Planning the Project

Aside from the meetings, you'll need to create a plan on paper that will describe the project's vision, scope of work, and milestones. You'll also need to describe the interested parties in the project and who will perform which actions.

At this stage, you are most interested in defining all the elements of the Web site and the project work that is required to build it with CMS. Hence, you'll be looking at overall design issues, the site's functionality, CMS-related components such as templates, and how to deploy this site. End-user training should also be included in this step especially use of the Authoring Connector.

The project plan should include information related to the project schedule, budget estimates, and any other project specifications that might exist for the project to be successful. Business users and content experts should develop a content plan that becomes a part of the overall project plan. Developers should create a development plan that becomes a part of the overall project plan.

The project plan identifies all the types of content and functionality that will be placed into the site. The content plan should also specify the sources of the content for your site.

Your development team may also need to craft a plan that explains how content in an existing site will be ported to the new CMS-based site (see Chapter 37 on how to migrate from CMS 2001 to CMS 2002). They may also need to outline how to import content from external sources, such as a newsfeed or a streaming data source.

The project vision and scope document should define the size of the project and the areas of responsibility for each party in the project. It is also essential to define what "success" means to a given project. Setting expectations at this stage will help keep the project rolling along and remove misunderstandings that would naturally arise in the absence of such definitions:

  1. The planning phase

    1. Create project vision and scope

      1. CMS vision/scope document

        1. Project vision

        2. Solution concept

        3. Project scope

        4. Success criteria

        5. Dependencies

    2. Risk management

    3. Resource management

    4. CMS project plan documents

      1. Envisioning document

        1. Planning phase

        2. Development phase

        3. Deployment phase

        4. Stabilizing phase

      2. CMS risk document and risk matrix

        1. Risk management process

        2. Identify risks

        3. Analyze and prioritize risks

        4. Plan risks

        5. Track risks

        6. Control risks

        7. Top risks

    During the planning phase, you'll want to gather and discuss detailed information about security, authentication, site architecture, operations management, and capacity planning. Be sure to argue for a test lab with a good configuration to enable you to work offline with a production version of your CMS environment so that you can test proposed changes to your production environment in your test lab.

    Some of the elements in the following portion of the outline will be difficult to quantify, such as the CPU cost per transaction or a theoretical maximum number of users. Don't spend a great deal of time on these types of details unless they play a prominent role in the customer's requirements. Here, then, are some additional outline elements that should be addressed in your planning documents:

    1. Planning for security and authentication

    2. Existing content management planning

    3. Planning site architecture

    4. Operations planning

    5. Performance planning

      1. Capacity planning and usage profiling

        1. Capacity planning fundamentals

        2. Understanding transaction characteristics

        3. Understanding page requests

        4. Establishing a usage profile

        5. Example: Establishing a usage profile

      2. Capacity planning and transaction cost analysis

        1. Maximum throughput per transaction

        2. CPU cost per transaction

        3. Cost per user

        4. Theoretical maximum number of users

        5. Strategy for handling peaks

        6. Consideration of other factors

        7. Result verification

      3. Test plans

      4. Test cases

      5. Test lab requirements

      6. Test lab configuration

      7. Test tools

      8. Availability planning

        1. Acceptable uptime

        2. Software solutions for high availability

        3. Hardware solutions for high availability

    Although some of the following points might be a bit redundant to earlier outline entries in this chapter, what you need to keep in mind is that the planning portion of the deployment is much more detailed than the envisioning portion. Hence, even though you might have discussed the number and type of CMS servers in your environment, you may need to do so again from a functional and design perspective:

    1. Planning site design

      1. Network design and topology

        1. Basic network topology and servers

          1. Web servers

          2. Read-only MCMS servers

          3. Authoring MCMS servers

          4. Clustering Web servers

          5. Database servers

        2. Additional network components and servers

          1. Switches and hubs

          2. Firewalls and proxies

          3. Network load balancing

          4. Leveraging application center in network design

          5. Monitoring with MOM

        3. Integrating with SharePoint Portal Server

          1. SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server 2002

          2. Integration pack



Microsoft Content Management Server 2002. A Complete Guide
Microsoft Content Management Server 2002: A Complete Guide
ISBN: 0321194446
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 298

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