I am part of a team within Charteris that is qualified to deliver consulting under the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) program from Microsoft. “What is SDPS?” I hear you cry, “Why should I care?”.
The idea of SDPS is to help Microsoft Software Assurance customers with getting the most out of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server by allowing them to claim a number of days time with a SharePoint consultant. Registered Microsoft Partner Organisations deliver the consultancy, and this has to follow a prescriptive plan for content and deliverables.
I think it is a great idea for a number of reasons, for one thing you don’t pay the consultant – Microsoft does (of course, you pay for Software Assurance so you do pay in a way), but for another it is a great way of catching up with the current version of SharePoint and a great structured way of finding out what is in there and perhaps carrying out a proof of concept. And from a consultant perspective, the support material coming from Microsoft for SDPS is excellent and up to date. We have a content refresh coming up in March which is going to further strengthen the quality of the material delivered to you as a customer.
SDPS delivery comes in 1, 3, 5, 10, and 15 day engagements and from a consultant perspective we have a prescribed set of deliverables from each. Some are for the bigger engagements, but some come with all sizes and reflect the content of the days. As you may have guessed (the clue is in the name) the primary aim is to plan SharePoint Deployment, and to this aim the engagement will feature consideration of business needs, how SharePoint can answer these and the plan moving forward. The 1 day engagement focuses on the business value of SharePoint and how this might fit to your needs, and at the other end of the spectrum, the 15 day engagement includes this, and labs, proof of concept work and a lot more deliverables.
I recently conducted a 3 day SDPS Engagement in Edinburgh with a Legal Firm. The Firm had considered SharePoint 2003 in the past but wanted to get up to date with SharePoint 2007, and relate this to their business needs. As I dealt primarily with the IT Team, I tailored the agenda to demonstrations of the product and balanced this between covering the functionality of SharePoint with maintaining questions and answers. This is another aspect to remember with SDPS, although the deliverables and materials have a strong prescriptive element, the aim is to maintain the quality and this can happen while tailoring the delivery to the specific needs of the customer. For a 1 day engagement this can even mean that your engagement will take place over a series of live meetings – great if you can’t get your team in one place, we are all busy these days.
I find SDPS engagements quite rewarding because they are a great opportunity to get out there with SharePoint and help customers to understand all of what SharePoint can do, but also very importantly – to approach it with the proper planning that is appropriate for an Enterprise Application.