This book is organized into the following four main sections:

Because of our strong belief that well-defined business requirements and governance standards must be in place for a robust, successful deployment of SharePoint Server 2007, we have dedicated entire chapters to these two topics in Part I. When you read these chapters, you might be tempted to think that they don’t really cover SharePoint Server 2007 here or that they don’t include many best practices for SharePoint Server 2007. Please understand that the development of well-defined business requirements and technical requirements is a best practice, so the entire chapter represents our discussion about a single best practice. The same is true for the governance and project planning chapters.

In Chapter 1 we provide a brief overview of SharePoint Server 2007. In Chapter 2 we’ve written about topics that are seldom discussed with customers regarding a SharePoint Server 2007 implementation. This chapter discusses the cultural impact, power shifts, and conflict points that a SharePoint Server 2007 deployment can introduce into an organization. Ignore these potential effects at your own peril. In Chapter 3 we discuss the design life of a SharePoint Server 2007server and offer best practices related to this topic. In Chapter 4 we shift gears and discuss how to define business requirements for your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment. In Chapter 5 we follow up our discussion about business requirements definition with a discussion on the development of governance standards. This chapter will show you how to create an environment in which those standards can be created. In Chapter 6 we highlight SharePoint Server 2007 deployment best practices as they relate to the sample SharePoint Server 2007 deployment project plan that the product team has published and that you can find on this book’s companion media. We end Part I with Chapter 7, where we discuss how to develop an information architecture for your organization.

Part II focuses on building out your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment. We start with Chapter 8 on document management best practices. Chapter 9 explores Enterprise Content Management best practices, and Chapter 10 outlines the best practices for business processes and workflows. For our readers who are also developers, we have two chapters in which you’ll be interested. First, in Chapter 11, we discuss the branding and customization best practices for developers who are want to create a consistent look and feel for their SharePoint Server 2007 deployments. In Chapter 12 we discuss the best practices as it relates to Web parts, features, and solution management. In Chapter 13 we cover the best practices for creating and managing publishing sites. We round out Part II with a brief introduction to Microsoft Search Server 2008 and some best practices as they relate to this new platform.

In Part III we focus on best practices for deployment topics. Specifically, we discuss how to create an optimal search topology in Chapter 15. Then, in Chapter 16, we outline the best practices for your Shared Service Provider implementation. In Chapter 17 we discuss the best practices for information security management in SharePoint Server 2007 and use the CISSP model for securing SharePoint Server 2007 objects. In Chapter 18 and Chapter 19 we include an extensive review of business intelligence and the best practices for basic and advanced business intelligence implementations. We finish our discussion of deployment best practices in Chapter 20 with a strong chapter on deployment design for intranet, extranet and internet scenarios.

Part IV deals with enterprise operations and we begin with disaster recovery best practices in Chapter 21. Then Chapter 22 wades into the thorny area of upgrade best practices. Finally, we conclude the book in Chapter 23 with an interesting look at capacity planning and monitoring best practices.