SharePoint Staging to Production Environment
Creating SharePoint® elements in live production environment presents challenges in maintaining quality assurance and content continuity. When a SharePoint site is developed or updated with new content, functionality or design elements, best practices dictate that it be tested in a pre-live testing environment before it goes to production. It then needs to be deployed in a reliable and timely fashion on the different SharePoint production servers or farms. This process includes both sites and assemblies (Web Parts, site templates, custom list templates), as well as artifacts (master pages, workflows, CSS sheets).
RepliWeb Operational Synchronization for SharePoint® (ROSS) provides multi-stage deployments and multi-farm replication for enterprise SharePoint environments.
Consider the following SharePoint content deployment scenarios:
Tiered Architecture
A critical component of larger-scale SharePoint implementations is the need to incorporate a tiered architecture – development, testing, staging and production. At the very least, organizations that are concerned with quality assurance and content continuity should implement "test" environments. For example, the incorporation of functional elements, developed in-house or by external partners, into current content and application frameworks should first be “applied” in non production environments to ensure viability– and then published to production when validated and ready.
Timed Deployment of Functional SharePoint Elements
Existing SharePoint functionality allows for adding content to the live site, then manually enabling / disabling it as desired. This approach often proves problematic for sensitive or timely content (marketing campaigns, sensitive corporate announcements) that needs to be deployed at a specific point in time.
ROSS enhances and extends native tools, offering a traditional development to production solution that enables SharePoint administrators to control, schedule and distribute content, code, visual and functional releases into production or DMZ environments.
KEY ROSS FEATURES:
- Logical Replication - Agnostic to hardware or database environments; replicate between different database tiers; replicate between MOSS and WSS in various configurations; single site to a farm, etc…
- Comprehensive Replication - Content, content types, structure, galleries, web parts, permissions, views, and navigation elements. No need to manually create sites or site collections on target prior to replication.
- Granular Replication - Browse and select replicate - Site collection or individual sites
- Guaranteed Integrity - Transfer Recovery at block level and Transactional updates
- Automation – Scheduled, Pre/Post, or On-exit command execution.
- Optimized Transfer Engines – Enhanced transfer for Large Files, including compression and bandwidth control
- Secure - SSL Encryption & Authentication.
- Web User Interface - A web-based interface enabling non-privileged users to launch preconfigured jobs and publish approved content.
