| In this chapter, we discuss the implementation of an enterprise-wide SharePoint Portal Server solution. To make the application of the following more meaningful, we are approaching this chapter in such a way as to walk Global Corporation (or "Global," another fictional entity) through planning and deploying a SharePoint Portal Server environment to support their entire company's search, data sharing, document management, and collaboration needs. Details on Global Global Corporation employs more than 90,000 employees across 100 sites in 20 countries . As a manufacturer and assembler of various electronics components , they require much in the way of a sophisticated document management system. Version and revision management is crucial to what must become a powerful search and collaboration vehicle as well, and transparent rollback to any stage of work is key. Engineering, marketing, accounting, and research and development groups are expected to make up the bulk of the online/active users, sharing and collaborating on both Microsoft-based and non-Microsoft-based documents. There is also an emphasis on crawling content sources both inside and outside their corporate firewall-protected resources. Finally, the current needs of the company have been tagged at more than 18 terabytes of data spread out over three key Data Center sites, growing at an expected incremental 3 terabytes a year for at least the next two years (see Figure 22.1 for details). Much of this data resides on expensive and nonstandard hardware platforms, and as such benefit from very little consistency site-to-site. Fortunately for Global, and key to selecting SharePoint Portal Server for their portal needs, they have recently upgraded half of their 70,000 end- user clients across the enterprise to Windows 2000/SP1, and have implemented Office XP as well. The remaining clients will be phased out in favor of the new standard within the next six months. Figure 22.1. Global Corporation is indeed "global," with large Data Centers in three countries, and other Information Technology (IT) support functions distributed across additional locations.  Challenges Deploying Enterprise-Wide As we have seen in previous chapters, sound deployment planning is critical in terms of successfully implementing SharePoint Portal Server. Deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server ”regardless of enterprise, departmental, or small business unit scope ”requires addressing the same umbrella of activities we identified previously, including -
Business goals and requirements -
Building the technical support organization -
Hardware vendor selection -
Solutions architecture -
Security plan development -
Developing the workspace(s) -
Preparing the dashboard site(s) -
Addressing change management -
Preparing for Go-Live -
Planning for post Go-Live support To compound matters, though, an enterprise-wide deployment implies another level of complexity, and exacerbates the previous challenges to an already daunting deployment with the following considerations: -
More than one approach to enterprise deployments -
Incremental technical support organization challenges -
Fundamental solutions architecture challenges -
Greater functional/organizational challenges -
Additional physical challenges -
Enormous data challenges We will now drill down into the preceding challenges from the perspective of our deployment planning strategy.  To read in more detail about creating a deployment plan for SPS, see "Planning a Deployment for ABC Company" p. 520.  |
