Hi, I’m Zulfikar Ali and I’m a Technical Consultant for Parative specialising in SharePoint, Active Directory, Compliance and Migrations. I’ll be focussing on SharePoint in my blog entries but will from time to time will be posting other topics of interest.

As a Microsoft Gold partner we’ve spent some time (and effort) building our SharePoint services. Parative can now offer SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS for short – less of a mouthful!) as part of our portfolio of services, but what exactly is SDPS?

Essentially if you buy software from Microsoft under the ‘software assurance’ banner you get some vouchers depending on type and volume of licenses you purchase. You can then ‘spend’ these vouchers on services like SDPS (there are 3 other services, namely Desktops, Business Value and Exchange). You actually spend them by choosing a service like SDPS from a recognised Microsoft Partner (i.e. us!) and all you need do is specify which level of SDPS service you want and we deliver. More on that below.

Simple eh? However it is a bit more involved then that. Choosing SharePoint as a technology platform to either tackle poor document management (libraries, workflows!), improve existing business processes (business data catalog!) or to simply make stuff easier to find (enterprise search!) is the first step. Knowing what SharePoint can do and how it does it is important in understanding how it will fit your organisation.

That is where SDPS comes into its own. Once you engage in the SDPS process you decide which service level offering best meets your needs, they are based on a standard number of consulting days ranging from 1 to 15 (more is possible!). Below is a table that provides a high level overview of the days.

Table showing SDPS Days and the high level service offered

This table breaks it down really simple, in essence the first 3 days are about understanding the business need from an information architecture perspective, then subsequently delivering the relevant briefing sessions providing SharePoint solutions to those needs. If you want, you can find a more detailed breakdown here:

https://iwsolve.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/SDPS/ProgramOverview.htm#What

Therefore for your business, when choosing the number of days simply look at the requirements you have from the simple ‘what can SharePoint do for us?’ all the way through to a full blown usable and customised production pilot. As an organisation you may be eligible for 4 days, in this case you either create a voucher for the level below (3 Days) or if you have any unused training vouchers these can be converted into additional days to bring you to the next level (5 Days).

One of the concerns you may have is choosing a Partner with the assurance of quality however you can take confidence in the fact that Microsoft themselves QA the customer surveys that form the end of every engagement (regardless of the number of days). So at the end of any SDPS engagement expect both a Customer Survey and an Evaluation form allowing you to provide detailed feedback.

If you are unsure of anything the easiest route is to ask a Microsoft SDPS Partner for more information and answers to any of your questions. Of course here at Parative we are more than pleased to answer any queries related to SDPS.

In my next post (SDPS Part 2) I’ll go deeper into the SDPS service offerings and for the near future I will be looking at some of the new features of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010.

Happy sharing!