| Whether your deployment goal is building a corporate enterprise dashboard site to consolidate your information services, or creating a series of workspaces to assist a geographically dispersed business group to collaborate on and manage its documents, you will find SharePoint Portal Server a versatile solution. A SharePoint-based solution may be scaled from a single dashboard site to a network of organizational and departmental dashboards providing great functionality across an entire enterprise. Specific solutions components ”search, crawl, index, workspace, and so on ”may be scaled out, thereby providing a platform from which to grow as additional uses for SharePoint Portal Server are identified and implemented. As always, it is important to coordinate your SharePoint Portal Server planning, development, and deployment efforts with other stakeholders in the company. Communication of business goals and needs is key to designing a system capable of meeting the productivity needs of the organization. The right approach to deploying the Portal must be determined as well, as must incremental technical support organization requirements. Underpinning any successful business-driven IT project is a fundamental understanding of the data, its uses, its locations, and overall accessibility. Functional and organizational issues and challenges regarding the data, and goals of the folks using the data, must be identified, with an eye toward maximizing collaborative and information-sharing capabilities. Finally, maintaining, administering, and safeguarding the enterprise-wide SharePoint deployment requires a greater level of commitment than simpler implementations , and benefits from a holistic approach to information management. Disaster recovery and backup/restore practices must be put into place. And just as important, these critical services must also be tested and verified .  |
