Published Intranets in SharePoint Server 2010

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Published Intranets in SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft Corporation

November 2010

Applies to:SharePoint Server 2010

Follow these tasks in the order they are presented to create and operate a published intranet site for your organization.

For the more information, see Published intranets in SharePoint Server 2010.

1. Evaluate

This section suggests some typical steps to take during the evaluation phase before a project is planned. An organization might use different steps or perform steps in a different order to meet its unique needs.

1.1 Evaluate organization needs

In this step, you determine your high-level needs for an intranet site. Include both technical decision makers and business decision makers in this process. Do not plan your specific implementation, but instead take time to identify requirements and constraints.

1.1.1 Identify business goals
In this step, you work with a project team to define the business goals for the project. If you don't have an established process for how to envision your project, you can follow the steps in the Microsoft Operations Framework.
Related content: Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 - Envision Service Management Function

1.1.2 Determine availability, capacity, and performance requirements
Do you have hours in which downtime might be acceptable? How many users are you serving with this site? Do you have any performance benchmarks you need to hit?
Related content: Reliability Service Management FunctionProcess 1: Planning

1.1.3 Identify functional requirements
What specific business and functional requirements need to be met for your intranet site? For example, does the site need to be accessible to users around the world? Will different departments have their own sites or will there be only a central Intranet site?

1.1.4 Determine operations criteria
Are there specific requirements or restraints for operations for your intranet site? For example, are there any physical infrastructure constraints on your environment?

1.1.5 Identify staff and resource constraints
What specific resource constraints will need to be taken into account during planning? For example, do you have a team that includes developers and designers, or will you need to hire employees or consultants to do some of the work?

1.2 Evaluate software capabilities

Review information about SharePoint Server 2010 to determine how using this software can help you achieve your business goals.
Related content:

  • Case Studies: Advanced search
  • Product information

1.2.1 Review checklist of SharePoint features
Which edition of SharePoint 2010 Products contains the feature set you need?
Related content:Evaluation guide for SharePoint Server 2010 (white paper)

1.2.2 Read applicable case studies
Learn how other customers are using SharePoint Server 2010 to enhance their businesses.
Related content:Case Studies: Advanced search

1.2.3 Compare business requirements with SharePoint features
Now that you know what SharePoint Server 2010 can do, and you have a high-level set of goals for your intranet site, compare your business goals and the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 to determine whether they fit.

1.2.4 Try out SharePoint
Use the trial version of SharePoint Server 2010 to test out your ideas and perhaps create a rough proof of concept.
Related content: Download SharePoint 2010 trial

1.3 Review requirements

There are specific hardware, software, and licensing requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. Review these requirements to be sure that your environment and your organization can meet them.

1.3.1 Review licensing options
You need to determine the types of licenses you'll need for your environment, how many licenses you'll need, and what the cost of those licenses will be.

1.3.2 Consider dedicated hosting
Consider whether you'd rather use a hosting company for your published intranet instead of hosting on site. A hosting company can take on the operational burden of supporting your sites.
Related content:

  • SharePoint Online planning and administration
  • SharePoint partners
  • SharePoint Online

1.3 3 Review system requirements
What hardware and software do you need to be able to run SharePoint Server 2010?
Related content: System requirements

1.4 Exit criteria

At the end of the Evaluate phase, you should have:

  • Determined whether SharePoint Server 2010 can help you meet your business goals regarding a published intranet.
  • Identified your broad solution criteria, such as desired uptime, maximum number of users, and whether you will take advantage of a hosting company or host your solution on premises.
  • Decided whether or not to use SharePoint Server 2010 for your intranet site.

2. Plan

2.1 Train IT and development staff

Before you begin your project, make sure your IT and development staff members are fully trained to use SharePoint Server 2010. Training videos and labs are available on TechNet and MSDN.
Related content:

  • SharePoint 2010 Advanced IT Professional Training
  • SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer Training
  • Take SharePoint Server 2010 training at your desk

2.2 Determine key vision or identity for the site

Determine the most important goals for your site. For example, is the goal to distribute news and communication? To create a centralized location for resources?

2.2.1. Research user roles and scenarios
You need to understand who is going to use your site and for what purposes. Consider crafting a series of user personas and scenarios to illustrate these roles, so that your planning and development teams can work with the user in mind.

2.3 Plan information architecture

Effective information architecture makes it easy for users of your published intranet to find and store information.
Related content:Plan information architecture for Webcontent management

2.3.1 Define managed metadata policy for site
Define the term sets and terms that will be used as the basis of content organization and searches.
Related content: Plan managed metadata

2.3.2 Determine URL structure and addresses
You need to consider the number and type of top-level sites and subsites you’ll need, as well as the site collections that will organize them all.
Related content: Plan sites and site collections

2.3.3 Identify search scopes
Which search scopes are available to use? Which custom ones might need to be created? What set of scopes would be most useful for this site?
Related content:

  • Plan the end-user search experience
  • Manage search scopes
  • Define scopes for searches

2.3.4 Define governance requirements for site and content
How do you want to govern the information in your site? What features do you intend to use for governance, for example, versioning, workflows, and content types. How do you ensure that your content stays current?
Related content:

  • Implementing and governing information architecture
  • Governance model
  • SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning (white paper)

2.3.5 Plan information storage design
How are you going to store information in your site? What libraries do you need to contain site-wide documents or images? What external storage is needed?

  • 2.3.6 Plan migration of any existing content into the new site
    Do you have existing content that needs to be migrated or imported into the site? Third-party tools are available to help you migrate content.
    Related content:SharePoint partners

2.4 Define implementation-wide requirements

In this task, you define any requirements that affect how the entire site will work, such as accessibility and language requirements.

2.4.1 Determine how to support business goals with analytics
The analytics features can help you gather feedback about your site from your users. How can you use these features to make continuous improvements to your site? What data will you gather and how will you use the feedback?
Related content: Reporting and usage analysis overview

2.4.2 Set goals for usability and accessibility
Build in support for users with accessibility challenges from the start of your designs. Plan usability testing to ensure that the site design is intuitive and works for all of your users.
Related content:

  • Usability
  • Accessibility resources
  • Conformance statement A-level
  • Conformance statement AA-level

2.4.3 Define multilingual requirements for site
Does your organization span regional and global boundaries? If so, does your site need to support multiple languages or will you have separate sites for separate regions or languages?
Related content: Plan for multilingual sites

2.5 Define content requirements

Many sets of people will be coming to your site for multiple purposes. Plan how to target and secure content so that you display the right information to the right people.

2.5.1 Determine audience targeting needs
Do you have distinct sets of users that you can identify and target information to? Use audience targeting to serve the appropriate content to groups of users.
Related content: Audience and content targeting planning

2.5.2 Determine permission and security trimming needs
How do you prevent users from seeing content they shouldn't, even in search results?
Related content:

  • Security planning for sites and content
  • Writing a custom security trimmer for SharePoint Server Search

2.5.3 Choose display tools and options for information
After you think about what you want specific users to see, think about the implementation that will support that goal. What types of pages or Web Parts would be helpful for which types of information? What kinds of queries will provide the control that you need over the content display?

2.5.4 Determine media management strategy
Do you need a central storage place for images and audio or video files? How do you structure libraries to contain these items so that you can retrieve digital media assets from different areas of the site?
Related content: Plan digital asset management

2.5.5 Determine customization requirements
Familiarize yourself with the capabilities and programmability features of the SharePoint Server 2010 framework so that you can determine customizations and solutions that you want to build, as well as the tools that you will likely use. Be sure to review best practices.
Related content: Programming overviews

2.5.6 Define authoring and publishing flow
How do you want authoring and publishing to work for your site? Could you benefit from the approval workflow or a custom workflow? What happens if you need to restore a previous version of the content.
Related content:

  • Plan content approval and scheduling
  • Plan workflows

2.6 Plan site structure

Once you’ve determined your requirements, it's time to start planning the design and user experience of your site. Review your branding strategy before you begin this work so that your branding and design will work together well.

2.6.1 Determine site collection structure
You can have your whole site in one site collection with multiple subsites, or you can create individual site collections for different areas and associate them by using custom navigation.
Related content:

  • Plan sites and site collections
  • Design sample: Corporate deployment

2.6.2 Create site wireframe
Create a simple sketch of the site (or wireframe) that includes the general layout of your site and its component pieces.
Related content: See "Creating wireframes" in Real world branding with SharePoint Server 2007 publishing sites (part 1 of 2)

2.6.3 Create and review design options
Create detailed design illustrations (that is, comps) with branding options and review them with stakeholders. You might also consider usability testing at this stage to see which designs work best for your users.
Related content: See "Creating realistic design comps" in Real world branding with SharePoint Server 2007 publishing sites (part 1 of 2)

2.6.4 Define site navigation
Determine the best navigation model for your site, including global navigation, quick launch, Content By Query Web Parts, and search. Determine the necessary links for all pages and the positioning of those links.
Related content: Plan site navigation

2.7 Define page structure

Determine the overall structure and layout of site pages. What elements do you need on each page, what areas are common and unique, and how much will users be able to change?
Related content:

  • Create SharePoint site pages
  • Create basic pages and Web Part pages

2.7.1 Define master pages
Master pages provide the interface and overall layout of the pages on a SharePoint site. You must balance the customization of master pages with investments in styles and external cascading style sheets.
Related content:

  • Introduction to SharePoint master pages
  • Page layouts and master pages

2.7.2 Define page layouts
Page layouts are used to position content on a page that uses the Publishing features in SharePoint Server 2010. They are also used with master pages to control the look and feel of content on a publishing-enabled SharePoint site.
Related content: Page layouts and master pages

2.7.3 Define site pages
What pages do you need to create for your site? Think about the types of pages, including wiki pages, list view pages, and Web Part pages.
Related content:

  • Site and page creation
  • Create SharePoint site pages

2.7.4 Define Web Parts
Determine what content you need to expose by using Web Parts. Which are customized Web Parts, which are Web Parts that you need to create or buy, and which standard Web Parts can you use?
Related content:

  • Building block: Web Parts
  • Web Parts

2.8 Plan style design

How and where are you going to use Cascading Style Sheets and XSL files for branding and design? Will the site design be locked down or will it allow users to apply a theme?

2.8.1 Define global style guidelines
Define and document which styles you will use throughout the site.

2.8.2 Determine use of cascading style sheets
Determine how many .css files you want to apply to the site and whether you need multiple .css files for language, themes, and more.
Related content: Cascading Style Sheets Class Usage in SharePoint Foundation

2.8.3 Define XSLT style sheets
In addition to cascading style sheets styles, you can use XSL sheets to design specific Web parts, such as the XSLT List View and Content By Query Web Parts. Both of these Web Parts can appear in the body of your site pages.
Related content: How to: Customize styles

2.9 Plan custom development and extensibility

Determine how much custom development is required and at what level, including sandboxed solutions versus full-trust development.
Related content:

  • SharePoint Foundation development in depth
  • What's new in SharePoint Foundation 2010
  • What's new in SharePoint Server 2010

2.9.1. Plan customizations to navigation
Identify and diagram your intended site navigation, and learn how SharePoint navigation works. Then, plan the controls, Web Parts, ribbon customizations and other customizations that will be needed to implement your navigation.
Related content: Plan site navigation

2.9.2. Plan custom Web parts and forms
Determine the necessary validation steps to ensure the scope, security, and performance of custom Web Parts that your development team will be building.
Related content:

  • Building block: Web Parts
  • Manage Web Parts

2.9.3. Plan business intelligence and data integration
Determine how to integrate your business data by using Business Connectivity Services and determine the processes that you will need to put in place in order to protect the performance and security of your custom solutions.
Related content:

  • Plan for Business Connectivity Services
  • PerformancePoint Services

2.10 Plan for browsing and search

Review browser, multilingual, and search requirements, and ensure that your site design will meet your requirements.

2.10.1 Determine browser support
See if the browsers in use in your organization can be used with SharePoint Server 2010.
Related content: Plan browser support

2.10.2 Plan UI for multilingual sites
Do you need to provide a way for site users to view the user interface in a language other than the default site language? How will application content be translated? What language packs need to be installed?
Related content: