SGS.net
A presentation by Fabian Simillion & Pietro Caltabiano
For SharePoint Club – Suisse Romande
Vevey, November 2006
2
Agenda
� Context
� Customizations
� Deployment
� Performance improvements
� Questions & answers
3
Context
1) SGS
� Worldwide leader in inspection, verification, testing and
certification
� More than 46’000 employees
� Presence in 140+ countries
� Network of 1’000+ offices and laboratories
� Organized around 10 business lines
� Lotus Notes phase-out
� No pre-existing intranet
4
Context
2) SGS.net
One centralized portal
with significant
customization
Hundreds of team sites
hosted on several server farms
with limited customization
5
Customizations
1) Navigation features Cross-navigation
Contextual navigation
Left-hand navigation Breadcrumb trail
6
Customizations
2) Country sub-portals
Contextual navigationDynamic image
Country imageCountry flag
7
Customizations
3) Content syndication
� Corporate content pulled down from local level
� Mechanisms to push local content up to corporate level
8
Customizations
Lessons learned
� Pro’s
• Navigation features very appreciated
• Country sub-portals used as browser starting page
• Top-down content syndication appreciated by management
� Con’s
• Generated a lot of empty areas
• Negative impact on performance
• Bottom-up content syndication unsuccessful
• Makes evolution more difficult
� Open issues
• Sometimes used to make a « bad » content organization
more acceptable
9
Deployment
1) Architecture
10
Deployment
2) Centralized team site creation
11
Deployment
3) Decentralized content management
Intranet Group
LocalIT
Localusers
CorporateIT
CorporateBusiness / Function
LocalBusiness / Function
Corporateusers
12
Deployment
Lessons learned
� Pro’s
• Team sites intensively used
• Effective collaboration work taking place in team sites
• Central access to all team sites through portal
� Con’s
• Performance problems on portal
• Portal usage not satisfactory
• Portal search not very effective
• Lots of missing features compared to Lotus Notes
� Open issues
• Network load balancing
• Usage statistics
13
Performance improvements
1) SGS.net corporate portal home page
� Two front end web servers with NLB
� No IIS compression
� The page was About 1200 Kb
� The http sessions were in total: #69 (requests &
responses)
� Time to get the page with IE6 from Geneva: quite
immediate, less than a sec
� Time to get the page with IE6 in Secaucus, New Jersey
38s, the first time
14
Performance improvements
2) Actions taken
Data transferred after clearing cache Data transferred with caching enabled
22KB300KB
First time access Reload or Access after that
� Big-IP
• Big-IP for network load balancing, compression and also to stop losing
performances in the datacenter (NLB was broadcasting when STSADM backups
start)
• Compression resulted in reduction of 70% of size of page transferred on the network
� IIS Caching increased
• Javascript, CSS, gifs, etc… are cached on the client (~280KB)
• Only HTML and headers are downloaded when accessing the page (~22KB)
15
Performance improvements
3) Other actions taken
� Actions performed
• Applied latest service packs for OS & DB
• Increased SGS.net infrastructure internal network card from 100MB to
1GB
• Re-Ghosted unghosted pages
• Removed heavy components on home page: animated .gif, .bmp, .swf
• Fixed http 401 errors (not authorized)
• Asked to stay with standard cache settings for IE6
• Vanity server redirection modified to go straight to the right page for all
countries.
– ch.sgs.net point to http://sgs.net/C0/Switzerland/default.aspx
� SGS.net home page is now comparable to an OTB portal home page
• 300KB compared to 220KB
• 59 http requests compared to 42 http requests
16
Performance improvements
4) Results achieved
January 2006 June 2006
SGS.net
Thank you for your attention.