I just realized I’d left this unpublished from a few weeks ago. This should have been published before my trip to SharePoint Saturday Atlanta.
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So I’m working with a new client again, and I’m seeing what I’ve often seen with other previous clients: test sites and test lists and even testtesttest2 lists. This drives me nuts for a few reasons:
- They are usually old. If you don’t know your job as a SharePoint person and need to create a test list for you to figure things out, admit you don’t know how SharePoint works.
- They lack any kind of context. It might have just the title column, no records, and modified last 5 months ago. How do I know if it holds any value to anyone whatsoever?
- Whoever made them didn’t change the permissions or correct the navigation for it. This is what drives me nuts the most. Not only do you obviously not know the platform, you are advertising it to everyone who can see the site that you don’t know what you are doing and are cluttering up their UI.
If SharePoint were your house, we’d already have had an intervention for your hoarding.
Just stop it already.
In another client’s O365 environment, they were looking to create another web application (paying a lot more money by the way) to have a testing area, but they weren’t doing some kind of crazy code affecting O365. It wasn’t necessary at all. I’m glad I stopped them.
So here is my freebie to everyone out there.
O365/SharePoint Online Users
If you are an O365 customer, you might want one site collection as a test environment.
Why?
Because you do need a place to train other people and a place to make new masterpages without deploying the new look and feel right into production. I’ve seen too often someone create a new masterpage and roll it out without being approved properly. Bad idea. Create the new site collection and then a NEW copy of the masterpage. NEVER edit the defaults. Just don’t. Work with it there and fill the site with a bunch of lorem ipsum junk text. You’ll get a better feeling for how things will look. Also, don’t forget to add a few dozen links to your quick launch and global navigation to see how well they look under the new master.
You do not need to put new lists in this environment to test them and then build the exact same thing in your production sites. That is just silly. That is beyond silly. This is not traditional application development with rounds and rounds of software development design meetings and half a dozen folks creating their own pieces of code that others will piece together to make this one beautiful application in six months. SharePoint is a middle platform to create applications in minutes. If you don’t like it, delete it. If you create it properly, use the same content type over and over to make the application for multiple groups of users. It could also be that place where you and only you have your test lists because you don’t know how to make a feature work properly, but that still wouldn’t be the best place for the test list.
SharePoint 2013 On-Premises Users
You have the world as your oyster with your own environment, but you still load it up with test sites and lists. Shame on you. Other options are available and here is what you need.
Scenario 1: We will write custom C# applications that will need binaries injected in the hive.
Solution: Build another farm. Scale it to have the same number of web front ends (WFEs) running the exact same version as production. You will only need one SQL box on the back end. All we are trying to do is replicate the environment as much as possible with far fewer resources like memory and storage. You will need to change files on the WFEs in this scenario. While highly customizable, this is really only advantageous to very few customers out there doing some really amazing things.
Scenario 2: We will write some custom JS, CSS, and HTML and use the client-side object model (CSOM) to make things pretty and more functional.
Solution 2: Still build out a second farm. BUT why? If you are an IT systems administrator who has been in this business for more than a year, you will know and will probably have experience of getting a patch that has broken a server or two, especially after you have hardened the servers (STIG’d in my market) to make them more secure. How do you know which patches from Microsoft or any of the other third party applications that you have running on all of your boxes will not screw up your environment? You test. You will only need one WFE. The SQL instance will be a new instance on a cluster that you are using for ALL of the other SQL things going on in your environment. Again, we are trying to replicate your environment with as few resources as possible.
But what about SharePoint testing?—Aside from testing a cumulative update before adding it to all of the WFEs in production, you don’t need to use this test environment for anything else. If you aren’t running any monitoring software that you need to patch on your production WFEs, you might not even need this. Microsoft has an OK record of not destroying SharePoint farms with patches, but it is by no means spotless. I do recall a few years ago a 2010 update that screwed up a lot of folks. Those patches are the only things you are testing. You aren’t testing lists, web parts, sites, or anything else. Don’t even give anyone else the URL if you are the systems admin or farm admin for SharePoint in your IT department.
So where do you test things?
In production. Let me explain it as simply as I can. When you write up a document in word and it is in draft form, do you keep it on a different computer? When it is ready to print, do you copy it out of the draft version and paste it into a clean document? Of course you don’t.
Build the entire application right where you need it. The key is to change the permissions on the list/library/site/etc. to the pieces of it so only those involved in building it can see it. When it is ready for go-live, change the permissions. That is it. You can even update your navigation, unless you are creating a lot of hard links, because security trimming in SharePoint won’t show those links to people until they have the permission to see them. If, however, you are using a lot of hard links in the navigation, set the audience on those links to just those involved in building. When the application is ready for go-live, take the audiencing off.
If you are a client, looking for good SharePoint folks and you see a bunch of test crap in your environment after you hire them, recompete that contract ASAP.