SharePoint Knowledge Transfer Checklist

In a SharePoint architect/administrator’s life, It’s quite a common task to takeover existing SharePoint environments during Job/Role switch. From my experience, Here is the checklist to help ease up documentation for SharePoint:

SharePoint  Infrastructure

  • Farm(s) Topology – List of servers and roles, physical and logical architecture diagrams for production, Staging, and Development Environment (if applicable)
  • Server Infrastructure (Physical/Virtual), Storage, CPU-RAM-Network configurations
  • List of Service Accounts (Setup account, Farm account, search crawler account, etc) and passwords. Active Directory setup, DNS entries for SharePoint
  • Maintenance windows schedule – Patching, patch Level? OS versions?
  • Incoming/Outgoing E-mail configurations. SMTP configuration details
  • IIS Level customizations (compression, URL rewrite, redirects, etc.)
  • Backup, Disaster recovery in place. Tools used (SCDPM, Comvault, etc). Backup frequency.
  • Database server details. SQL Alias? Redundancy – Clustering in place? Mirroring? Always-ON?
  • Monitoring setup for server/application Health, SCOM, etc
  • Load Balancing/Publishing details (ISA? TMG? CISCO Ace? or any other Hardware load balancer, F5 Big IP?)
  • Third-party software (Nintex, Layer2, Control Point, etc installed in the environment
  • Licensing details for SharePoint and any 3rd party software. Volume/MSDN Licenses for DEV/TEST? Premier support with vendors such as Microsoft?
  • Profile Import/My site setup – Schedules, directory services/sources List
  • Last but not least – Contact person/teams for all dependent teams such as Network, DBA teams, System Admins, Backup, AD, Server Hardware, Security, Exchange server, etc.

Users & Security:

  • User Base – Total No. of users, region, locations, internal vs. external, site usage in last one Month?
  • How external users access SharePoint? Published Intranet? users member of AD? VPN connections?
  • Custom authentication provider in use (E.g. FBA, AD LDS, ADFS, Live)? Kerberos?
  • Web applications/CA is SSL enabled? certificate details, providers.
  • Any SharePoint specific Antivirus on SP Servers? E.g. Forefront antivirus for SharePoint? Third-party anti-virus solutions such as McAFee?
  • Are there any exclusive site for end-user training materials, FAQs, KB, etc? Any self-service sites?
  • Access Rights Policies? – Any custom permission levels created (E.g. contributor without delete)

SharePoint Inventory:

  • List of web applications, site collections with owner contacts
  • List of customizations/custom solutions and their documentation
  • Additional Language Packs installed.
  • CA Specific custom settings – Recycle bin, Max File Upload size, Storage quotas, etc
  • Integration points (Interfaces) with LOB and other applications/ Software (SQL server reporting services?)
  • List of SharePoint and other related application databases
  • How Branding is applied, What’s being done? (feature staplers/custom site definitions/Themes/Custom CSS, Master pages, etc)
  • List of SharePoint Sites that are most critical to the business?
  • Typical SharePoint Usages in the Org. (Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Content Management, Document management, Dashboards, etc. )
  • Repository for configuration files, Implementation/Build guides, Known error database (KEDB) , Incident Logs, RCA (root cause analysis), (CSV, SVN, TFS, etc.)

Process and Metrics:

  • Team Structure – Team Members, Roles supporting existing SharePoint environment.
  • System in place for Incident/Request/Change management? 
  • How end user requests are routed to the team? Provide the complete request life cycle.
  • Existing SLA and priorities for incident management. 
  • Governance Policies in place. E.g. site creations, content responsibility, support limits, etc 
  • Support statistics (Tickets received last month, open/close, etc)
  • Scheduled Reports to the business owners? E.g. Monthly reports for usage.
  • Remote Sharing/ User Interaction methods (Web ex, etc).
  • Communication plan for any planned/unplanned outages – Key stakeholder list

This checklist can also be used during SharePoint migrations, rebuilds. Please comment to add/remove your own items to this list.

Salaudeen Rajack

Salaudeen Rajack - Information Technology Expert with Two-decades of hands-on experience, specializing in SharePoint, PowerShell, Microsoft 365, and related products. He has held various positions including SharePoint Architect, Administrator, Developer and consultant, has helped many organizations to implement and optimize SharePoint solutions. Known for his deep technical expertise, He's passionate about sharing the knowledge and insights to help others, through the real-world articles!

One thought on “SharePoint Knowledge Transfer Checklist

  • Very informative post. I sometimes do presentations on SharePoint and was wondering if I could use your Print List example in my presentations.

    Reply

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