Datasheet

Technical folks are also responsible for planning for the deployment of the
server farm. This requires coordination with other planners to ensure that
the deployment occurs in accordance with requirements.
If you don’t have the internal staff to complete this phase of planning, don’t
worry. You have two options:
 Hiring consultants: You can hire a third party to come in and take care
of the technical stuff for you. Depending on the size and complexity of
your project, it could take as little as a day to get you up and running.
This option works best for companies who already have an existing IT
infrastructure but don’t have the time or the skill set to bring up a
server farm.
 Hosting: If you don’t have the internal staff to support a SharePoint
farm, hosting may be a good alternative. With a hosted solution, a third
party allows you to access SharePoint on their servers. Hosting is a
great way to get up and running with SharePoint in a very short period
of time and for the lowest amount of up-front cash outlay.
Several kinds of hosting options are available. You can find companies
who host only WSS and those who also host MOSS 2007. You must
decide whether you want to use a shared server or a dedicated server.
With a shared server, your SharePoint installation lives alongside other
people’s SharePoint sites on the same server. For the highest amount of
security and availability, you can use a dedicated server that only your
company accesses. Obviously, a shared solution is less costly than a
dedicated solution. If you go with a dedicated server, most companies
let you bring the server in-house whenever you get ready.
Planning for content and usage
Deciding what gets stored in SharePoint and how SharePoint is used in your
organization is the meat and potatoes of your planning. I’m assuming that
you’re just planning on implementing the baseline collaboration and docu-
ment management features of WSS. In my opinion, this is where you should
start unless you have no intention of using any of these features. These fea-
tures are the underpinning for nearly every application of SharePoint you can
dream up. For that reason, I think it’s vitally important that your organization
master these uses before you start getting too advanced. Anything beyond
this project, I consider a SharePoint application.
It’s at this planning level that you need to do the following:
 Figure out which sites to create and how to organize them in a site
hierarchy.
 Decide whether to allow inbound e-mail.
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