Chesapeake Energy wanted to enhance its document and web content management capabilities. It chose to begin the transition of its intranet and Internet sites to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. With the solution, the company plans to standardize on a common development platform, and it expects to improve efficiency and boost the reliability of its services. Thus far, the company has experienced a smooth, trouble-free migration.
Business Needs
Chesapeake Energy is a natural gas producer that develops natural gas reserves onshore in the United States and owns interests in approximately 44,100 natural gas and oil wells.
Chesapeake has relied on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to support its intranet since 2007 and its public websites since 2008. The company’s intranet includes an employee portal that gives access to company news, people search capabilities, department information, an employee marketplace, approximately 30 departmental team sites, and a searchable document repository.
Additionally, Chesapeake uses Office SharePoint Server as the basis for its 15 public websites, including those of its subsidiaries, others used for marketing, and educational sites about innovative natural gas recovery processes, such as hydraulic fracturing. Chesapeake had built a successful content management and collaboration environment by using Office SharePoint Server 2007, but it wanted to continue to enhance the environment for even greater performance and efficiency.
Solution
In early 2010, Chesapeake decided to implement SharePoint Server 2010, moving a group of pilot Internet sites to the newer platform first, because “they were small and manageable, serving as good indicators of what we could expect in future migrations,” says Mark Wiley, IT Supervisor at Chesapeake Energy. To date, Chesapeake has transitioned six of its 15 websites to SharePoint Server 2010.
“We use as many out-of-the-box SharePoint Server features as we can in our site code,” explains John Carney, Senior Applications Developer at Chesapeake Energy. “For this reason, the upgrade has been very straightforward.”
Encouraged by this initial success, Chesapeake began to transition its intranet sites to SharePoint Server 2010. Chesapeake looks forward to taking advantage of new features such as enhanced integration with the Microsoft Office suite, content tagging, and streamlined content management. For document management initiatives, plans are in motion to use the Document Center site template for its ability to assign each document a unique identification number.
Chesapeake is also evaluating Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, which provides deep refiners, visual search, and contextual search to help users easily locate information. The search technology would enable Chesapeake to use multiple crawl and index servers to ensure high availability of search, which, says Joni Richardson, Senior Applications System Administrator at Chesapeake Energy, “will enhance search options and provide added redundancy and reliability.”
Chesapeake will use the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor its environment. Adds Richardson, “Proactive alerts through Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 have helped us maintain high availability of our SharePoint Server 2007 environment and will continue to provide value in the new environment, alerting us in advance of site issues and outages.” It also plans to implement Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint.
Benefits
Chesapeake is experiencing a smooth transition to SharePoint Server 2010. Soon, the company will take advantage of the software’s enhanced document management capabilities, and it expects that the newer environment will help it streamline development and boost performance.
Easy Migration
Chesapeake was able to upgrade the first six of its 15 websites to SharePoint Server 2010 with very little effort. “The only development work required was to ensure that our custom utility applications operated correctly. We made some minor modifications, which took no more than 30 minutes,” says Carney. “We had no challenges getting our code to work in the new environment.”
Efficient, Standardized Development
Chesapeake is taking advantage of SharePoint Server 2010 to help streamline and standardize its development environment. “With SharePoint Server 2010, we’ve been able to stop using a third-party web part and use out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts instead,” says Carney. The product’s close connection with the Microsoft Visual Studio development system has also helped Chesapeake simplify its work. Carney continues, “The integration between Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 makes it much easier to write code and manage data. We hope to adopt Visual Studio 2010 throughout the company, which will make it easier to standardize our development of web parts, connectivity services applications, and application pages for SharePoint Server.”
Wiley adds, “The ability to connect to our many line-of-business applications with SharePoint Server 2010 using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Server 2010 will be very valuable in the future.”
Developers are already using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development software to enhance and extend the environment. For instance, they are beginning to take advantage of Microsoft Business Connectivity Services to make user profile information in Microsoft SQL Server data management software and Active Directory Domain Services accessible to the intranet. Chesapeake uses the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to SQL component of the Microsoft .NET Framework to make this connection.
Better Performance, Reliability
Chesapeake expects to achieve higher performance from its internal environment by taking advantage of functionality in SharePoint Server 2010, such as the ability to control large list activities and to use throttling. Chesapeake also expects to benefit from upgrading to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and SQL Server 2008.
For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to:
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
