Sample Planning Document Outline

In this section, we've pulled together all the portions of the overall outline discussed previously in this chapter, and we present it here for your consideration.

1. Envisioning the project

   1. Understanding business pain points

      1. Company background

      2. Current system

      3. Challenges with current system

      4. Why the need for a content management system?

      5. Why the choice of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002?

   2. Gathering customer requirements

      1. Understand the current environment

      2. Analyze the customer's content

      3. Investigate your customer's authoring/publishing requirements

   3. Identifying supporting products for integration

      1. Applications built in-house

      2. Third-party applications

      3. Other Microsoft products and servers

   4. Determining the required number of CMS servers

      1. Budget and cost

      2. Site traffic

      3. Hardware

   5. Content Management Server 2002 environments

      1. Managing different environments

      2. Development environments

         1. Managing team development efforts

         2. Source control

         3. Build servers and the build process

      3. Testing and staging environments

         1. Aims of testing and staging

         2. Setting up testing and staging environments

         3. Testing and staging processes for Content Management Server 2002 solutions

      4. Production environments

         1. Deploying solutions to the production environment

         2. Managing and maintaining the production environment

   6. Team model and resources

      1. Skill set for administrators

      2. Skill set for authors/editors/moderators

      3. Skill set for infrastructure and operations staff

      4. Skill set for developers

      5. CMS team skill set document

         1. Identify team members

         2. Evaluate skill set

         3. Assign CMS tasks to individuals

   7. Identify security and authentication requirements

      1. Type of authentication

      2. Need for a single sign-on

      3. Need for private content

   8. Identify network topology designs

      1. Location of database

      2. Location of domain controller

      3. DMZ setup

      4. Firewall setup

2. 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

   5. Planning for security and authentication

   6. Existing content management planning

   7. Planning site architecture

   8. Operations planning

   9. 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

   10. 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

3. The developing phase

   1. Installation

   2. Site design

      1. Managing channel hierarchies

         1. Determining basic site structure

         2. Preventing channel proliferation

         3. Identifying channel managers

      2. Managing resource gallery structure

         1. Grouping resources with Site Manager

         2. Adding resources with Resource Manager

      3. Managing template gallery structure

         1. Grouping templates

         2. Identifying template designers

      4. Workflow design

         1. Basic workflow

         2. Designing extended workflow scenarios

   3. Site architecture

   4. CMS customizations

   5. Template creation

   6. Content creation

4. The stabilizing and monitoring phase

   1. Testing

   2. Site deployment