Phase 1 - Plan
A successful Microsoft® Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition configuration requires a clearly articulated vision. By thoroughly examining and planning your configuration before installation, you can significantly increase the efficiency and availability of your service, and ensure that your planning is accurately reflected in future phases of the project.
There are four steps in the planning phase:
- Establish a vision for your project.
- Create profiles for your users, the site, and the hardware.
- Determine performance targets for your site.
- Design the architecture.
The planning phase is critical to the success of your project. To ensure that you have all the essential information you need, we strongly recommend that you include the following personnel in the planning process:
- Company executives
- Marketing
- Sales
As you collect answers to the Planning Questionnaire, you begin to develop profiles for your users, the site, the hardware, performance targets, and architectural diagrams:
- User profile: The frequency of interaction users have with the site, such as how many times they access your home page and over what span of time, or how many catalog searches they make each time they visit your site.
- Site profile: The size of databases and Web pages, the number of unique pages included in the site, and how many users are contained in the Membership Directory.
- Hardware profile: A budget for the hardware to be used by this project.
- Performance targets: The desired maximum delay for returning the bulk of the Web pages, including any throughput goals based on another site or other benchmarks. You should also plan how to relate the user profile to simultaneous user connections or concurrent users.
- Service-to-service architecture: Site architecture should include network diagrams to describe the bandwidth necessary to support the planned throughput, and event-sequence charts to map the flow of requests through the various systems so you can view potential bottlenecks. Generating these diagrams in the earliest planning phase can highlight difficult-to-envision problems and bottlenecks.
To plan upgrades to an existing site, use the Site Evaluation and Tuning Kit and the Microsoft Complete Commerce Toolkit.
To help you through the planning phase, we have provided a number of other sample planning documents, as well as tools and other resources: