Roadmap for Responsive Design and Dynamic Content in SharePoint 2013

Responsive design combined with dynamic user-driven content and mobile first seems to be the main focus everywhere these days. The approach outlined in Optimizing SharePoint 2013 websites for mobile devices by Waldek Mastykarz and his How we did it series show how it can be achieved using SharePoint 2013.

But what if you have thousands of pages with good content that you want make resposive? What approach will you use to adapt all those articles after migrating the content over from SharePoint 2010? This post suggests a roadmap for gradually transforming your static content to become dynamic content.

First of all, the metadata of your content types must be classified so that you know the ranking of the metadata within a content type, so that it can be used in combination with device channel panels and resposive web design (RWD) techniques to prioritize what to show on what devices. This will most likely introduce more specialized content types with more granular metadata fields. All your content will need to be edited to fit the new content classification, at least the most important content you have. By edited, I mean that the content type of articles must be changed and the content adapted to the new metadata; in addition, selecting a new content type will also cause a new RWD page layout to be used for the content. These new RWD page layouts and master pages are also something you need to design and implement, as part of your new user experience (UX) concept.

While editing all the (most important) existing content, it is also a good time to ensure that the content gets high quality tagging according to your information architecture (IA), as tagging is the cornerstone of a good, dynamic user experience provided by term-driven navigation and search-driven content. Editing the content is the most important job here, tagging the content is not required to enable RWD for your pages.

Doing all of this at once as part of migrating to SP2013 is by experience too much to be realistic, so this is my recommended roadmap:

Phase 1
- Focus on RWD based on the new content types and their new prioritized metadata and new responsive master pages and page layouts
- Quick win: revise the search center to exploit the new search features, even if tagging is postponed to a later phase (IA: findability and search experience)
- Keep the existing information architecture structure, and thus the navigation as-is
- Keep the page content as-is, do not add search-driven content to the pages yet, focus on making the articles responsive
- Most time-consuming effort: adapting the content type of all articles, cutting and pasting content within each article to fit the new prioritized metadata structure

Phase 2
- Focus on your new concept for structure and navigation in SP2013 (IA: content classification and structure, browse and navigate UX)
- Tagging of the articles according to the new IA-concept for dynamic structuring of the content (IA: term sets for taxonomy)
- Keep the page content as-is, no new search-driven UX in this phase, just term-driven navigation
- Most time-consuming effort: tagging all of your articles, try scripting some auto-tagging based on the existing structure of the content

Phase 3
- Focus on search-driven content in the pages according to the new concept  (IA: discover and explore UX)
- New routines and processes for authors, approvers and publishers based on new SP2013 capabilities (IA: content contributor experience)
- Most time-consuming effort: tune and tag the content of all your articles to drive the ranking of the search-driven content according to the new concept

Phase 4
- Content targeting in the pages based on visitor profile segmentation, this kind of user-driven content is also search-driven content realized using query rules (and some code)

The IA aspects in the roadmap are taken from my SharePoint Information Architecture from the Field article.

Controlling Content Database Size in SharePoint

A SharePoint content database can be up to 4TB with data (max 200GB is recommended). However, storage size is not the problem; it is the recovery time to restore all that data that is the availability problem. The recovery time decides for how long your business critical solution will be down. As SharePoint can spread its content across multiple databases, it is recommended that your architecture segments different content across different databases based on IA and other user experience aspects, plus business requirements for availability and recovery time. Plan for structuring your solutions with a strong focus on your information architecture (IA).

Here are some options for how to control the size of the content databases, without disposing and deleting content:

A) Use an ootb Record Center as an archive for old content: The users must manually send each document to the RC using e.g. move and leave a link; note that only the latest major version with metadata is kept – all version history is lost. The information management policies supported by SharePoint for retention and disposition can be used to automate the cleanup.
As the RC has its own content databases, the live collaboration databases will grow slower or even shrink as outdated information is moved to the archive. Keeping the live databases small ensures shorter recovery time; while the recovery time for the archived content can be considerable, but not business critical.
Search must be configured appropriately to cover both live and archived content.

B) Use a third-party archiving solution for SharePoint from e.g. MetaLogix or AvePoint. This has the same pros & cons as in option A, but the functionality is probably better in relation to keeping version history and batch management of outdated content.
Search must be configured appropriately to cover both live and archived content.

C) Use a third-party remote blob storage (RBS) solution for SharePoint, such as MetaLogix StoragePoint, so that documents are registered in the database, but not stored there. This gives smaller content databases, but more complicated backup and recovery as the content now resides both in databases and on disk. Provided that you don’t lose both at the same time, the recovery time should be shorter.
Search will work as before, as all content is still logically in the “database”.

D) Use powershell scripts or other code to implement the disposition of outdated content. The script can e.g. copy old documents to disk and delete old versions from the content database; the drawback being that all metadata will be lost and there is no link left in SharePoint.
The databases size will shrink as data is actually deleted, and backup and recovery is more complicated as content is now both in the database and on disk (same as for option C).
Search can be configured to also crawl and index the files on disk, but content ranking will suffer as the valuable metadata is lost.

My recommendation is to consider option A first, especially if you are able to define automated rules and exploit the built-in information management policies in SharePoint. The keyword is *able* - in my experience, everyone is positive to having automated retention and disposition, but noone even at large banks and law firms are able to come up with the policies.

Always consider using RBS for databases larger than 200GB, and note that RBS also helps you meet the disk IOPS requirements of SharePoint.

How to Debug SharePoint Solutions in a Multi-Server Farm

Some tips on deploying and debugging code in a multi-server SharePoint 2010 farm:

When debugging on a multi-server SharePoint farm, with Visual Studio on the app-server, then add AAM mapping for the app-server to the web-application to debug, otherwise VS can't attach to the local w3wp process.

For example, to debug the web-app hosted on

• http://azure-sp2010web:8383/ 

you must add the app-server URL first to AAM and then use it as Site URL when debugging

• http://azure-sp2010app:8383/

Make sure to browse the site using the added app-server URL to load the code in a local w3wp process.

If the breakpoints have yellow warning triangles, then VS could not load the correct code to the w3wp processes attached to the debugger. Solve by rebuild and deploy to get the latest bits into the [14] hive and GAC. Note that you can’t activate WSPs on deploy in a multi-server farm, set the "Active Deployment Configuration" to “no activation” in Visual Studio project properties. If VS still can’t deploy the WSP, then use powershell to first Add-SPSolution and then Install-SPSolution across the farm.

Validate the WSP deployment status in “Manage farm solutions” in Central Admin first, and make sure that your feature is activated in the site or subsite you try to debug.

Happy debugging :)