The SharePoint Blog

Microsoft has built and sold one of the most successful products in the Enterprise space ever and with that comes a lot of possibilities, responsibilities and problems to solve. Once you’ve committed to the licenses and hardware, trained your staff to deploy, hired consultants to help and gained approval from your executives, it’s time to build a solid of understanding how you will support your users and what will be allowed and disallowed in your shiny new SharePoint farm.

Let’s look at what you’ll need to consider at a glance and more information about each of these topics will be posted in the future.

• Your architecture and environment (On-premise, hosted/cloud or hybrid)
• Your staff (Who do you need? and how many?)
• Your feature roll-out
• Your customer’s needs (training, application support and development and Service Level Agreements (SLA))
• Customization, custom-code or no-code solutions
• Communications
• Special considerations (Archiving, third-party components, etc.)

As a consultant at, and an employee of, Fortune 50/500 companies, I have seen governance become a huge issue that rears it’s head throughout the deployment lifecycle and in supporting your customers. Another trait that it is equally important is the Enterprise discipline required to keep your collaboration and application platforms consistently meeting the needs of your sponsors and business to provide the real value expected from the rollout of any technology, to include SharePoint.

Let’s look at some of the issues all organizations can consider before deploying SharePoint and maybe it might help in other technologies, as well.