SharePoint Lessons Learned – Clearly Define a Deployment Baseline (Part 1)

One of the major lessons that I’ve learned so far with SharePoint development is how important it is to clearly define your Deployment Baseline from very early stages in the development lifecycle. In part 1 of this blog post I will describe the concepts behind this Deployment Baseline and in part 2 I will describe how in Collaboris we apply them to the development of SharePoint applications.

A deployment baseline is a clear definition of the artefacts that are going to be built and deployed when creating a new application. These artefacts should be catalogued and grouped based on their purpose, functionality and on how we plan to deploy and maintain them once the application is live. This baseline will also help to clearly define the different areas of responsibility within the team.

Imagine that you are developing a new Web Content Managed application where the development team is responsible for the creation of all the technical artefacts (ASP, HTML, CSS etc) and the business team is responsible for the creation of content (pages and documents). In this scenario it will make sense to create two separate packages; one for the technical artefacts the other for the content artefacts. These packages can then be maintained, managed and version controlled separately. To do a release you would just need to release the package with the technical artefacts followed by the content package (you can also have more than one content package but more on that later).

In SharePoint development, the Features and Solution Framework gives you the right tools to define and create this Deployment Baseline and I think that it is a worthy investment to get familiar with it before starting to develop any SharePoint application (strongly recommend Andrew Connell’s book to learn this). Unfortunately this framework also has a lot of limitations that are not immediately obvious when you start to use it so be prepared to get your hands dirty and do some coding to overcome some of them (or have a look at SAF the free tool that Collaboris released on CodePlex).

In part 2 of this post I will go through the steps on how in Collaboris we organise our deployment artefacts to create a deployment baseline for our projects. Stay tuned.