Before you hire your SharePoint deployment company you should ask certain crucial questions to ensure that you are choosing the right company to deploy SharePoint in your organisation.
The first and the most important question that you should ask your software company is their experience level as an organisation in terms of the number of years they have been dealing with SharePoint.
Secondly, you must also check for the average experience level of the experts that will be engaged in the deployment of SharePoint in your organisation. This is a very important question because as a software company they may have several years of experience, but the professionals that are present at the time of deployment of SharePoint in your organisation, may just be newbies in SharePoint. This will certainly become an area of concern during the implementation stages. So it is best to establish the average experience level of the individual software professionals that will be engaged in the deployment of SharePoint in your organisation.
Thirdly you should ask the versions they work with and make sure that they specialise in the version that you would like to deploy in your organisation.
Fourthly, you should ask your SharePoint deployment company for a detailed picture of the required hardware and software. You must also make sure that you understand the cost involved in having the required hardware and software in place.
You should be clear about the nature and the duration of SharePoint support you will get from your deployment company. Once you deploy SharePoint 2007 in your company, you will have to live with it day in and day out and you are likely to run in to problems. The answers to “when you do run into such problems how do you deal with them” and “who you will be running to for help”, should be established before you venture into SharePoint 2007 deployment. Many companies struggle in this area because they get inadequate SharePoint support from their software company either because their software company has insufficient experience or because they lack enough manpower to provide the required support.
Overall cost for the implementation of SharePoint 2007 and subsequent support will be of paramount importance. You must make sure that you understand their pricing structure very clearly before you contract your software company.
Having specific experience in your industry is an added advantage so this should be one of the important questions you should ask your SharePoint deployment company.
Questions on overall timeline for the deployment of SharePoint for the entire organisation and the measures that you would be required to take for seamless integration of SharePoint 2007 for your organisation must be answered.
It is not enough to ask these questions, you should make sure that you get satisfactory response from your SharePoint deployment company.
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