How we got started - continued

After the week long training session on implementing and administering SharePoint, we thought we were ready to tackle designing a site collection and our new portal intranet page. Wait a minute... not so fast. Enter SharePoint Designer 2007. Can anyone figure out how to use this new tool? SharePoint Designer 2007 is the replacement for FrontPage and we were under the assumption that anyone that developed in FrontPage could easily transition to SharePoint Designer 2007. Wrong !! OK, now what ?? We are a group that is usually able to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. The only problem was that there were no resources out there for SharePoint Designer 2007, at least as of that time. I think the books are just hitting the press. We managed to find a group willing (and able) to come to our organization to teach a class on SharePoint Designer 2007. The four day class was rocky. Just when the muddy water started to clear, it was like a big rock was thrown in and the murkiness returned. It was like a roller coaster of confusion and clarity. After training was over, it was time to get to work again. The web developers and I locked ourselves in a room to see if we could hammer something out. At the end of the day we had implemented a basic site collection with some simple customizations. This is where we are caught up with the present time and I will continue to journalize our experiences in the implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. My goal is to document both good and bad experiences. I hope others who have anything to contribute to what we are doing will do so. Maybe we can be of some help to someone attempting to implement SharePoint. Let's collaborate on our experiences !!

How we got started !!

The project was barely underway when I was assigned a lead role on the SharePoint project team. Microsoft had sent some folks over to show us what SharePoint Server 2007 could do and they created a basic 'proof of concept' to give us something concrete to look at after the demo. From there, we were on our own. I began reading as much as I could on the Internet about WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, and SharePoint Designer 2007. I watched webcast after webcast. One thing to point out here is that I am actually a database application programmer and and not a web developer, so all the concepts were brand new !! No problem !! I am a fast learner and was looking to get into something new. OK ... It was time to get started. After coming up with a basic design for our development farm topology, we decided to take a crack at installing MOSS 2007. The development farm topology consisted of three servers; one to fill the web and application roles and two for the SQL database back-end. The initial install was somewhat bumpy. Five members of the project team hovered over the servers throughout the installation process, each looking at one another for answers. During the time period that we were blazing our way through new territory, we were also in the process of scheduling a week long training session for the Microsoft Implementing and Administering Course. One of the primary reasons for attempting the install before training was so the training material would not be completely foreign. To be continued ...

What we are doing !!

The challenge for our project team is to implement Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in our organization. One of our executive management's primary reasons for implementing SharePoint is to design an Employee Portal in SharePoint that will replace our existing Intranet. Phase I of the project is limited to replacing only the current Intranet Home page with a SharePoint site and establishing links that jump off into static Intranet content. Seems pretty easy right ?? Phase II and future phases will explore bringing the rest of the Intranet into SharePoint. Oh yeah... somewhere along the way we will be implementing some of the other fine features of SharePoint such as document management, business process management, business data catalog, and much more :-)