Planning for Implementation

When implementing a new service you must determine what components will be needed and how they will be deployed. This includes acquiring these components and planning the installation procedures to ensure the deployment goes smoothly.

If custom components are to be created, lead time will be required for developing and testing those components. A project manager or project management office can be very helpful in these cases. See Chapters 12, 13, and 14 for details about managing the development of custom solutions for SharePoint.

Many services require the integration of third-party products. These need to be purchased prior to setting up the stage environment for functional testing. The stage environment is a good place to practice installing these products. While a third-party product will always come with installation instructions, those instructions are not designed to account for the unique requirements of your portal.

A new service may introduce new security or regulatory requirements. These need to be documented and understood before deployment. Any new business processes that must be established to ensure compliance must be implemented as part of the service rollout even if they exist outside of SharePoint.

When rolling out new services, the portal's capacity plan should be updated as well. The service may generate large loads on the servers or large amounts of content that will need to be stored. If new hardware will be required to support the new service, in addition to the existing site, that hardware should be deployed before or in conjunction with the new service. Always try to take a proactive approach to farm performance.

Last, you need to consider how long the service will take to implement. There are two parts to this question. The first comes before deployment. This involves all of the planning and development we have discussed up to now plus the planning we will discuss in the following sections. All of this must be done before touching the production configuration. Also, a release date should be scheduled that includes time for communication, training, and any downtime that is required. Some types of services may require significant downtime while others may not require any.