Datasheet

There are many additional roles. Some are part and parcel to projects. For
example, you obviously need a project manager. It’s probably also a good
idea to have a project champion and sponsor to help sell the project through-
out your organization. Consider involving Legal to make sure you cover all
your bases as it relates to privacy and terms-of-use agreements.
I like to think of a SharePoint project as using three distinct types of planning.
Each of the following types maps to a group of users who perform the planning:
 Technical people must plan your server topology and server farm.
 Subject matter experts and solution builders are responsible for identi-
fying the kind of content that must be stored, displayed, and managed
and coming up with the appropriate site hierarchy and building blocks.
Designers are also involved to help manage the look and feel.
 Solution builders and software developers are responsible for planning
ways to use SharePoint as an application platform.
I discuss each of these planning tasks required in the rest of this section.
Planning the server farm topology
Technical people are responsible for figuring out your server farm topology.
Only in rare circumstances is SharePoint deployed to a single server. In most
cases, SharePoint requires at least two servers.
Planning the server farm topology requires tasks such as these:
 Matching the topology to the project’s requirements.
 Determining the requirements for capacity, performance, and availability.
 Deciding how many servers are required of each kind of server role.
 Figuring out how the servers are configured within the existing network
topology to prevent unauthorized access.
 Providing access to authorized and anonymous third parties as required
by the project.
 Determining strategies for upgrading and migrating content from previ-
ous versions of SharePoint and other server applications.
 Identifying requirements for multilingual sites.
 Provisioning databases for use by the server farm.
 Making sure you have the proper licensing to match requirements.
 Creating a backup and restore strategy.
 Creating an ongoing administration plan.
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