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.