Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is fast taking hold as the choice platform and application to help businesses organize their data, streamline processes, and enhance communication with employees and clients. As with most things, you can’t just install it and start watching productivity rise and your ROI unfold before your eyes. A healthy SP2010 deployment is built on a foundation of planning. The drivers for planning are dominated by a single question. What do you want SharePoint to do for your business? Now, that is not for this blog to uncover but for you and your department heads to reveal. However, the typical options are business intelligence, document management, employee and customer portals, and collaboration.

As challenges and pitfalls go, the more you know about them the more you can plan and avoid them. Although this piece will not go into a how-to for each of these categories, as your business begins to look to the benefits of SP2010 or expand your current SP environment, I give you food for thought and criteria to consider when you are deciding what this platform will mean for your group. As I stated before, planning is the key foundation for success so we recommend <!--more--> you do your research and network with your peers as well as engage your Microsoft solutions provider or eGroup to help build the roadmap. With this being the most critical stage, don’t be shy about spending a healthy amount of time defining the business requirements.

Once you understand the purpose of the platform specifically for your business, take the time to understand the architectural intelligence that is required to support what you are asking of your IT staff and the infrastructure. What does your server count look like, how do you size the server farm, what are the best load balancing strategies, how should you cluster your databases, how do you leverage caching for best performance, and more.

If you are coming from an older SP platform you will need to make database migration decisions. You will find most of your challenges here around custom webparts and pages, unghosted files, and custom site definitions to name a few. Once you have outlined and fully understand the different components of your existing deployment, the path to upgrade/migrate becomes much clearer. Building targeted test plans to ensure migration success is key to any SharePoint upgrade. As with most complex application upgrades, all the issues from the upgrade are not always readily apparent. A targeted and well executed test plan can save you a lot of valuable time on the backend.

As you make your way out of IT and into the departments, both entities need to concern themselves with the level of customizations, data sprawl, and governance, as all affect the front and back part of the house, namely around performance and storage growth.

When you get into governance it is important that you create processes that force users to request a site for which they have provided business justification. This will give you a clearer path to site ownership and might be an opportunity for you to create a chargeback model as a checks-and-balances system.

Finally, many business struggle with closing critical gaps that can stall all efforts to supplying the business with the intended benefit.…increased productivity and revenue. Those gaps are focused around adoption and education. Adoption is about involving the business stakeholders upfront to develop processes they are committed to championing. Your education facet will revolve around user training, change management, effective governance, and continuous support.

As SharePoint goes, I know I did not touch on all the things that lead to success for standing up a healthy environment but sharing some of the challenges that our clients have experienced should help you define the areas that will require more focus and attention and hopefully assist your group with understanding the whole picture as it relates to the entire business. SP2010 can offer your company a competitive advantage when you are committed to building and introducing it properly into your business environment.