Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

190 10.2 Planning SharePoint Features

end users after discovering the collaborative features of WSS 3.0, might use

the environment mainly for team collaboration. We learned this lesson in the

HP Services Knowledge Management Team early on, when we simply

“turned on” SharePoint Team Services (the previous version of Windows

SharePoint Services) thinking no one would really use it. You can imagine

our surprise one year later, when we discovered that country business units

depended on the service being available 24/7, with estimated downtime costs

of $100,000 per hour for the business.

Spend time finding out the answers to “what” and “how” by talking not

only to the deployment champions and the company management, but also

to the future end users. Often you will find the end-user expectations to be

quite different from management vision. Managing the end users expecta-

tions and balancing them with management’s priorities will help adoption

and user acceptance once the system goes into production. Talking to users is

especially important if you are planning to migrate from an existing legacy

system, as users often have novel ideas on how to apply the technology to

their particular business problems.

10.2 Planning SharePoint Features

As you have undoubtedly come to realize by this stage of the book, Windows

SharePoint Services 3.0 provides a rich and extensible framework for collabo-

ration. Add on top the portal, search, business intelligence, and content pub-

lishing features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and we’re sure

you can imagine endless options for all manner of implementation scenarios

across an enterprise.

While we have already covered all the major features earlier in the book,

it’s good to highlight a few of the key areas you should consider early on in

your planning cycle. While some features are easy to turn on/off and recon-

figure throughout the deployment process, others, such as the Authentica-

tion Provider, can cause considerable work to change at later stages of a

deployment process, since they typically involve supporting infrastructure.

10.2.1 Authentication Providers

Previous versions of SharePoint were tied to security principals that had to

translate to a Windows identity. While it was logical for SharePoint prod-

ucts to do so, given their background and focus, this requirement did limit

organizations that were using third-party user directory servers, such as

Netscape and Novell directory servers. While it was technically possible to

utilize third-party plug-ins that translated non-Microsoft directory user

accounts to domain identities, they came with performance, support, and