Systematica Dynamics Blog

During a recent implementation of Business Portal for Dynamics GP 10.0 for a customer, we inevitably encountered the question of where the Business Portal content should reside. Before we dig in, here is a little bit of background…

Background
Business Portal for Microsoft Dynamics GP delivers browser-based, role-appropriate access to Microsoft Dynamics GP information and processes and can be installed on Windows SharePoint Services or Office SharePoint Server. We implemented Business Portal for our customer as a way to extend the reach of their Human Resources and Payroll information in Dynamics GP to all 2,200+ employees. Employees are now able to log into the company’s intranet to view their HR profile, submit changes such as enrolling in benefits, updating education records and emergency contact information, and view their pay stubs as a way to save on paper costs associated with distributing paper copies.
 
Our customer already had a company intranet built on Office SharePoint Server 2007. They had one web application housing one site collection with many sites and subsites. All of this was contained within a single content database.
 
With the implementation of Dynamics Business Portal, you have many options when it comes to planning for and managing the content storage in SharePoint. For example, you can install Business Portal into an existing site collection or a new site collection. In SharePoint you can have one or many site collections per content database. The final decision on how best to manage the content storage of a Business Portal solution is ultimately made by balancing the business, legal, and IT considerations that surround your organization.
 
This article is not intended to cover the best practices for managing SharePoint content databases in terms of database size limits and scalability. A lot of factors are involved in that type of discussion, such as number of existing sites, expected short and long-term growth of the company, sites and content, as well as your company’s backup and recovery plan.
 
What we will cover is one scenario for planning for and managing your SharePoint content databases as it relates to a Dynamics Business Portal implementation.

Requirements and Planning
As alluded to earlier, during the Business Portal installation you must either choose an existing site collection or create a new site collection in which to install the application. We approached this decision from a couple of perspectives — end user experience and segmentation of data. In our customer’s case, we discussed with them the following considerations…
 
Business.  By maintaining access to your HR and Payroll information in a separate site collection, you are able to transport it to a new server a little more easily in the event of a company sale or acquisition, or any other business event that requires transferring of existing SharePoint site collections.
 
Another business consideration was that our customer is in the process of gradually moving as many reports and documents to SharePoint as possible, such that users could search for and access everything from their team sites versus maintaining various network drives for each department/team. With Office SharePoint Server, you have the ability to configure enterprise search across site collections, so keeping Business Portal within the existing site collection was not a requirement.
 
Legal.  Segmentation of Human Resources and Payroll related information may be a concern for some companies who are bound by certain regulatory compliance or legal statutes. In our customer’s case this was not a major concern at present moment but still something to keep in mind for the future.
 
IT.  With any SharePoint or Business Portal implementation, it is necessary to consider the company’s backup and recovery plan. On a technical level, there are certain limitations to how low of a level you can backup and restore SharePoint data. Through SharePoint Central Administration, you have the ability to backup and restore at a farm, web application, or content database level. Using the stsadm command line tool, you also have the ability to backup and restore at a site collection level. There is currently no efficient way to backup and restore at a site level.
 
It is also important to consider how long your maintenance windows can be, how large your content databases and site collections are, and how effectively your IT team is able to work within those constraints to restore data in the event of a system failure.
 
Additionally, you may need to consider how to integrate navigation between an existing intranet portal on one site collection, and Dynamics Business Portal on another site collection, especially if you wish to present the two as a unified experience to your users. Inherently, two separate site collections do not share common navigation. You may need to consider modifying the master page(s) to integrate the navigation between the two site collections.

Solution
After weighing the above business, legal, and IT considerations surrounding end user experience and segmentation of data, our customer decided to install Business Portal into its own site collection within a separate content database. Here are the steps we took to create a new content database and site collection prior to installing Dynamics Business Portal for GP.

1. Log into SharePoint Central Administration > Application Management > SharePoint Web Application Management and modify the content database settings for the existing content database. Set “Number of sites before a warning event is generated” to 0, and set “Maximum number of sites that can be created in this database” to the value in the “Current Number of Sites” field.
   
2. Create a new content database with settings “Number of sites before a warning event is generated” equal to 0 and “Maximum number of sites that can be created in this database” equal to 1.
   
3. Create a new site collection under Application Management > SharePoint Site Management. When finished, notice how the “Current Number of Sites” value for the new content database is 1, indicating that the new site collection was automatically placed into the new content database.
   
4. You can now modify the settings for the original content database to the original settings, for example “Number of sites before a warning event is generated” equal to 9000 and “Maximum number of sites that can be created in this database” equal to 15000 (the default SharePoint settings) if you want all future sites to be created in the original content database, otherwise create a new content database for all future sites.
5. Finally, during the Dynamics Business Portal installation, select your new site collection. Business Portal data will be housed completely separate from any existing SharePoint content.