Plug & Play SharePoint

This is a tale all about how my SharePoint world was turn upside down. Ok, so much for my Fresh Prince parody. I want to invite you to come along on a very unusual adventure in the world of SharePoint. What is the adventure you ask? How to do SharePoint without actually using SharePoint. Intrigued yet?

My adventure began in January 2009 when my customer hit me with what seems to be a typical goal for their firms collaboration needs and an unusual set of requirements for achieving that goal. Their goal is, “Provide a single enterprise wide collaboration environment that leverages web 2.0 style tools such as blogs, wikis, video sharing and even a Facebook type solution for the firms internal and external customers”. So their goal isn’t so unusual but the requirements that I was saddled with are most unusual.

These are the requirements:

1. Consolidate all 14 globally deployed internal WSS v.2.0, SharePoint  Portal 2003 and WSS v.3.0 servers into one centrally deployed SharePoint farm. Also, All existing intranet servers (10 total) must be rolled into SharePoint.
2. No “MOSS  2007”: You must use only Windows SharePoint Services v.3.0
3. Provide an alternative solution to the MOSS BDC and Performance Point.
4. No Visual Studio: Cannot use Visual Studio for custom coding, workflows, webparts, etc.
5. Enterprise Search: Cannot use FAST, MS Search Server/Express, Google Search Appliance or WSS Integrated Search.
6. Establish a centrally managed Global navigation structure for the environment.
7. High Availability: Provide a highly available environment without using SQL cluster, mirroring, log shipping, etc.
8. Delegated Security and Management: Security and Site management must be delegated to each of the 10 internal business units.
9. Disaster/Data Recovery: Provide a solution that reduces RTO from days to Hours/Minutes and RPO from days/hours to minutes.
10. Be able to drop SharePoint 2010 in place within the next 3-5 years.

Now as we all know accomplishing this with WSS v3 OOTB is basically impossible. I have been working on some very interesting solutions that I think you as my readers will like very much.

But wait, if your not stupefied yet it gets better. Typically for a project like this you would have a small army. You would have a Project Manager, SharePoint Architect, SharePoint administrators, SQL administrators, Windows Server administrators, SharePoint Developers, SharePoint Designers, Trainers and more.

Not us! There’s two of us tasked with making this all happen. There’s me; I am the SharePoint Architect, Enterprise SharePoint Administrator, Technical Project lead, Search Administrator and SharePoint Designer. Oh yeah, I have to deploy everything too.

My counter part is the Project Manager, SharePoint Designer and Backup Administrator. We do have a few other folks that are assisting is various ways and I’ll discuss them later in this series.

So that’s it for now.

Next Steps
Collecting the Tools for Success