SharePoint Deployment Planning

For most organizations, SharePoint’s value proposition cannot be fully understood until the product is in place and delivering value to the business. It’s the classic “chicken and egg” situation: How do you prove the value until you recognize the value?

The approach taken by many IT organizations curious or even bullish about the value of the product, but unwilling or unable to make a definitive case for strategic deployment of the platform, is to start with an implementation of SharePoint in a pilot or ‘sandbox’ environment. By the time these organic implementations have proven their value to the business – as they almost always do – IT finds itself with a SharePoint deployment unsuited for rapid adoption and growth.

Getting Past the Sandbox

Clearly, skipping the pilot phase entirely is not an option, so the challenge becomes leveraging what you have learned in your sandbox environment – about the SharePoint platform as well as your organization – to create a desirable plan for enterprise deployment.

Shifting gears from what was essentially an application evaluation to form the strategic vision and deployment plan for use across the organization and between business units is critical at this juncture. Doing so will help your organization avoid the diminishing returns that inevitably undermine SharePoint pilots that are not architected for the long term.

Abel Solutions’ SharePoint Deployment Planning addresses four critical components – Strategic Vision, Infrastructure, Application Framework, and Administration – designed to propel businesses up the value plane, where they can recognize sustained business value from SharePoint and maximize the return on their investment in the platform.