ING web site on SharePoint 2010

Since January of this year I started working for the banking company ING as lead of the SharePoint Competence Center. Since Wednesday the ING web site (www.ing.be) runs on SharePoint 2010.

This public facing site is a highly customized and complex WCM site running on a complex infrastructure. We have two authoring farms that are constructed as a stretched farm, located in two different physical locations. Each farm is consists of one front-end server, one application server and one database server. For the publishing farm we have two farms in two different physical locations. One farm is the active farm, the second farm is the inactive farm. Each farm has 4 front-end servers, which are load balanced, 2 application servers and 2 database servers.

SCOM polls the home page of each front-end server at regular intervals. When 3 of the front-end servers are down, the second farm is activated and the current farm inactivated to correct the situation.

Content deployment to the two publishing farms is done using snapshots of the content database.

We have a number of custom developed components containing different master pages, content types, page layouts, navigation controls, and a lot of other web controls. For translating our pages we use the out of the box Variations. Unfortunately only pages in Page Libraries are variated, so the solution implements event handlers to correctly variate list items. Some product pages contain tabbed web controls. For performance reasons only the data of the first tab is loaded. When the visitor clicks another tab, an http handler fires to avoid a post back of the page to retrieve the needed information.

For search we are not using FAST at the moment, we implemented the standard Search service application that comes with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise edition. We had to implement a custom ranking model to bring product pages higher in the search results than FAQ pages.

We also encountered a number of performance issues before the go live. In a next post I will share the different problems we encountered on infra and application level, and how we solved them.

The project itself was a complex project that took almost a year to complete and asked a lot of effort of different teams: business, infrastructure, development, processes, Microsoft. I never knew project management could be that important. All teams worked seamlessly together – even in periods of high pressure and frustrations – under the lead of the very skilled project manager Rudi Vos.

During this past year I got the possibility to build out a team of SharePoint experts and developers. My team members on this project are: Tom Nys, Sebastien Sougnez (SharePoint MVP), Ludovic Lefort (SharePoint MVP), Ben Graf, Nicolas Claessens, Arnaud Desager and Pieter Gheysens (TFS MVP). It is a joy and an honor to work with all of you! And last but not least, as of the 1^st January Stephane Eyskens will join the club.

Seen the plans ING has for SharePoint 2010, it will be a very interesting and challenging 2012!