Plan Your Service Offering
In order to plan your reference architecture for a deployment, you need to assess your business, define your business goals with regards to the solution, and then figure out what gaps exist between your current status and the one you wish to achieve.
The traditional Architectural Design Session (ADS) sequence is laid out in brief for you here, with links to specifics for the first step in a phased approach to planning, implementing, and supporting the deployment of Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.5.
Service Offering Planning Steps
Review the Reference Architecture Design. This will provide the general layout of the solution.
Summarize your existing business model and infrastructure.
Review a list of Solution Components.
Summarize your plans for incorporating, including:
What service plans you want to offer; see Sample Service Plans for ideas.
What service-level agreements (SLAs) you want to offer.
Highlight any gaps that will require customization of the solution by creating a gap analysis report.
The overall gap analysis consists of two parts:
Gap analysis - Provides a high-level summary of business or technical requirements that are not met by the standard solution. You should construct a gap analysis table to help record discrepancies between the service provider's business and technical requirements.
System integration analysis - Summarizes all existing systems that will require integration with solution. Also included are systems that may be currently missing but are recommended from the gap analysis. You should construct a system integration analysis table to define how existing systems can be integrated into the proposed solution.
Map your start size and growth plan by using the Information on solution design points, found in the Scalable Hosted Exchange Architecture section.
Compile the following:
Proposed hardware and software bill of materials.
Details of design decisions and supporting reasons.