Deferred Sharing Maintenance
In addition to all the technical concerns administrators must manage to perform a major realignment, they must also coordinate closely with the business to ensure that end users aren’t adversely affected when access rights are being adjusted. In an enterprise environment in which multiple systems are continually processing updates, it can be difficult to schedule an organization or sharing rule change that can take substantial time to complete. Deferred sharing maintenance can help with increasing the predictability of these kinds of updates.
Here’s how deferred sharing maintenance works.
- Based on requests from the business, an administrator identifies a number of changes to the role hierarchy and group membership, or updates to sharing rules.
- Given best estimates of the remaining overall work, the administrator negotiates a maintenance window for completing the processing.
- Instead of processing each separate update and waiting for it to complete, the administrator prepares all the information required to perform all updates ahead of the planned maintenance window.
- At the start of the maintenance window, the administrator uses the deferral feature to essentially “turn off” processing of group maintenance operations, and then makes all the desired changes to role and group membership at the same time.
- After the changes have completed, the administrator resumes processing group maintenance, and the system performs a recalculation to make all the role and group changes take effect.
- At this point, the system is in a state that requires a full recalculation of all sharing rules for user access rights to be complete and accurate. The administrator can resume sharing rule processing immediately or wait to start the process at a later time. After the sharing rule recalculation has completed, all the access changes take effect.
When using the deferred sharing features, it's especially important to test the whole process in a full copy sandbox. This practice helps benchmark how long the overall recalculation is likely to take in production and smooth out any kinks in orchestrating deferred sharing maintenance. The full copy sandbox should mimic your current product environment as closely as possible. We recommend using a sandbox refreshed within the last 30 days that reflects all major changes.
Who’s a Good Candidate for Deferred Sharing?
There are two main criteria for determining whether deferred sharing maintenance is the right tool for your organization: the size and complexity of your realignment activities, and the flexibility you have to arrange a maintenance window with your customers. If you find that organizational changes and sharing rule updates typically complete quickly enough to be scheduled into the workday and weekend downtimes in your use of the service, you’re unlikely to benefit substantially from this feature. On the other hand, if you’re able to negotiate downtime with your business customers and have been struggling to complete updates in a timely fashion, deferred sharing can be a good solution to your problem.