Spencer Harbar and Mirjam van Olst are presenting Lessons learned from the field about successful deployments.
Best Practice
- Establish – business requirements
- Develop – a governance plan
- Define – the technical architecture
- Drive – adoption and change management
Your company should be prepared to organize and to decide wether to use a site collection or a subsite. And it is good to have power users, who have more experience with SharePoint and can help the business users. Therefore they should be from business units themselves.
“Do more with less”
understand core capabilities because SharePoint is a huge platform. So Mirjam told to startsmall and make iterative improvements. You should not deploy all features at same time, it is better to make them available one after another.
I think this is really good hint, cause not everyone has the overview what is possible with SharePoint and how he can use lists and libraries for his daily work.
The SharePoint Infrastructure should be solid, Spencer said. You have to care about Active Directory, SQL Server, Storage Subsystems, Network Access, Identy Management and SharePoint ISV Solutions. I think everybody who has installed SharePoint knows it, right?
“There is no such thing as a perfect farm”
Before building custom solutions:
- understand out-of-the-box features
- design solutions with the end stare in mind
- ensure solution can scale
- consider future delivery models
The first point is really true, SharePoint offers lot of features which might be the solution you are looking for, there is not always the need to develop everything from scratch. You should also use implementation guidelines and be aware of the technical design specifications as well as code acceptance, testing and third party tools.
But it is all about the requirements, so you have to meet the requirements of the business and therefore it can help to educate the stakeholders and establish key service offerings.
The final word could be that it is not the technical aspect which makes a deployment successful. It is about the people! So educate, prepare them that they know the basics and can make good decision.
“Just implementing the software doesn’t make the trip”
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