In my experience, the most significant challenge with enterprise implementations of SharePoint is that, while its usage and adoption is viral, it is often not given the same careful thought and planning as other enterprise technology investments.

When you implement technology within an enterprise that has significant up-front investment, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, you do significant up-front planning. This up-front planning includes staffing appropriate teams and determining how to budget for the costs you know the technology investment will require for being successful. In other words, plan to ensure that IT can support and measure business utilization to meet the needs of the business over time. When you invest more than a million dollars in that same ERP technology, you can assume that careful thought has been given on how that ERP technology will remain up and running. This includes appropriate backups, fire drills, additional redundancy, and that it definitely includes technology configuration planning. SharePoint often sneaks in with a much smaller up-front investment—it's easy to see why it may not have the same diligence when it comes to availability and performance planning that the larger upfront technology investments (like ERPs) have.

Many SharePoint implementations start in a pilot, often driven by a few key passionate leaders—the eventual usage of the platform is varied in both its application and in its configuration as it grows and scales to meet increasing business needs. Eventually, you look back at the SharePoint investment and wonder how you got to the point you are at—where there are numerous dependencies and significant complexities. Then you are faced with that dreaded question (or worse, an actual disaster scenario) and someone asks—how do we get SharePoint back up and running?

The difference in why this is so challenging for SharePoint stems from the fact that what SharePoint does is as varied in organization usage as the numerous configurations of sites and settings you can implement. In one organization, they may be using SharePoint for basic team collaboration. In another, it may be used to surface complex dashboards or connect other systems. This variation makes planning for things such as availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery a significant challenge.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when you look at disaster recovery strategies for SharePoint, and find confusion, a lack of investment and careful consideration, or the struggle organizations have with implementing successful plans and procedures for SharePoint's restoration in the advent of a disaster.

So you can imagine my excitement and almost immediate satisfaction on reading the excellent business and technical guidance in this book. The fear and worry that had been bothering me, my customers, and my partners for so long became something we could understand, and more importantly, plan for by leveraging what we learned and what other people can learn from this book.

As a trusted advisor to many CIOs struggling with this very subject, and as a Microsoft Technology Strategist, I found this book to be great at spelling out the specific steps customers and partners would need to execute to achieve a successful disaster recovery strategy for SharePoint.

At times, the authors' observations and advice are thought-provoking and hit home for technology leaders tasked with ensuring that stakeholders understand the complexity and the reason why certain disaster recovery investments are needed. The technical guidance becomes invaluable as you begin to implement those same strategies within your own organization, or for a customer. Once assumptions have been replaced with facts, and as the complexities become clearer, you end up with a direction on how to move forward, and are ready to answer that dreaded question—how do we get SharePoint back up and running?

From experience, SharePoint is a powerful platform, which can be your most challenging enterprise technology or the one that keeps you up at night if not looked at with proper diligence and thought. The more powerful the platform is, the more ways it is leveraged, and the more critical it becomes. So don't hesitate testing your knowledge of SharePoint Disaster and Recovery after reading this book. Help ensure that your organization's significant investment of effort into SharePoint isn't lost, all because appropriate time, expertise, or money couldn't be found in your own organization.

Richard Harbridge

Partner Technology Strategist Microsoft