MOSS Requirements Gathering

Question

I'm engaged in a project with a customer that requires MOSS to be installed for Internet and Intranet. Unfortunately the client does not know what he wants. Is there a systematic appraoch usually used to gather MOSS requirement such as a set of questions usually business analysts ask to clear the direction and to manage the scope. Is there a referenced material that can help? what do you usually do in such cases?

In addition, during the gathering phase, we used to show the clinet 3 options as an image prototype that shows the look & feel, once he confirmed on one, we ask the MOSS designer to reflect the PSD files on a MOSS site for showing as a demo. Do you use another approach?

Answer 1

A big problem in MOSS is that customers aren't really sure how to organize their data (in terms of sites, subsites, etc.) until user data has accumulated and it's too late to re-organize.

UI changes (look-and-feel) are relatively easier, so if you really have to nail down one thing, make sure it's how data is to be organized. Example: Will it be one site collection for each line of business or one big site collection with subsites for each LOB? This also affects how data will be secured, and that's also a big pain to revise later.

Answer 2

Man, that is a loaded question. You could write an entire book answering this question (some have). In all honesty though, a great place I started was looking up 'checklists'. One that I use for reference is located here: http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102552101033

It has helped immensely for not just requirements gathering, but also for infrastructure requirements, storage, etc.

I agree with maxam. Users barely (if ever) know what they need in regards to MOSS. They may know what they need to solve their business problem, just not how to do it in SharePoint. That's where you will come in.

Answer 3

Deploying MOSS in a production environment requires a lot of planning. Initially everyone is just thrilled because of how easy MOSS is to set up and suddenly you have collaboration sites and wiki's and blogs all over the place. Although it may seem like you don't have a lot to worry about, ensuring that the topology and farm structure you have selected is scalable requires a lot of planning.

Here are a couple of links to get you started:

• Downloadable Book: Planning and Architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Planning Overall Design
• Capacity Planning
• Logical Architecture
• Design Server Farms and topolgies
• External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint
• Plan for Redundancy

This is just a start, technet and msdn are great resources and have a variety of topics to help you get started. Like I said, deploying the product itself is not terribly difficult once you have established a plan, but establishing the plan/site topology/search/indexing/database considerations/estimated growth take quite a bit of time. I just went through this project and we have about 2000 intranet users and it was a 6 month project that is nearing completion at the end of April. Good Luck.