This slideshare focues on real-world experience working with SharePoint Online. Consisting of five main operating divisions that help transport more than 2.5 billion passengers every year, FirstGroup is in the process of deploying a cloud-based collaboration platform to 15,000 users across the UK and North America as a way to foster communication between mobile workers and those in the office. Girish Balsavar, VP, Center of Excellence, Employee Channel at FirstGroup America, shares the ways in which implementing SharePoint Online will deliver key capabilities that FirstGroup is taking advantage of and the cloud solution's impact to the organization. Chris Hines, Senior Solutions Architect at Perficient, covers both the benefits and challenges of working with SharePoint Online. Several solutions to common problems are presented along with useful and reusable architectural patterns. He also discusses best practices around development and deployment processes.

1. facebook.com/perficient twitter.com/Perficient_MSFTlinkedin.com/company/perficient
SharePoint Online
Learn How FirstGroup Will Use the Cloud-Based Service
to Collaborate & Share Across Five Divisions

2. Agenda
• Who is Perficient
• Benefits & challenges of working with SharePoint Online
• Deployment & development best practices
• Patterns for common challenges
• Yammer and integration into SharePoint
• How FirstGroup is aligning 5 divisions with SharePoint Online
• Questions & answers

3. Perficient is a leading information technology consulting firm serving clients throughout
North America.
We help clients implement business-driven technology solutions that integrate business
processes, improve worker productivity, increase customer loyalty and create a more agile
enterprise to better respond to new business opportunities.
About Perficient

4. • Founded in 1997
• Public, NASDAQ: PRFT
• 2013 revenue ~$373 million
• Major market locations throughout North America
• Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus,
Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fairfax, Houston, Indianapolis, Los
Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York City,
Northern California, Philadelphia, Southern California, St.
Louis, Toronto and Washington, D.C.
• Global delivery centers in China, Europe and India
• >2,100 colleagues
• Dedicated solution practices
• ~85% repeat business rate
• Alliance partnerships with major technology vendors
• Multiple vendor/industry technology and growth awards
Perficient Profile

5. BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
Business Intelligence
Business Process Management
Customer Experience and CRM
Enterprise Performance Management
Enterprise Resource Planning
Experience Design (XD)
Management Consulting
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
Business Integration/SOA
Cloud Services
Commerce
Content Management
Custom Application Development
Education
Information Management
Mobile Platforms
Platform Integration
Portal & Social
Our Solutions Expertise

6. Our Microsoft Practice

7. Girish Balsavar | VP - Employee Channel - Center of Excellence, FirstGroup America
• Over the last five years, he has held multiple senior leadership positions within
FirstGroup’s IT department
• In his current role, he is responsible for the establishment of Employee Channel
COE
• Key objective of creating a global platform to enable employee productivity
through increased collaboration and sharing of best practices across divisions
Our Speakers
Chris Hines| Senior Solutions Architect, Microsoft Modern Apps, Perficient
• More than fourteen years of IT experience, he has worked with SharePoint since
2003
• He has led many successful SharePoint projects over the years, and is now
focused on delivering SharePoint Online & SharePoint Search solutions to global
organizations
• Certified SCRUM Master and an expert in understanding & leading SCRUM
projects

8. Benefits of SharePoint Online
• Create a globally scalable SharePoint instance in minutes!
• Deploy minimal viable product quickly, reduce risk
• Upgrades are managed by the service ‘Evergreen’
• Improved update cadence, smaller changes
• Focus on solving business problems

9. Challenges with SharePoint Online
There are restrictions, but it’s often just a case
of thinking about the problem in a different way.
• No farm solutions
• User profile synchronization is limited to set fields
• No vanity URLs, need to work with <name>.sharepoint.com
• Cannot edit search content sources nor schedule crawls
• Probably need to deploy ADFS + DirSync or FIM
This list used to be longer but
the service is constantly improving:
e.g. Content by Search WebPart,
1TB site collections

10. Development & Deployment
MSDN
Tenant
Developer Scripted Deployment
Development
All Developers
Team
Foundation
Server
Scripted Deployment
Refinement
Scripted Deployment
Scripted Deployment
Tenant
Admin
Periodic Content Replication
Product Owner
Stakeholders
Test Users
End Users
Review
Test
Use
Tenant
Admin
Can it be scripted?
Document exceptions.
Development
(Integration)
Tenant
QA
Tenant
Production
Tenant

11. Development & Deployment
• Scripted Deployment
– Highly repeatable
– Helps new developers onboard very easily
– Document exceptions
– Could also be used on-premises
• Separation of Environments
– Shared services/features not compromised during development
– No developers in QA or production
– Preserves tenant administrators in production
– Sign-up for ‘first release’ in development
• Leverage Cloud Accounts for Development and QA
– Very easy to setup, easy to manage for external users
• Federated Identities
– A test domain could also be federated to QA
– Needed to test single sign-on experience

12. Scripted Deployment
• PowerShell Library with XML Configuration
• SharePoint Server 2013 Client Components SDK (v16)
• Scripted Deployment For E.G.
– Content types (avoid content type hub)
– Deploying display templates and layouts
– Populating term store
• Client Object Model Does Not Support E.G.
– Setting managed properties
– Configuring search navigation
• Temporary (Unsupported) Work-Arounds
– Use .Net assembly browser on server code
– HTTP remote operations (Vesa "vesku" Juvonen)
*Credit to Roydon Gyles-Bedford and David Palfery at Perficient

13. Building Apps for SharePoint Online
• App Model Samples
– SharePoint Community effort
– http://officeams.codeplex.com
– Contributors include:
• Richard diZerega
• Vesa Juvonen
• Pattern Highlights:
– Remote site & site collection provisioning
– Remote event receivers
– User profile updates and picture uploads
– Personal site (e.g. OneDrive) customization/branding

14. Remote Site Provisioning
• App Model ‘App’
• Site or Site Collection
• Custom Form
• Collect Site Metadata
• Associated Workflow
• Execute Provisioning
Scripts

15. Hybrid Search

16. Hybrid Search
• Propagates search-based patterns and will most
likely fit with patterns adopted already e.g. result
sources, display templates, etc.
• Hybrid is a powerful pattern when we need to
augment SharePoint Online with on-premises content
• Can be used to solve the user profile synchronization
challenge
• Requires on-premises (or Azure with VPN)
SharePoint 2013

17. SharePoint Online Developer’s Toolkit
• Search Query Tool
– Build your queries for search-based design patterns
– http://sp2013searchtool.codeplex.com
• Client Object Browser
– Debug script-deployed content types and site columns
– Inspect OOTB content types and site columns
– https://spcb.codeplex.com
• Color Tool
– Brand by theme
– Give it to your visual designers!
– http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38182

18. Yammer Integration
• Integration of Yammer is evolving rapidly
• Switch from SharePoint Social to Yammer
• Unified Groups: SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer
• Yammer App Parts and Yammer Embed
• Yammer Search and the Office Graph
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MEC/2014/USX202

19. FirstGroup – Employee Portal

20. FirstGroup plc
Keeping people moving and communities prospering
First Student : The largest provider of student transportation in North America –
over twice the size of the next largest competitor
First Transit : One of the largest private sector providers of public transit
management and contracting in North America
Greyhound : The only national operator of scheduled intercity coach
transportation services in the US and Canada, serving 48 US States and ten
Canadian Provinces and Territories
UK Bus : One of the largest bus operators in the UK, with around a fifth of the
deregulated market
UK Rail : UK’s largest rail operator with almost a quarter of the UK’s passenger
rail network, carrying more than 330 million passengers per year
Our services help to create strong, vibrant and sustainable local economies.
Each day, every one of our 117,000 employees works hard to deliver vitally
important services for our passengers. During the last year around 2.5 billion
people relied on us to get to work, to education, to visit family and friends and
much more.

21. Employee Portal – Office365 Implementation
• Provide an authenticated single point of contact
• Provide a single directory of employees and contact
information
• Enhance ability to communicate group messages
• Standardize document storage for policies, procedures
and forms across divisions
• Enhance search (people, documents)
• Simplify access for device/location

22. FirstGroup – Employee Portal

23. Why SharePoint in the cloud
• Focus on collaboration and communication vs servers
and datacenters
• Focus on getting to information vs. VPNs and network
access
• Reach the right people when needed vs. which device
do I use
• Focus on increased integrated capabilities vs. working
on technical projects connecting best of breed products
• Opportunity to increase collaboration and communication
across the countries and divisions

24. What doesn’t change for successful
implementation (Cloud or no Cloud)
• Executive sponsorship
• Business partner engagement
• Skilled resources to implement
• Keeping it simple – right architecture and guidelines

26. Connect with Perficient