What are Sharepoint(MOSS 2007) Developement/Deployment best practices.

Question

We are deploying sharepoint MOSS 2007 at our work. I'm trying to come up with a sharepoint development and deployment methodology. We have Dev/QA/Prod environments and I need a way, preferably automated to deploy changes from Dev to QA and from there to prod.

We are creating site collections web parts etc. Some of it is done directly within sharepoint, some through Sharepoint designer or visual studio. I'm looking for a way to extract this and deploy it to other enviornments.

I tried stsadm backup/restore import/export etc but they all move the data along with it as well. I just need the structure deployed. Content deployment paths and jobs does the same thing as well. We use MSBuild & Curisecontrol.net for other .net projects to automate build/deployment process. I'm looking for something similar with sharepoint if possible.

What are your best practices for this? Since my team is learning we don't have a defined process and we are open to change our development process if needed.

Answer 1

First off, it's a hard problem.

Probably the 'best' method is to put everything into solution packages - but its quite hard to do correctly.

There is a lot of opinions out there - the best I can do is give you further reading

SharePoint Solution Deployment Strategies

SO - How do you deploy your SharePoint solutions?

ROSS - A commercial toolset to help with deployment

DocAve Deployment Manager

Answer 2

SharePoint development / deployment isn't as finely tuned as it is with regular .NET. I haven't heard of anyone using CI solutions for this.

Your basic unit of deployment is a solution package (a WSP file). It's basically a CAB file with a different extension. WSPBuilder is helpful for creating them. (http://wspbuilder.codeplex.com)

SPSource (http://spsource.codeplex.com) is pretty good for reverse engineering some stuff that you build in a web browser, such as Content Types and Lists. It's my preferred way of doing this stuff - trying to cut them by hand is no fun. I've had SPSource reverse engineer simple lists into 2000 line XML files.

Powershell is important for SPT 2010. James Kovacs has built a build tool called psake which plugs into PSH. It looks pretty straightforward, though I need to figure out PSH properly first.

Spend some time on http://sharepointdevwiki.com as this an evolving resource.

Microsoft patterns and practices group have released some guidance as well at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx

LearnDevNow.com is also selling online training videos that are pretty good and very affordable (about USD100). They will show you many of the good ways of doing things.

Cheers Mike