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I have believed for a long time that when you deploy MOSS in an organization you get some “interesting” issues, and many of them are around the infrastructure. I do not believe that MOSS is in any way bad for the organizations infrastructure, in fact in a way it helps improve it. For example if your SQL infrastructure is in a poor condition MOSS will point it out as you may see poor MOSS performance. If your network is in a bad state MOSS will point it out with slow page loads on the desktop (and the helpful developers will say, “It worked on my PC”). Also is your AD has no data then your people search and My Site will show this up.
I would like to think that MOSS telling tails on a organizations infrastructure is a good thing, but I’m often proved wrong as people get defensive and say MOSS is the problem. This is why before any MOSS deployment the core infrastructure should be checked!!!! And also after the deployment a plan to regularly repeat the check should be put in place.
Some simple questions to ask
- Is your AD healthy?
- Is your SQL infrastructure healthy?
- What will your Web front end server infrastructure look like and will it handle your planned MOSS load?
- What is your DR and BCP plan and is MOSS factored in?
- What storage capacity do you have and need including backup space?
- What kind of performance do you get out of your network i.e. how long would it take to upload a 1 mb, 5 mb, 10 mb, 25 mb file?
- Is there a solution like Microsoft’s System Centre in place to perform system reporting?
There are a lot more questions to ask. I would recommend looking at more than just the IIS and SQL infrastructure as this is just the start. Remember that if the core infrastructure is not in a good way then the chances that the MOSS deployment will fail are a lot higher!!