The SharePoint Application Life Cycle

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Figure 1 illustrates the stages in a typical life cycle for a Windows SharePoint Services application.

Figure 1
SharePoint application life cycle

When you plan your deployment and upgrading strategy, consider each stage of this cycle. For example, you need to understand how the application will be used, how you will develop the application, how you will package it for deployment, and how you will manage data that is maintained in different environments. The following are other issues to consider:

• Will you ever need to upgrade this application?
• Will you only need to add functionality without changing the existing functionality?
• Will you package this application for broad distribution over multiple application versions, for example as an independent software vendor (ISV), or across the enterprise?
• Do you control all sites where the application is deployed?
• Do you need to preserve customizations from version to version?
• What is the governance model? For example, consider the following:
  • Do you have sensitive data that developers should not access?
  • Can you make changes in production as part of the development process?

A Typical Development, Testing and Deployment Topology

Figure 2 illustrates a typical topology for companies that do not use a Web content management system.

Figure 2
A typical topology

This topology is comprised of the following environments and servers:

• The development and build environment. The development and test teams use the development and build environment to develop, build, unit test, and validate the application before deploying it to the test team for functional and integration testing. For more information, see the Team Development Overview.
• Test environment. The test team uses the test environment to perform functional testing, performance testing, and integration testing. This environment can contain more than one server and it can also contain multiple configurations if the actual target environment is not known. Several applications at different stages of completion can be simultaneously tested in the test environment.
• Staging. The staging environment resembles the production environment as closely as possible. It tests the deployment of an application before a live deployment. Only production-ready applications should be deployed to a staging environment. The staging environment can be eliminated for smaller applications with lower governance requirements.
• Production. The production environment is the environment within which released applications operate.

Web Content Management

A Web content management system is essential for managing content-oriented sites that are of an enterprise or Internet scale. The topologies of these larger sites and the approaches to managing them are more complex than those required to manage applications for smaller companies. For example, larger-scale, content-oriented applications require at least one authoring environment as part of their topology. Many of the techniques outlined in this documentation can be applied to larger sites, but they are not sufficient in those cases. If this is your situation, see Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007 on TechNet for an in-depth discussion of Web content management.

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This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.

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