Internet presence scenario: Map business needs to technologies

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In the first stage of the Internet presence scenario, a team of IT professionals and business decision makers analyzes the design, implementation, and performance of the enterprise's current Internet presence site. As a result, the group decides to redesign and rebuild the site based on Office SharePoint Server 2007.

1. Analyze business needs

An investigation is underway in an enterprise to determine how to improve its Internet presence site. The investigating team was formed with the sponsorship of an executive in the marketing organization. He has become aware of the following issues:

• Maintaining the current site involves extensive manual work. Authors submit updated pages to IT operators who then deploy the pages to a staging site and run manual scripts to push those changes to the production environment. This deployment inefficiency reduces the ability to keep the content of the site current.

• Business processes, such as for reviewing content and approving its publication, are poorly organized, inefficient, and hard to configure and modify.

• Maintaining the Web servers and software that host the Internet site has become increasingly complex. A mix of technologies and tools provides the enterprise’s Internet platform.

• The Web site itself, which serves as the enterprise’s corporate presence, product catalog, marketing platform, and recruiter of new employees, needs modification. The growing volume of content in the site is not well organized and the site is becoming difficult to navigate.

• The site is not robust or highly-available.

  • Backups are completed once a week. During the most recent failure, the support team was unable to restore a backup.

  • When equipment fails, it is not unusual for the site to be offline for two days.

The team documented the capacity and performance requirements for their system, which include the following:

• Number of different types of users

• Corpus size (number of documents to publish, number of documents to search)

• Frequency of updates to code and layouts

• Page views on the production site

• Times for page loads

2. Evaluate available technologies

The team evaluates products and technologies for implementing, authoring, and supporting the Internet presence site. The resulting full deliberations are beyond the scope of this scenario. However, links that are provided later in this article might be useful in making similar determinations.

The team recommends Office SharePoint Server 2007 to implement and deploy the enterprise’s Internet presence site and associated authoring site. The reasons include the following:

• The highly integrated Web content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 include the following:

  • Customizable page layouts and ASP.NET master pages

  • Smart navigation controls

  • Site variations based on language or other criteria

  • Automated content deployment

• Authoring, content approval, and content deployment in Office SharePoint Server 2007 have familiar user interfaces that can be easily learned and adapted by the content authoring team. This frees the IT infrastructure team to focus on its core responsibilities such as deploying and operating the server infrastructure.

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, the Web-based application on which Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built, is already in use in the enterprise as a collaboration platform. This makes it easier for the site’s authors and other contributors to learn how to author and customize the Internet presence site.

• Office SharePoint Server 2007 will reduce the total cost of ownership for the IT operations team:

  • The centralized configuration database in the configuration and management model of Office SharePoint Server 2007 automatically propagates and synchronizes the centrally-stored configuration settings across all servers in the server farm.

  • The three-tiered Office SharePoint Server 2007 administration model (encompassing central services, shared services, and site administration) makes it easy to differentiate administrative roles and assign administrative responsibilities.

  • The backup and recovery, migration, and monitoring support provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007 will improve general IT operations.

  • The Office SharePoint Server 2007 solutions framework will promote reliable deployment and management of customizations across server farms.

3. Determine Web site scope

Under the leadership of a solution architect, a design team for the site is formed in the marketing organization. It includes a program manager, lead developer, designer, and content lead. The goal of the design team is to determine the content and structure of the new corporate presence Web site. The team analyzes the content of the current site as a starting point and explores new ideas for the site. The design team recommends the following:

• The site should have a compelling Home page to welcome site visitors, communicate a great initial impression of the enterprise, broadcast critical corporate news and information, and provide clear navigation controls to enable visitors to find information.

• The site should contain a Corporate Information subsite that presents information about the enterprise. This includes pages that describe the corporate history, biographical sketches of members of the leadership team, and case studies that promote the enterprise’s products.

• The core of the site should be the Products subsite, which will present the enterprise’s product catalog in an easy-to-navigate, compelling way by combining text and graphics. The site architects note that this subsite will require custom features to enhance and animate the display of the various products.

• A News and Events subsite, which will present corporate news, press releases, product preview information, and a corporate events calendar.

• A Career Center subsite, which will contain general career information, features for searching the career opportunities database, and forms to submit resumes and applications.

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