Announcing SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS)
If you’re involved with SharePoint in some way, either as a customer or partner, I think that you'll be excited to learn about a new program we're announcing today called SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS). SDPS is a partner and Microsoft Consulting Services delivered offering designed to help our Software Assurance (SA) customers successfully plan and deploy SharePoint. Using field proven business and technical guidance, the program provides best practices and well defined results through 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 day deployment planning sessions. The number of Packaged Service days that a customer can receive is determined by a combination of the number of qualifying Office licenses and the number of Core CAL (Client Access License) Suites and Enterprise CAL Suites. So, no additional investment is needed by the customer to take advantage of this tremendous program.
While the length of the deployment planning engagement will be dependent on the customer’s SA benefit level, the types of services delivered as listed below will depend on the length of the engagement:
- A Strategy Briefing defines the vision for achieving technical and business goals and is part of all engagements,
- An Architectural Design Session introduces SharePoint technologies, solutions and concepts and is added in a 3 Day engagement,
- A Deployment Planning Session covers a specific SharePoint capability in depth and is added in a 5 Day engagement, and
- A Proof of Concept demonstrates the solution in the customer’s environment and is added in a 10 and 15 day engagement.
What is the value of SDPS to customers and partners?
For Customers
- SDPS enables customers to obtain a roadmap to understand how to effectively deploy SharePoint within their Organization and helps remove the customer perceived risk and cost of planning for a SharePoint deployment.
- SDPS offers an engagement that is customized for each customer, addressing their specific business or technical challenges.
- SDPS enables customers to get more value out of their existing Software Assurance investment, and it's available to them at no additional cost.
For Partners
- Partners receive the SDPS tools, training, and support to help customers deploy SharePoint and increase their revenue in the process.
- Microsoft pays qualified partners to deliver SDPS services.
- Microsoft partners that currently have Competencies in Information Worker Portals and Collaboration, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), or Search specializations can now advance their skills and become certified to participate in the SDPS offering. In addition, SDPS certified partners will be able to participate in a new online community which Microsoft has established to enable collaboration and information sharing among partners on SharePoint deployment best practices. This private site gives partners an overview of the program, suggested tools for engaging with customers on SDPS, as well as examples of specific content that they will offer to customers in SDPS engagements of differing lengths. Partners can register to be part of SDPS at http://www.microsoftSDPS.com.
Here's the screenshot of what a Microsoft partner would see on the SDPS Partner Center website for a 10 day engagement:
A fantastic team consisting of people from MCS and the SharePoint Product Management Group were so passionate about this new program that they dedicated many hours even in their "off time" to ensure we had the most useful best practices and other collateral for our pilot this past January as well as the full release today. I’d like to thank them (and they know who they are!) for their efforts in helping me launch this important program to customers and partners! I hope many of our customers will take advantage of this tremendous opportunity to jump start their SharePoint deployment. For more details, see the program's FAQ at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/features/sdps_faq.mspx.
Deb Bannon
Senior Product Manager, Microsoft SharePoint
