This page contains a list of guidance and best practice topics for planning and architecture for the deployment of SharePoint. I will update this list and make changes and add new information and links to articles when I come across them. MOSS 2007 Planning and Guidance for IT Pros Plan for server farms  (determining # of farms, org requirements and licensing) Plan for availability (Office SharePoint Server) & Database Mirroring Plan for performance and capacity (Office SharePoint Server) About performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server) Additional performance and capacity planning factors (Office SharePoint Server) Tools for performance and capacity planning (Office SharePoint Server) Performance Test Scripts and Data population for VSTT: SPDataPop WSSDW.exe Logical architecture model: Corporate ...[Read More]

A friend of mine asked me this the other day.. and I was glad that I was asked this question. (Let's just say my friend was relatively new to SharePoint but have had years of managing typical software development projects). From a pure Project manager's view it can be seen that SharePoint projects are not different to any old IT project. BUT let me tell you that to successfully complete a SharePoint project you'll need to think and plan a lot more outside of a standard software development Project. If you are a Project Manager who is "New" to SharePoint and want to apply your traditional PM methodology to deliver a SharePoint project then please take a timeout and head over to Paul Culmsee's blog and read the series of posts on "Why SharePoint projects fail". Paul points out all the reasons why sometimes the best e ...[Read More]

When you create a site collection in SharePoint based on the OOTB starter template "Collaboration Portal Template" you get a series of sub sites such as "Document Center", "News", "Reports", "Search" and "Sites". Typically if your organisations has just installed SharePoint or are evaluating SharePoint this "Collaboration Portal Template" is the first place an end user will start their interaction with SharePoint.   One main point to note is that the slight variation of the available templates under the "Publishing" tab in Central Administration and on an existing SharePoint site which has been based on the  "Collaboration Portal Template" which is available the first time you create your starter site collection in the Central Administration ...[Read More]

UPDATE [29 July 2008]: Infratsructure Update Known Issues Please note that there are some issues with regards to this update and I highly recommend this update to be thoroughly tested prior to being deployed Please notice that the Infrastructure Update [ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951695 ] has been updated to include the following information with regards to AAM: Known issues discovered after release of this update Installing the Infrastructure Update in a SharePoint farm that uses Alternate Access Mapping with a reverse proxy or a network load balancer, such as in an extranet deployment, may cause some public URLs to become unresponsive. Microsoft is aware of this issue and is developing a solution. Before installing the Infrastructure Update, customers who use this configuration should use a test environment to verify ...[Read More]

Via the ECM Team and SharePoint Team Blog SharePoint related Infrastructure updates are now available for download. To understand the issues fixed in these releases please read the following blog posts. Content Deployment and Infrastructure Update - ECM Team Blog It is strongly recommended that you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 and Office Servers Service Pack 1 before installing the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) and the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695). The installation process will incur server and farm downtime that you will need to plan for – updates should be installed on all servers in a farm. Please refer to the TechNet SharePoint Service Pack 1 deployment article.   The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB95 ...[Read More]

The concept of My Sites in SharePoint is often ignored in deployments due to the lack of understanding of the value that My Sites add when an organisation is considering a SharePoint deployment. One of the compelling reasons that I see for organisations for allowing My Sites to be enabled in a deployment is that it allows your users to explore and also learn on their own without being restricted to a "corporate rule". Recently Michael posted 10 tips of establishing "your" profile with My sites, which I must say is along more than enough reason that you should seriously consider opening My sites in your SharePoint deployment since it provides an instant findability and contactability solution for connecting with people in a large organisation. From an IT and architecture point of view My Sites can be resource inten ...[Read More]

As per my previous post about content deployment and the recently released post SP 1 updates the following articles are now online. You can request the Hotfix via the following links. WSS V3.0 > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698 MOSS > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704 Technorati Tags: MOSS,WCM,SharePoint,WSS,Content Deployment,Administration,Deployment ...[Read More]

When using SharePoint for creating and maintaining content rich web sites the content deployment API provides a way of moving content from a source server to a destination server. For example if you have a team developing a content heavy Internet site or an Intranet site you are able to setup content deployment between servers. (Assuming you are using multiple servers in Dev > Stg > Prd). See my previous post about  Multiple development servers and managing code. First you need to understand that in a SharePoint deployment "content" can be hard to define. Say for example you are creating a dynamic rotating image gallery feature with an image and a description about the image and an URL link. In this scenario there are multiple roles involved in the design and build phases of this piece. These roled are developers, design ...[Read More]