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"How long does a typical deployment take?" This is one of the questions I got at the SharePoint Conference last week in Sydney.
How would you answer? One guy I mentioned this question to quipped... how long you got?
If you already have your hardware, and Windows Server, SQL, DNS, IP addresses arranged, and service accounts provisioned...
SharePoint Server install on a single server could take ~30 minutes.
If you already have your hardware, and OS installed and are jumping in with a medium sized farm...
Install on a load balanced web farm with a SQL cluster could take 4-6 hours.
Tack on email enabled lists, building custom forms, master pages, an excel services solution, and BDC to a Siebel or SAP datastore and I'll have some questions for you...
A proof of concept deployment is extremely feasible to be setup in a few days with a fully custom master page, indexed content, sample content and image placeholders--- all sorts of goodness in less than a week.
That's fairly easy, but that's not what I'd call a "deployment." I've been focused on governance and working with the business for a successful deployment, so I'm more conservative.
Let me break this down into a few major buckets... that will help you understand some of the key aspects to a corporate deployment.
Aquire Licenses and Get Application Business Requirements - Before a product is selected there are usually requirements from the business. Sometimes when an EA (enterprise agreement) renewall happens, the business buys the appropriate client licenses and so forth to run Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 standard. Amazingly the IT folks may not even know that they have the ability to be running SharePoint! Sure there are server licenses, but you may already be covered. The requirements gathering phase should cover clarifying what you already have access to and what you need to purchase such as an upgrade to the enterprise license. You may also consider Groove 2007 and SharePoint Designer 2007, extremly powerful tools when used with SharePoint deployments, for example.
There is a process which takes place in a business where the company reviews solutions and products that are out there. COTS or off the shelf applications often times have presidence over custom written apps. After the selection process and likely either demos or proof of concepts a product is selected. When collaboration, content management, web content management, or a redesign of the intranet, or extranet, or even Internet site redesign comes up.... This is an importune time to figure out what the requirements are, and assess how the requirements are met by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Server Standard or Enterprise edition.
Identify and Educate Key Stakeholders and Players - This process will go a lot faster if you have CXO buyin and at least 1 Business Owner, 1 Project Manager, 1 Developer and 1 IT Professional dedicated to the effort. People can wear more than 1 hat if you're in a small to medium business. In the enterprise, it may be more than 1 in each of these areas, but you do need to roll up ownership.
Get the business educated so they know how to ask you for the "right" requirements... 1 week - 3 months. This education can be facilitated by Microsoft or partners and trainers. When you figure out these requirements I do recommend second guessing yourself just a little. The simpler the deployment, the easier it will be. Of course, an out of the box deployment may not be exactly what you need, but with most solutions, it is easy to add on what you need as you figure out how to use the platform.
Work with the Project Manager to identify all the steps in the deployment and come up with a work back schedule from the date the site needs to go live.
Have a Governance Plan and Communicate it. The key to a successful deployment is to plan for it to be successful. Only you or your deployment team know the business and culture well enough to understand what policies will fly and what will work and what won't. Building a successful plan that is bought off by the business and by IT including Service Level Agreements (SLAs) bought off by both organziations may take 2-3 weeks to a 2-3 months based on the agility of your organziation. Having meetings focused on flushing out this content that no one else can write for you will be key.
Plan and Design your Deployment - TechNet Technical Library for SharePoint Server has 1000 pages on the designing phase. Get educated. If you aren't in to reading about logical architectures, security, and planning backups, then go to training or get one of the 30 or so books on the topic, from Step by Step, Essentials, Unleashed, to Admin Companion, to SharePoint 2007 for Dummies. You may laugh, but there were some great diagrams right in the cover. Send your Devs, and IT Pros, and even key business information workers to learn best practices that can be shared. These investments will be returned as their learnings are propegated as experts train experts. Don't dismiss TechEd as time off, and if you are at TechEd. ...Take notes and grab the decks to share with the folks at home on relevant topics. Diagrams and Decks are worth more than a 1000 words.
Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server, part 1 (Download )
Covers topics such as planning sites, planning for certain features such as forms and search, and planning for managing documents and records.
Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server, part 2 (Download )
Covers topics such as determining hardware and software requirements, capacity planning, and planning for security.
Deployment for Office SharePoint Server (Download )
Covers installing and configuring Office SharePoint Server in a new deployment.
Aquire Hardware and Storage - There are lots of hardware vendors and nearly all of them that know windows know a little about WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007. Do you want blades? What about that cool dual core or quad core technology? Does your company have a standard of 64 bit?
Have Reviews with key IT groups and establish Operation Level Agreements - Understanding company standards for infrastructure, security accounts, firewall, security guidelines, and how to recover from a disaster will help your application and deployment be successful. Don't be afraid of collaborating with other groups that have been through this process. Don't wait till the last second to mention your plans with the security group for example. They may want some time to dig in and become comfortable. If this means running some intrusion detection on your planned configuration. Many of these reviews will require the environment be up and running with some samples or even with the application configured.
Based on your company size this may take 1 week to 2-3 months, but the second deployment may take 1-7 days.
Have a Pilot Deployment and use it to validate - everything. A pilot deployment is a deployment that follows almost all the normal rules. The main difference is you have a limited set of users that know that support is ramping up, and that you may change your mind on how the service is configured. Test out your information policies, your SLAs, your governance and usage plans. Test out your security policies, your backup/restore and failover/disaster recovery strategies. Is your UI and navigation working? This is your chance to get the feedback you need. Only after both the operations team, the engineering team, and the support teams, and the business using the environment all agree things are working... and sign off. Remember you don't have to roll out all functionality on day 1. It's always more fun to save some for later. Consider Forms, Advanced Workflows, and Excel Services type functionality for specific business units and plan separate projects focused on rolling this functionality out.
A pilot can typically run 2-3 months, but an environment that is looking to go live quicker can send out to a larger group and push the system harder quicker, getting you feedback sooner.
Without turning blog post into a novel, a deployment itself wholly owned by IT can be done fairly quickly and go live within a week, but with proper governance, and service reviews, including a pilot may take 3-6 months or even up to a year. Not to scare you, but more to help you understand that this process is not a bad thing. Ensuring the ops team has a playbook and knows what they are doing will pay off. Especially when you need to recovery something not in the recycle bin, such as a site.
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I got a follow up email from one customer (Ted) saying it took them 6 weeks with no prior MOSS experience to build and fully deploy this site. I know it doesn't look like a MOSS site. They are using an HTTP handler to obfuscate the /pages and removed dependencies for anonymous users to the core.js. Not saying I endorse all that, but that's fast.
http://www.sendtec.com
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Buceando por los diversos blogs de WSS 3.0 / MOSS a los que estoy suscrito (que buen invento el de las