This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Talks Las Vegas 2009, speakers: Scott St. Jean and Charles Ofori.

The online topology is basically a Microsoft managed data center that has a one way external trust to your corporate intranet, data sources and AD through a secure connection. Also you can connect to your external (internet) data sources and users.

The presenter discusses a business case that is about Aviva who went their collaboration sites, my sites and forums & blogging to the cloud. Aviva is also attracted in expanding BI, Social networking and Accessibility.
The day chose to go online to the top where it was live was done in 143 days.
So what did Aviva with their portal? They made their own modified navigation to be able to regionalize it. They also developed a forum web part. Another major thing they did was releasing an attention called Aviva day. It basically shows a view of a map. When a user logs on their location is shown as a dot on the map. The highlights are around the fact that Aviva has deployed a high number of customizations. The challenges were around handling large amounts of make pleased in amalgamation with variations. It was not encouraged to use it till the 2010 release. Also a high level of traffic showed that NLB single affinity was not the way to go.

The presenter discusses a business case that is about Coca Cola. The key features they needed was a publishing portal for communications, team sites and user profiles with a custom user profile page. It was vital to have SAP integration, blogging and a deskless worker features available in the feature.
The homepage of the portal shows us some rotating highlight controls and news rollup. They also place on an iFrame to show a page from SAP. The profile page is literally by SharePoint user profiles, but the look and feel has been modified. On the team sites they have three boxes. The first box is about training and how to use the team site. The second box is about the most recent changes. On the right box they really show you my Links.
The highlights are around a high number of customizations deployed. The resulting changes to the service were improved documentation producing a master list of configuration changes. They also introduced a re-drop policy for code participating in the review process.

2007 Supported features, scenarios and customization types

Examples of Customization scenarios: custom developed full trust solutions, bought third party solutions, one hosted external database, SharePoint designer based customization, pre production test environments.
Key supported scenarios: information worker access to SharePoint features, Deskless worker SKU, Extranet access for external collaborators, service continuity management, internet accessibility to hosted SharePoint environment, SAS70 ISO 27001 Facilities, outsources administration of IT tasks like patching and monitoring and endeavor or Standard Office SharePoint Server 2007 SKU.
Unsupported features: Inbound email, directory management service, SharePoint Single on, Site variations, Minutes center, Pluggable certification providers, Pluggable SSO providers, BDC Based Search.
Unsupported customization types:  custom site classification, document convertors, custom managed path, HTTP modules, Inline Code, Custom COM Servers, Custom HTTP handlers.
Scenarios not supported: hosting consumer based data in MS Data Centers, Kerberos constrained allocation, Direct access to servers or DBs, Access to admin UI or Farm/server, Additional web applications, Install attention (non SharePoint), changed to db machinate, non SSL encrypted URLs, exchange host names after launch, anonymous access, hosted dev or test environments.

2010 Supported features, scenarios and customization types (April 2010)

New features: Office Web Apps, Minutes Center, SharePoint 2010 feature set that is delivered out of the box unless mentioned not more than.
Prospect features: FAST as a service from Microsoft Online, Anonymous access/internet sites, Machinate as a service from Microsoft Online, Performance Top services.
Unsupported features: email enabled lists, site definitions and inline code.
April 2010: new scenarios: completely virtualized environment, shorter RTO and RPO for disaster recovery, partially trusted code development by by sandbox solutions feature, improved metrics reporting, customization deployment framework. The latter is fascinating. It is about a framework to make sure that customers deliver solutions that really should work the first time they deliver it to the hard environment. There will be a lot more automation to shrink the time to review the consumer code review and are more of a standard level.
September 2010: Prospect scenarios: claims based certification, remote blob storage space by Azure, integration with IRM, site variations. April 2011: geo distributed design.

The presenter shows a nice overview of all SharePoint features that was shown as well on a Tuesday overview session. All of the features are really marked as available at Online now, Apr 2010, Sept 2010 or Apr 2011.

Process for customization evaluation

It is required for all customizations: in household developed or third party developed. Consumer submit to engineering before coding starts. Provides engineering an opportunity to give feedback. Customers use a provided template.
The customization package contains:
Scheduling information, a deployment guide, rollback plot, solution packages, test ID and consequences, dependencies list and so on. There are more items that I may possibly not capture right now but the report should be available online.
The process starts with a consumer notification on for instance Thursday, one week later the consumer delivers code & docs, the 10 days engineering review period starts (SLA), three days later the 1 day request gets reviewed in the CAB meeting, three days later the initial engineer PPE go/no go is, one day later the solution gets installed on the PPE, next a 5 days Consumer session starts, at the end of that period the consumer praise is required and the engineer review is completed. After that a one day request is reviewed in CAB meeting, within five days the solutions get installed in production.

Common pitfalls
The test environment not build or configured like production. Also, everyone should be committed to the deployment schedule. The proposed solution design to consumer with understanding MSO custom code support limitations.

Initiatives underway
Test automation framework (automated code breakdown). Customization Development Framework (automating customization deployment). Customization Toolkit (packaging the right assets). Marketplace (certify ISV solutions to make them available to Online endeavor customers).

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