In a SharePoint architect/administrator's life, Its quite a common task to takeover existing SharePoint environments at the time of Job/Role switch. From my experience, Here is the check list to help easing up that job:
SharePoint Infrastructure
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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
- 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.
- 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)
- List of web Applications, site collections with owner contacts
- List of customizations/custom solutions and its 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, Whats being done? (feature staplers/custom site definitions/Themes/Custom CSS, Master pages, etc)
- List of SharePoint Sites that are most critical to 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.)
- 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