOR MORE INFORMATION References Case Study: Creating a Highly Available Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Environment by using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring By Ralf Günther (Microsoft GmbH), Christian Keil (Alegri International Service GmbH), Bernd Kemmler (Alegri International Service GmbH), Shobhit Mehrotra (HCL Technologies Ltd.) For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (800) Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information through the World Wide Web, go to: This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This White Paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. Unless otherwise noted, the example companies, organizations, products, domain names, addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted herein are fictitious, and no association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, address, logo, person, place, or event is intended or should be inferred Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Active Directory, Excel, Groove, InfoPath, Internet Explorer, Outlook, PerformancePoint, SharePoint, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.