This questionnaire can be used to assess the existing SharePoint environment of the customer for support transition and to collect key information to propose the right support model for the transition.
Business Goal
- What is the primary business objective of the SharePoint environment? (What needs of your business are met by the existing system – Communication, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Dashboards, Complete Intranet Solution, Extranet for suppliers, customers etc.?)
- Please share the status of all ongoing and planned activities for SharePoint (Development, migration and upgrade).
- SharePoint farm version (SP 2010, SP 2013, SP 2016 & Office 365).
- Please enlist the sites that are most critical to business.
- Please list down all the mission critical services that are hosted in SharePoint, along with their purpose.
Infrastructure details
- Explain in detail about how the domain controller is configured and the primary and secondary data center details.
- Please provide details or preferably Physical and Logical Architecture Diagrams for Production, Staging and Development Environment (i.e. Farm Topology, deployment diagrams, Virtual environment, SharePoint version details, Directory Services).
- Server hardware & software specifications.
- Total number of users? Number of concurrent users
- Server Naming Convention for Prod/Dev/Test servers
- Licensing details for SharePoint, Office web apps, Office Online server, Windows server and other supporting platforms.
- Please enlist all the integration points (Interfaces) with External LOB and other applications/ Software (Ex SAP Integration with SharePoint).
- Please give a brief explanation about all web applications and service applications in scope.
- Please provide the list of all 3rd party software that has been integrated with SharePoint (Ex- Nintex Workflow, Doc Ave, and Boldon James etc.)
- Explain in detail about the load balancing methodology used for the SharePoint Environment ((ISA? TMG? CISCO Ace? Or any other Hardware load balancer, F5 Big IP)
- Is there any redundancy for Service applications and if yes how are they configured?
- Are there any service applications which are being shared between two farms?
- DR farm details and its configuration for Business Continuity. A separate DR farm on a different datacenter or a stretched farm where the servers are distributed across two datacenters?
- Backend SQL Server details (i.e. SQL Server version, what level of permissions do we (i.e. SharePoint admin) have on SQL, SQL alias, named instance for SharePoint etc. . .)
- Backup strategy for SharePoint content databases.
- RTO and RPO strategy for SharePoint content databases.
- High Availability strategy for SQL Server - Clustering in place? Mirroring? Always ON?
- Authentication mechanism for SharePoint.
- Known issues in the farm if any.
- Language pack details if installed?
- When the farm was recently patched?
- Repository for configuration files, Implementation/Build guides, Known error database (KEDB), Incident Logs, RCA (root cause analysis), (CSV, SVN, TFS, etc.)
- Deployment architecture? Give an overview (Farm solutions or Sandbox solutions)
- Do you have Office web apps/Office Online server deployed? If yes, detailed explanation of the Office web apps farm.
- Do you have Workflow Manager deployed? If yes, detailed explanation about the Work flow manager farm.
- How often do you perform a data refresh to the UAT and TEST farm?
- Details about AV scanning for the SharePoint farm?
- Do we have any monitoring in place for monitoring the environment (Ex SCOM, Zenoss monitoring tool)?
- Are you using IaaS platform for SharePoint? if yes, give details about that (AWS, Azure & Google Cloud Platform).
- VM machine types if the SharePoint environment is on Azure, A series, D series, G series etc.?
- Health check scripts if available and it’s frequency. How often does the health check script run and what are the parameter it monitors?
SharePoint Online (Office 365) details
- What’s the Office 365 plan that your users are using?
- How are the user identities synced from on-premises AD to Azure AD?
- Are you using any Hybrid functionalities (One drive for business, Hybrid Search, Hybrid user profile, Hybrid App launcher etc.)?
- Detailed explanation about the customizations made on the SharePoint Online sites.
- Documentation of all the customization made on the SharePoint Online sites.
- Migration tools used to migrate to SharePoint Online from on-premises.
- What level of permissions will the SharePoint Online tenant admin have on the Office 365 tenant? Just SharePoint administrator or Global administrator?
- Who will take care of Office 365 license management?
Portals
- Please explain in detail about the most critical sites (in scope) on existing environment?
- Please share the information architecture
- Please share the governance plan for the SharePoint environment.
- List of blocked and allowed file types in SharePoint?
Content management
- What’s the main kind of content that’s stored in SharePoint? (Text content, Documents, Images, flash, Audios, Videos, other formats etc.)
- Is there any other Content Management or Document management tool in place along with SharePoint (Ex Onbase from Hyland software)?
Security
- Are the SharePoint sites secured (Using SSL, encryption)?
- Details about the SSL certificates used for SharePoint sites?
- If the SharePoint sites are made available to internet/ external sharing what’s the authentication mechanism followed for that?
- What is the current Authentication mechanism? (Windows Authentication, Forms based Authentication or Kerberos, AD, LDAP )
- Authentication mode used for web applications (Claims or Classic)?
Customizations
- Does the SharePoint farm /SharePoint Online have customizations on it?
- If yes, what’s the total number of farm solutions, User solutions & sandboxed solutions that’s been deployed?
- Detailed description /documentation of all the WSP files that’s been deployed and its use?
- If we have apps deployed to the app catalog, then detailed description about those apps?
- What kind of apps are they? Provider hosted, Auto –hosted or SharePoint hosted?
- List of custom scripts running on the SharePoint servers and its purpose.
- How Branding is applied, what’s being done? (Feature staplers/custom site definitions/Themes/Custom CSS, Master pages, etc.)
- Do we have a SharePoint developer/developer team who takes care of all the development related tasks and if yes his/her details?
Supporting Team details
- Who is supporting the existing environment? Please provide existing SLA and priorities for incident management.
- Please give a brief description about team structure for Support (OS, Hardware, SQL server, Security, Exchange server, SharePoint, Cloud Management team)
- Do you have a distributed development team across multiple locations/geographies? Please provide details.
- Do you have a distributed team of site owners?
Vendor details
- Does this account have Microsoft premier support? If yes, whom to contact for opening a support case. Microsoft PFE and TAM contact details for this account if applicable?
- Name of the Vendor who did all the SharePoint environment customizations.
- Can we reach out to the Vendor for any customization issues which is not in our scope of support, if yes contact details of the Vendor?
- Vendor details for the third party tools that’s used in the SharePoint farm (Ex Metalogix, AvePoint, Share gate etc...)
- SLA details with the Vendor and the contact person from the Vendor’s side for this account?
Support & Incident Management
- What is the Support Type (L1, L2 or L3) expected?
- Please provide the call flow process. Find below a sample process flow.
- What’s the frequency of L1, L2 and L3 tasks that you get in a day, in a week & in a month?
Call Flow Process / Diagram
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Call flow
- Who is expected to make calls to Microsoft for support and for other vendors?
- Is it expected to interact with end users for Support?
- What are the support hours (time zones) and SLAs expected? What support coverage are you looking? (24*7, 16*5, or 8*5 ...)
Service Hours
The below calendar defines the times that the SLA clock starts and stops excluding weekends.
| Day | Start hours(EST) | End hours(EST) |
| Monday | | |
| Tuesday | | |
| Wednesday | | |
| Thursday | | |
| Friday | | |
- Do you have any system in place for Incident Management? If yes, please give details so that we can understand about how to accommodate that with our Incident Management system?
- Please explain the Incident classification criteria. Find sample below.
| Definition | Response Time from time of Incident Log | Fix Time from time of Incident Log |
| P1 | Impact on All Users /Risk to Business Continuity | 10 mins | Stay with it |
| P1 | Impact on All Users /Secondary system down | | |
| P2 | Impact on Site or Dept. / Significant problem preventing satisfactory operation | | |
| P3 | Impact on single User | | |
| P4 | Service Request/Advice required | | |
| P4 | Service Request/Planning | | |
| P4 | New starters/requisitions/supplies/bookings | | |
- What is the mode of communication for Support (Email only, Incident management tool, Phone, chat)?
- Please share the SLAs/ OLAs with existing vendors for 3rd party software, Infrastructure, Exchange Server, Security, SQL Server, OS and hardware.
- It is assumed that content and configuration DB of all SharePoint sites are in scope for support. Please confirm?
- Please confirm if following is out of scope for SharePoint Support,
- OS level support like Server Performance Management, Memory Management, Disk Space and SQL Server Uptime.
- Installation, Implementation, Deployment of any Software
- Design, Development, Implementation or any issue on Development and Test servers.
- Evaluation of any Software, Tool and Processes and Results
- Design, Development and Implementation of Proof of Concepts
- Development and Enhancements of 3rd Party Products
- Platform Troubleshooting
- Application Migration & Upgrades
- Optimizing search for website or any other design changes to website
- Managing Office 365 licenses and supporting the Azure environment.
- Are there any development or migration projects that are currently in progress? What support is given to these projects by existing (Portal, or SharePoint) support teams?
- Is there any repository for knowledge documents, Incident Logs, RCA (Root cause Analysis)?
- Communication plan for any planned/unplanned outages - Key stakeholder list
- Escalation matrix details.
- Detailed description of tasks & activities performed in shift / daily / weekly / monthly
- Please provide us with the following Support statistics (priority wise)
- Total tickets logged for SharePoint in last 1 month, 3 month and 6 months.
- How many Priority 1 calls were logged in last 1 month, 3 month and 6 months?
- Details about past SLA adherence,
- Summary of support tickets with case open age
- Are there user training requirements for educating the users about the sites? Need for webinars, training material, FAQs etc. to facilitate the rollout and ongoing changes to the sites
- Any past record of the entire SharePoint environment going down, if yes details about that?
Finally, once all the above mentioned details are gathered and you have understood the customer’s environment well, then you’re good to close the transition phase.