This major section deals with the creation of a POC or pilot and outlines the tasks and subtasks associated with a real deployment. Much of the planning has already been accomplished earlier in the overall deployment plan under the sections "Identify Coexistence Strategies," "Establish Test Lab Environment," and "Plan Server Configuration."
The pilot is a real implementation of all of the planning that you and your team have accomplished. The pilot is a chance to find the bugs, problems, and roadblocks that are unforeseen to a successful deployment. You’ll troubleshoot these problems as needed, and then you’ll move on to refine your deployment configuration choices in your project plan.
Microsoft mentions a production go/no-go decision as part of the pilot in its sample project plan. If there is a no-go decision at the end of the pilot, the chances are good that whatever is stopping the deployment has been a known element since the beginning of the project. However, there are times when difficult-to-find technical details will get in the way of a successful deployment. In such cases, every attempt to find a third-party product that will resolve the issue should be considered before the no-go decision is made. Also, don’t ignore hiring a development vendor to assess the viability of modifying SharePoint Server 2007 so that the main obstacle is either resolved or worked around.
Lessons Learned: A Customer Makes a No-Go Decision
One of our customers had completed its project charter and initial deployment plan. Early in the life cycle of the pilot, the customer noticed that SharePoint Server 2007 didn’t support (what seemed to be at the time) a minor detail in the file plan.
Specifically, this customer was accustomed to batching multiple documents into a single set and then routing the entire set through a workflow for approval. It just never occurred to the customer that SharePoint Server 2007 doesn’t support this scenario out of the box. Because the development budget was extremely tight, the customer didn’t have available funds to hire a development vendor who could, perhaps, have fixed this problem. Therefore, the customer was stuck with either using SharePoint Server 2007 as is and routing each document through an individual approval workflow process or using another system.
In the end, this customer selected a different system to work with because the ability to approve a set of documents in one workflow was perceived as a high value feature that the document management system needed to have. Naturally, the customer wishes it had caught this detail earlier in the evaluation process because a high number of cycles were wasted on evaluating SharePoint Server 2007. But the positive side of the pilot was that it worked: The customer was able to test SharePoint Server 2007 and concluded that it wasn’t the right system for its needs.
Bill English, Microsoft MVP, Mindsharp
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