On January 8, 2015, we will hold the sixth Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) webinar. SAB webinars are one hour and consist of brief presentations followed by time for open feedback.
Here is the agenda:
Introductions and logistics – Chris Fox
SAB 2014 Annual Survey – Chris Fox
The results and conclusions of our first SAB member survey. Thanks to all who participated. This information is very valuable to us.
Q&A
Online Consumption of Technical Diagrams – Serdar Soysal
Based on the survey results, technical diagrams (posters and other formats) are one of our most popular content types. We are working on an improved online viewing experience for technical diagrams and will share a few of our ideas.
Resources and wrap-up – Chris Fox
We are anxious to hear your feedback on these topics to help us refine our content efforts going forward.
We would love to have your participation in future SAB Webinars. Let us know if you have something to present at SAB@microsoft.com.
We will have two sessions at different times on January 8th to accommodate all our members worldwide. We have sent every SAB member Lync meeting invitations for both meetings so you can accept the one the best fits your schedule.
Thanks and see you on the 8th!
Note: By participating in this webinar you agree that Microsoft may record and use this session for internal purposes only.
To receive an invitation to an SAB Webinar, you must be an SAB member. To join the SAB, send an email-based request to SAB@microsoft.com. Please feel free to include any information you want about your experience in creating solutions with Microsoft products or areas of interest. Join now and get in the solutions discussion that is happening across Microsoft.
Hey present or future Azure fans,
I have always been a big fan of Microsoft publishing presentation materials so that you don't have to spend time creating these materials from scratch. For example, when you start with a Microsoft-published PowerPoint deck on a product, feature, technology, or solution, you can use them as is or customize them for a specific audience or purpose. Use them with the confidence that they contain the right emphasis, messaging, graphics (with some cool animations!), and are technically accurate (as of their publication date).
To this end, I am very pleased to inform you that for Microsoft Azure, there are a set of great slide decks for Azure technologies and scenarios in the Azure Readiness Content download.
This download creates the AzureReadiness-DevCamp folder with subfolders for:
In each subfolder is a PowerPoint slide deck that you can use a basis for presenting to your peers, management, customers, or community (such as at local user groups or conferences). Here is an example of a slide from the deck in the Big Data folder:
Note that you can also get the set of icons for Azure services that Microsoft uses in much of its documentation by downloading the Azure Symbol/Icon set.
I hope these resources are useful to you.
Joe Davies
If you have questions, or if you’d like to join the SAB, email us at SAB@microsoft.com.
Greetings,
If you are an SAB member and will be attending the MVP Global Summit from November 3-6, Chris Fox and I would love to meet with you face-to-face. It can be an informal chat before, between, or after sessions.
We would love get your perspective on cross-product solutions that you have worked with, solutions that you would like to see documented, and the state of solutions content (among other topics).
If you would like to meet, please send us a note at sab@microsoft.com and we will coordinate a time and place.
Thanks.
Chris Fox and Joe Davies Microsoft Solutions Advisory Board
To join the SAB, send an email-based request to SAB@microsoft.com. Please feel free to include any information you want about your experience in creating solutions with Microsoft products or areas of interest. Join now and get in on the solutions discussion that is happening across Microsoft services and products.
On October 23, 2014, we will hold the fifth of our bi-monthly Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) webinars. SAB webinars are one hour and consist of brief presentations followed by time for open feedback. This special edition of the SAB Webinar Series features two SAB members presenting their own tried and true solutions!
We will have two sessions at different times on October 23rd to accommodate all our members worldwide. We have sent every SAB member Lync meeting invitations for both meetings so you can accept the one the best fits your schedule.
Thanks and see you on the 23rd!
To receive an invitation to an SAB Webinar, you must be an SAB member. To join the SAB, send an email-based request to SAB@microsoft.com. Please feel free to include any information you want about your experience in creating solutions with Microsoft products or areas of interest. Join now and get in on the solutions discussion that is happening across Microsoft services and products.
Automatically create your next development or test SharePoint 2013 farm in Microsoft Azure describes the SharePoint Server Farm template in the Azure Preview Portal, which allows you to very easily create a standalone SharePoint farm in an Azure cloud-only virtual network.
The new SQL Server AlwaysOn template in Azure Preview Portal…
automatically builds out the following configuration:
Like the SharePoint farms created with the SharePoint Server Farm template, the SQL Server AlwaysOn template creates a standalone configuration with its own domain and domain controllers in an Azure cloud-only virtual network.
You specify custom settings for this configuration in the Create pane…
and the Azure Preview Portal does the rest.
Use this as a pre-configured lab environment to experiment with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups. See SQL Server AlwaysOn Offering in Microsoft Azure Portal Gallery for more information.
With the new Azure (IaaS) Cost Estimator Tool, you can now estimate the costs for moving your on-premises datacenters, infrastructure, and IT workloads to Microsoft Azure.
You use the Azure Cost Estimator Tool to monitor physical servers (both Windows and Linux) and virtual servers that are managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Hyper-V, and VMware/ESX for their resource consumption. Then, you can estimate the costs of running an equivalent set of servers in Azure.
See this blog post for a walkthrough.
On August 26, 2014, we will hold the fourth of our bi-monthly Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) webinars. SAB webinars are one hour and consist of brief presentations followed by time for open feedback.
Here is the agenda for the August 2014 webinar:
To prepare for this webinar, please look over the following resources:
We will have two sessions at different times on August 26 to accommodate all our members worldwide. We have sent every SAB member Lync meeting invitations for both meetings so you can accept the one the best fits your schedule.
Thanks and see you on the 26th!
To receive an invitation to an SAB Webinar, you must be an SAB member. To join the SAB, send an email-based request to SAB@microsoft.com. Please feel free to include any information you want about your experience in creating solutions with Microsoft products or areas of interest.
For those of you playing with SharePoint in Microsoft Azure, the Azure Preview Portal now supports the automated creation of a basic or high-availability SharePoint farm in Microsoft Azure.
This new feature, known as SharePoint Server Farm, can save you a lot of time when you need to quickly create a new development or testing environment for SharePoint Server 2013. Use your Azure subscription, an Azure Trial Subscription, or your MSDN subscription.
The basic configuration is three servers, consisting of a domain controller, a SQL server, and a SharePoint server.
The high-availability configuration is nine servers, consisting of two domain controllers, two SQL servers, a SQL Server quorum server, two SharePoint servers in the application tier, and two SharePoint servers in the front-end web tier.
You specify the settings for these two different farms using the Create pane…
Once the farm is built, you can access a basic team site as an Internet web client and use Central Administration to configure additional capabilities. For the details, see SharePoint Server Farm.
To see a step-by-step walkthrough, take a look at Step-by-Step: Deploy a Highly Available SharePoint Server Farm in the Cloud – in ONLY 8 Clicks!
Take a look at Microsoft Solutions Advisory Board – Azure, Cloud Services and More in the Solutions Engine Blog, written by Theresa Miller of Enow Inc.
Theresa does a great job of summarizing the April 2014 SAB webinar, in which members of the Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Content team presented their cloud and datacenter solutions content, including hybrid cloud infrastructure and Bring Your Own Device deployment considerations.
Thanks so much to Theresa for this coverage!
We are very happy to see our solutions content talked about in the blogosphere. If you have published something about the Solutions Advisory Board in your community venues, please let us know and we will share it with the rest of the SAB community in this blog.
If you would like to learn more about the SAB or want to join, contact us at sab@microsoft.com.
Tony Trivison of the Office Server Solutions team recently published the Test Lab Guide: Set Up a Directory Synchronization Server to Sync Users with Office 365. This new TLG shows you how to set up directory synchronization to an Office 365 Trail Subscription with the Directory Synchronization (or Directory Sync) tool. Here is the configuration (click on it to see a larger version):
When complete, your Active Directory users in the CORP domain on the logical Corpnet subnet are synchronized with the set of users in your Office 365 Trial Subscription. Note that this configuration is for password sync and does not require the configuration of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS).
This TLG opens the door to configuring and testing Office 365 hybrid workloads. For example, you can install SharePoint Server 2013 in the Corpnet subnet and test hybrid functionality with SharePoint Online in your Office 365 Trial Subscription.
Here is the current Public Cloud TLG stack (click on it to see a larger version):
Thanks to Tony for his two Office 365 TLGs and to Bill Mathers for his two Azure AD TLGs.
As SAB member Doug Hemminger stated in a comment in this blog post: Our clients need/want hybrid solutions and proving them out in a test lab is critical to the process of discovery and an eventual production deployment.
We hope to keep delivering this kind of content to give you a way to test, learn, and play with the technology prior to piloting and implementation.
To join the SAB, send an email-based request to SAB@microsoft.com. Please feel free to include any information you want about your experience in creating solutions with Microsoft products or areas of interest.
On June 16, 2014, we will hold the third of our bi-monthly Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) webinars. SAB webinars are one hour and consist of brief presentations followed by time for open feedback.
Here is the agenda for the June 2014 webinar:
To prepare for this webinar, please do the following:
We are anxious to hear your feedback on these two topics to help us refine the solutions content story from Microsoft.
The SAB is now approaching 500 members. We will have two sessions at different times on June 16 to accommodate all our members worldwide. We have sent every SAB member Lync meeting invitations for both meetings so you can accept the one the best fits your schedule.
Thanks and see you on the 16th!
Platform Options posters give you an immediate visual sense of the ways that a product can be deployed, either by itself or in conjunction with other products. We already released platform options posters for SharePoint 2013 and Lync 2013. The Exchange 2013 Platform Options poster is the final installment in this series of posters.
Exchange 2013 Platform Options
This poster shows the deployment options available for Exchange 2013; Exchange Online, hybrid, on-premises and hosted Exchange. It also provides an overview of how Exchange integrates with related products and services such as Exchange Online Protection, Lync and SharePoint.
Questions for SAB members:
We would love to get your opinion. You can comment on this blog post or send more detailed feedback to sab@microsoft.com.
Thanks!
Posters, Exchange 2013, platform options
Check out the new Power BI - Getting Started Guide.
This topic from David Iseminger and others on the SCI Data App Content team uses storytelling techniques, such as creating a story world and premise and defining characters and their goals to follow throughout, to guide you through a set of tasks. David is a published non-fiction and fiction writer (I'm so jealous :>).
What’s interesting about this approach is that it uses a third-person, character-driven narrative and covers common gotchas and missteps that you might encounter. Give it a read. Unlike the detached “technical writing” that Microsoft typically produces, this content pulls you in like…a story.
Question for SAB members:
Thanks,
We gave a customized presentation at the SAB Session yesterday at TechEd North America 2014, which included the following:
Attendees got a chance to tell us what they thought about our existing content and the new content we are planning.
Attendees also got the following printed posters:
Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Component Architecture
Windows Server 2012 R2: Private Cloud Storage and Virtualization
What's more, the copies were SIGNED by Windows Server poster author Martin McClean!
Sorry that you could not make it. We will be covering the Cloud Architecture project and other topics in future SAB webinars.
Solutions Advisory BoardMay all your problems have solutions…
If you are currently at TechEd North America 2014, don't forget that we are hosting a dedicated SAB Session today (Wed) at 4:00 - 5:30 PM (Houston time). This session is in the Hilton, Room 335A (use the skybridge from the Convention Center).
This 90-minute session is open to you and your associates who are interested in learning about solutions and solutions content.
We have a packed agenda with presenters scheduled from Microsoft Azure, Office Server, Microsoft Consulting Services, and Cloud and Datacenter Solutions.
We'd love to hear your feedback on our latest work and our future plans.
Hope to see you there in person.
Joe DaviesSolutions Advisory Board
My esteemed Microsoft colleague and poster Jedi master Martin McClean has just updated the Posterpedia application in the Windows Store at http://aka.ms/sposterpedia.
This update contains the following new and updated posters for cross-product solutions content:
If you don't already have this application, get it now!
Question for SAB members: What do you think of the Posterpedia app?
Please leave your feedback as comments on this blog post, add a post in the SAB Yammer network, or send a more detailed answer to sab@microsoft.com.
Thanks
If you would like to join the SAB, please send your request to sab@microsoft.com.
If you’d like to meet face-to-face and hear about cross-product and cross-platform solutions at this year’s TechEd 2014 North America, we have a couple of events planned for Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) members and guests.
SAB Table at Ask the Experts
Tuesday, May 13, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Representatives from Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services, the Office Server Solutions team, and the Cloud and Datacenter Solutions team (who just presented their solutions content at the April 2014 SAB webinar) will be there. Come say hello and talk to us about solutions.
SAB Session
Wednesday, May 14, from 4:00 to 5:30 PM
Hilton Americas, Room 335A
This 90-minute session is open to any SAB member attending TechEd and their guests who are interested in learning about solutions. We have presenters scheduled from Microsoft Azure, Office Server, Microsoft Consulting Services, and Cloud and Datacenter Solutions. We’re eager to let you know about our work and to hear your feedback.
Additionally, the Content Services & International (CSI) booth will be hosting a demo and discussion of the Solution Guides published on TechNet.
Hope to see you there!
In the New Solutions node in the TechNet Library and a new set of Solution Guides blog post, I introduced the Solution Guides being produced by the Datacenter, Devices and Enterprise Computer (DDEC) writing organization here at Microsoft.
Senior Technical Writer Kumud Dwivedi recently published a new Solution Guide. In her words:
If you are a small to midsize business that is looking for a reliable way to allow remote network users to access business data outside of your network, we now have a solution guide named Secure remote access in small and midsize businesses to address this.
Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and Windows Server 2012 R2 provide a solution to securely access data when off-premises via a wide range of Internet-connected devices by using various methods such as Remote Web Access, virtual private network, or the My Server app.
If your business has up to 25 users and 50 devices, use Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. For up to 100 users and 200 devices, use the Standard or Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2012 R2 with the Windows Server Essentials Experience role installed.
Here is the resulting solution design (click on it for a larger version):
Questions for SAB members: What do you think of this Solution Guide? Do you have any additional ideas for Solution Guides?
Thanks to YouTube and the proliferation of video recording and production technologies, we now live in a video-centered society in which a short, focused video can take the place of traditional text.
For solutions content, we can tap into this video/visual-centric trend by producing a short video with an overview of the solution. This video could show the business value, the major components of the solution, and maybe it bit about how it works to provide a big-picture context that will later aid in the assimilation of the technical details of planning and configuration.
Here are some examples:
Questions for SAB members: Should Microsoft solutions content have short, overview videos? If so, what are the key attributes of these videos?
Here is a list to get started (feel free to add):
Another question for SAB members: For the information covered in the video, what is the most important?
You can add comments to this blog post, join the corresponding thread about this topic in the All Network group of the SAB Yammer network, or send your detailed feedback to sab@microsoft.com.
Thanks in advance for your input!
The Office Solutions team recently published the following content that you can use to plan and deploy configurations of SharePoint Server 2013 in Microsoft Azure:
Some of these solution configurations were presented at the February 2014 SAB Webinar. You can find all of the solutions content for the Office Solutions team at http://aka.ms/moda.
Take a look and let us know the following:
You can leave comments on this blog post, send email directly to sab@microsoft.com, or add your comments to the corresponding post in the Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) Yammer network.
Thanks in advance for your input.
On April 22, 2014, we will hold the second of our bi-monthly Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) webinars. SAB webinars are one hour and consist of brief presentations followed by time for open feedback.
The April 22 Webinar titled “Private and Hybrid Cloud Solutions” is presented by Jim Dial, Tom Shinder, and Yuri Diogenes of the Datacenter, Devices and Enterprise Computer (DDEC) Solutions Team.
The SAB is now approaching 500 members. We will have two sessions at different times on April 22 to accommodate all our members worldwide. We will send every SAB member Lync meeting invitations for both meetings so you can accept the one the best fits your schedule.
Thanks and see you on the 22nd!
To receive an invitation to an SAB Webinar, you must be an SAB member. To join, send an email-based request to SAB@microsoft.com. Please feel free to include any information you want about your experience in creating solutions with Microsoft products or areas of interest.
Have you thought that you’d like to set up Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 to work together to support your organization’s compliance goals? Or have you wondered how to take advantage of Windows Azure to host a SharePoint farm? If cross-product solutions based on Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Lync Server, Windows Azure, and Office 365 interest you, and you’re going to be at MEC, come join us for a half-hour discussion to hear about solutions help content we’ve been working on. We’d also like to hear about solutions content that you’d like to see.
Where? Austin Convention Center at MEC – 3rd floor, room 8C
When? Monday, March 31st, at 6pm
RSVP – Let us know you’ll be coming by writing to the Solutions Advisory Board alias at sab@microsoft.com. However, you don’t have to RSVP to attend.
If you’ve thought, “I wish Microsoft would tell me more about how to set up SharePoint 2013 on-premises to work with Exchange Online,” or “I’d really like to know how to deploy eDiscovery across my Exchange Server and SharePoint Server environments,” we want to talk with you!
Microsoft Office has formed a solutions content team whose reason for being is to help you learn how to build solutions using on-premises products like Exchange Server 2013 together with services such as Office 365 and Windows Azure. We’ll be at the Office Content Publishing booth at the SharePoint Conference next week in Las Vegas, and we’d really like to talk about solutions with you – such as those we’ve been developing at Solutions using Office Servers and the Cloud. For example: * SharePoint Disaster Recovery in Windows Azure – Learn how to use Windows Azure as a viable disaster recovery platform for your SharePoint 2013 deployment. * Internet Sites in Windows Azure using SharePoint Server 2013 – Use Windows Azure infrastructure to create SharePoint 2013 sites that can keep your costs low and scale as your needs dictate.
We’d also like to hear about solutions that you have in mind.
We’re also going to be hosting some design-time sessions with individual customers at the conference. They’re intended to help you plan and build a solution based on SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. A couple specific areas of focus are hybrid environments, where you use SharePoint 2013 on premises and Office 365 offerings together, and on SharePoint with Azure. Check out the Invitation to Design Time sessions at the SharePoint Conference 2014 to see if you’re eligible to participate.
We hope to see you there!
[This week’s blog post is from fellow solutions writer Tom Shinder. Tom is a member of Datacenter, Devices and Enterprise Computer (DDEC) Solutions Team. The Solutions Team is responsible for creating standards and defining guidelines and delivering training and mentoring that enables the writing organization in DDEC to create solutions to complex IT problems. Tom is probably best known for the work he’s done related to ISA Server and Threat Management Gateway (TMG). His current focus on the Solutions Team is on hybrid cloud architecture.]
By Tom Shinder
Solutions, solutions everywhere, and not a drop to drink! There is a lot of talk in the IT world today about solutions. Just go to any vendor’s web site and at the top of the page you’ll see a prominent menu item for “solutions”. IT vendors understand that companies are moving away from the product and feature-based world that was so attractive to IT organizations in the past. Instead, they are moving toward IT solutions. There’s a big difference between focusing on applications/application features versus focusing on solutions. First, let’s see if we can get an agreement on what a “solution” is.
There’s a lot of talk about solutions but not as much talk about what defines a solution. I suppose the first place to start is to look in the dictionary:
As you can see, there are a many definitions for the word “solution”. Ask a chemist and he might say that it’s a homogenous molecular mixture of two or more substances. Ask a mathematician, and it’s the answer to a mathematical problem. Ask a physician, and it’s the termination of a disease process. Ask someone who writes content for IT organizations and suddenly it’s not quite as easy to define.
I suspect that most of you will think of an IT solution as something like definition #2 – the state of being solved. If that’s the case, then one can imagine that all of the following would qualify as solutions:
Essentially, IT solutions are answers to IT problems. But not all problems are the same. Some problems are very narrowly scoped, some are a little bigger, some are broadly scoped, and some are, for want of a better term, “ginormous.” The answer to any of these problems is going to be a solution to the problem. So, is this how we define “solution?” Is an IT solution merely an answer to any IT problem?
For my team at Microsoft, the answer to this is “yes and no”. Of course, a solution provides an answer to a problem – otherwise it wouldn’t be a solution and could very well just represent another problem. We’ve decided that a “Solution” (capitalized) is a bit more than an answer to a problem.
Let’s look a little closer at this. Microsoft documentation has been very good at describing how you can use a specific feature – for example, how to configure the forward proxy configuration on ISA Server 2004. The documentation provides information on all the option buttons, all the checkboxes, all the slider bars, all the wizards, and any other configuration apparatus that’s included with the software that allows you to configure the web proxy. That’s great information and you couldn’t use the product without it. This information provides a solution to the question “what are the available configuration web proxy configuration options in ISA Server?”
That type of documentation was very attractive to the guys in the trenches. I know, I was one of them! And the only thing better than detailed information on how to configure a feature was information on the technical details of how the product or feature worked! I’d stay up until 2:00 AM to read an 80-page white paper on the TMG firewall engine internals – I couldn’t get enough of that stuff.
But that was the age of the IT Pro. If they built it, we’d come. I think the world has changed quite a bit since those heady days of the IT Pro telling the business what to do based on whatever new thing we were playing with at the time. Now, if they build it, the business needs to understand if it’s something they need in order to realize business value. If not, they won’t come.
Therefore, a solution needs to be more than just how to “make things go” (or “we need computer things” – start this video at the 48 second mark). It has to be about an IT based solution that solves a business problem.
Our approach to “solutions” is to begin by defining a problem domain. For example, how to build a cloud infrastructure can be considered to be a problem domain. And we call it a problem “domain” because there are lots of sub-problems included in the primary problem of “how to build a cloud infrastructure”. Another example of a problem domain would be “how to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure”. These two problem domains include many sub-problems that have relationships to each other and in order to solve the primary problem (the problem domain), all the sub-problems need to be addressed in order to arrive at the solution.
But defining a problem domain is only the first step. The second step is to define an audience. One solution does not fit all. We could build a cloud infrastructure, but would the same guidance be relevant to all audiences? For example, consider the following titles:
While there will be some similarities and some crossover between each of these “solutions” – there are going to be some significant differences too. A cloud solution for a global cloud service provider and one for enterprise IT is going to be quite different – each audience has its own resource capacity, constraints, customer base, and reasons for being. That’s why when we define a solution, we include both the problem domain and the audience.
Notice that in these titles we focus on the IT problem. There is no mention of any specific technology in the titles. As much as we at Microsoft would like to believe that customers are saying “my problem is that I need some new Microsoft stuff in my datacenter” we realize that’s pretty unlikely. What we do know is that we make software that will provide IT-based solutions for business problems. But we don’t mention technology names in the titles of our solutions, because when someone is searching for a solution, they search based on their problem, not based on the name of Microsoft software that might solve their problem.
Now I should qualify that last statement. In reality, people are looking for product based solutions all the time. For example, if I need to upgrade my Exchange 2010 infrastructure to Exchange 2012, you can bet that I’m going to search based on product name. If I have a problem with the anti-malware service in TMG, you know that I’m going to use a product and a feature name to search for an answer. This calls out a key difference between the solutions my team does and other types of documentation that provides answers to IT problems.
The difference is that our Solutions documentation includes multiple products and technologies. Because there are be literally dozens or hundreds of different technologies used to create one of our Solutions, it doesn’t make sense to include any specific product or technology in the title. The products and technologies all work together to solve the business problem called out in the title.
Now let’s get to the meat of our “Solutions”. We take a lifecycle approach to IT-based business solutions. While we all like to begin with installing the software and seeing what it does in the lab and then turning the lab into a production environment, I think we can all agree that such an approach really doesn’t work too well anymore (and it probably didn’t work too well in the past). Instead, we need to be thoughtful about how we plan, design, implement and operate any IT-based solution we bring into our corporate environment.
Our solutions consist of a number of “guides” or “articles” or “documents” (you can pick your favorite term):
Let’s take a closer look at each of these and see how each of these guides work together to support an IT-based business solution.
Note: If you’re in a hurry and like to watch videos, here’s a great 8 minute video done by Jim Dial (a member of our Solutions Team) that provides an entertaining and enlightening overview to our approach to Solutions, as applied to the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution for Enterprise IT document set, which I will use as the example document set when discussing the guides that comprise the set.
The Scenario Definition Guide sets the stage for the Solution document set. The goal of the Scenario Definition Guide is to provide you with some context for the solution and define what the problem is that the solution intends to solve. To accomplish this task, we thought it would be a good idea to give you an example company that wants to solve the problem that is called out in the title of the solution document set.
For example, if the problem domain is hybrid cloud infrastructure, and the audience is enterprise IT, then the Scenario Definition Guide will provide a scenario that is pertinent to a company that intends to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure. In addition, it has an enterprise IT department that will be responsible for defining solution requirements, and designing, building and operating a hybrid cloud infrastructure for the organization.
What the Scenario Definition Guide provides you is an example organization that might be like your organization. The guide defines the current state of the company and its IT organization and infrastructure. It then describes what the goals are for that company as it applies to the problem domain defined for the solution document set. In the hybrid cloud infrastructure example, it would describe what goals the company has for its hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Also included in the Scenario Definition Guide is a discussion of the planning process that the organization went through. This planning process includes a number of questions and answers, with the answers defining the requirements for the ultimate solution that the IT organization will build out.
So, in the hybrid cloud infrastructure example, the Scenario Definition Guide includes a collection of questions and answers that the fictional company Contoso went through to define their requirements for a hybrid cloud infrastructure. The Scenario Definition Guide then finishes with a discussion about what strategy Contoso will use to design and implement the solution.
By the time you finish reading the Scenario Definition Guide, you should have a good understanding of where the company is today, where it wants to be in the future, what the requirements are for the solution they will implement that will take them to their desired future state, and the basic strategy that they will use to get them there.
The goal of the Design Guide is to help you understand the design process for the problem domain covered in the Solution document set. In the Design Guide, you see the design exercise that the example organization went though as it defined the design of the solution. The Design Guide is integrated with the Scenario Guide due to the fact that the design discussed in the design exercise is based on the requirements defined in the Scenario Definition Guide.
The key value of the Design Guide is that it provides you more than just a design. Anyone can come up with a design and say “hey, that’s a good design because I think it is”. While it’s great for someone to think he has a great design, that doesn’t help you that much. Sure, the guy who put that design together might think he’s the smartest guy in the room, but we all know that you are the smartest guy in the room, so you’re not necessarily going to take his word for it that his design is best.
What would be a lot more useful is if you had access to the reasoning behind the design decisions that are made during the design exercise. When you have access to the reasoning behind why a design decision was or was not made, it lets you know a lot about how to approach the design process for your own organization (which is likely to have requirements that deviate from the design requirements defined in the Scenario Guide). With access to the rationale behind the design decisions, you can make an informed decision on whether the design decisions were good ones, bad ones, or maybe even mediocre ones. The key is that you have visibility into the thought process behind the design. Without that visibility, you have to take that design on faith – which you may or may not be inclined to do.
Now you might be asking yourself “sure, the reasons for why the company made the decisions for their design are discussed, but where did they get the rationale to back up those decisions? Did they make it up? Did they have to scour the Internet to find the information they needed to evaluate the options available and try to reconcile all that information themselves before even entering into the design process?”
If you’ve been thinking that, you’re already one step ahead of me. How do you find the available options? Sure, you can search for the information yourself, but that would take a long time. What if someone could do that heavy lifting for you? That’s where the Design Considerations Guide comes in, and I’ll talk about that guide at the end of the article.
By the time you finish the Design Guide, you should have a good idea of what one approach is to carrying out a design exercise for the problem domain covered in the Solution document set. You can use the same approach, or craft a modified approach that maps more closely to how your own IT organization does things.
The Implementation Guide gives you the information you need to build out the solution that the fictional organization designed. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you can’t build out the design and see it work, then the design isn’t much use. This keys into the fact that when we created the Solution document set, we not only defined the requirements and went through the design exercise, we also built it out to confirm that the solution actually worked.
The process of actually building out the solution described in the Design Guide was very important to us. When we built out the solution, we learned a lot of things about how the various technologies worked together. We learned that it was more efficient to build out the solution one way versus another, and learned about a lot of “gotcha’s” and undocumented issues that required some work to find a solution. The result was that we were able to feed this information back into both the Design Guide and the Design Considerations Guide. The experience of building out the design provided insights that we could pass on to you. In essence, we experienced the pain so you won’t have to.
It’s important to note that the Implementation Guide does not provide a step by step process for building out the solution. What it does do it provide you a “stepwise” approach to building it out. We provide you the steps in an order that we’ve found most efficient to create the working solution. In each step we describe what you need to do, and for specific details we point you to highly relevant links that will help you carry out the step.
For example, if we want you to configure NIC teaming, we will point you to a link that shows you the steps for configuring NIC teaming. If there is something specific that we want to you to do, we’ll describe that if it’s not included in the information in the link, or if it’s supplemental information that needs to be added to what’s described in the link (such as whether to use failover or aggregation).
An example of what we won’t do is send you to the SQL Server home page if we need to you configure SQL Server to support the solution.
By the time you’re done with the Implementation Guide, you’ll understand how to implement the design created in the Design Guide. If that design is something you think will work for your organization, you can use it as is, as we’ve tested it and confirmed that it will work. If your design ends up being a little different than what we described in the Design Guide, you may still find the information in the Implementation Guide useful as many of the steps might be similar, and the order of operations that we describe might still apply to what you end up building out for your design.
I’ve left the best for last. The Scenario, Design and Implementation Guides comprise what we call a “reference implementation”. If you’re not familiar with the term, a reference implementation is essentially an example that you can use when implementing the same or similar solution within the problem domain discussed. The reference implementation takes you through a single company’s planning, design and implementation process – so it’s very specific for the scenario described for that particular reference implementation.
But let’s say that your company wants to implement a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Your company has some similarities to Contoso, but your current state and your requirements are a bit different. This might lead you to want to make design decisions that are different from Contoso. The problem is that the Design Guide only contains the decisions that Contoso made, and the rationale for those decisions. You need to know what other options might be available to you so that you can satisfy the requirements you defined during your own planning exercise.
What you need is a Design Considerations Guide! The Design Considerations Guide isn’t tied to a specific scenario. Instead, it’s intended for anyone who is interested in the problem domain described in the title of the Design Considerations Guide. This guide exposes you to all the relevant options that you should consider when you get to the design phase. Not only are all the options included, but a discussion of why you would or would not want to select a particular option, given a particular requirement. Armed with this knowledge, you can take your own set of requirements and see which options are available that might be used to meet those requirements.
This is how we approach the design process for the reference implementations we describe in our Solutions document sets. First, we write the Design Considerations Guide – this guide contains the entire universe of applicable options for the problem domain, scoped for the intended audience (both of which are included in the title of the Solution document set). Now that we have that knowledge, we write the Scenario Guide, that describes a fictional company and their requirements for a solution within that problem domain.
Next comes the design process, which is discussed in the Design Guide. What we do is think of the Scenario Guide as a filter through which we pour the Design Considerations Guide. Design options that do not meet the requirements defined in the Scenario Guide are filtered out. Design options that will enable the solution to fulfill the requirements defined in the Scenario Guide make it through the filter. Those design options are then surfaced and discussed in the Design Guide. See, it all makes sense!
Tackling big IT problems is getting increasingly complex and the amount of time you have to solve them seems to be decreasing at an alarming rate. You just don’t have the time to run the “paper chase” anymore. You need definitive answers to complex IT problems. We hope we are able to help you using the approach to solving IT problems described in this post.
Please feel free to write to me at tomsh@microsoft.com if you have any questions or comments regarding this content. Thanks! –Tom.
Please add your comments on this blog post, send email to sab@microsoft.com, or post your question for Tom in the Server and Cloud Solutions group of the Microsoft Solutions Advisory Board Yammer network.
Platform Options posters give you an immediate visual sense of the ways that a product can be deployed, either by itself or in conjunction with other products. Here are the two published so far:
SharePoint 2013 Platform Options
This poster shows various combinations of SharePoint 2013 deployment, including hybrid with SharePoint Online in Office 365 and hosting SharePoint farms and sites in Windows Azure.
Lync 2013 Platform Options
This poster shows the combinations of Lync 2013 deployment, including Lync Online with Office 365, hybrid deployments with Lync Online in Office 365, Lync Server on-premises, and integration with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,and on-premises Exchange 2013 Server.