SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Services in support of MS

[Andy Hollis]

The question I have is more what is the recommended best practice. We are
currently running MS Project Server 2003 and have SharePoint Services
installed on the same server. We are not currently using the team web sites
that are generated automatically by MS Project at plan publishing. But we
will be starting to capture project related documents soon.

We are now going to roll out the full blown SharePoint Portal Server
environment for document control, collaboration and team web sites
management. What are the pros and cons of having MS Project Server use
SharePoint Portal Server rather than just SharePoint Services and are there
any gotchas to watch out for?

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Andy:

Project Server doesn't use or talk to SharePoint Portal server. Both Portal
Server and Project Server rely on Windows SharePoint Services for the
underlying document management capabilities. Typically what companies want
to do is have their team sites searchable through the intranet portal.

 

[Andy Hollis]

First of all thanks for your reply. I guess what we are struggling with is
whether or not to have Project Server have a separate instance of SharePoint
Services or to consolidate all our SharePoint activity on one environment.
What go tus to here is installing Porject Server with SHarePoint Services
first and now trying to deploy the Portal Server environment on different
physical servers. Any ideas abotu that?

Thanks!

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Andy:

There's a good white paper in the knowledge base about deploying Project
Server and Portal Server on the same hardware. Whether this is a good idea
or not, depends on the service load you intend to give your server and its
ability to deliver.

 

[jonathan_sofer.....]

Andy,

The advantage of using SharePoint services is that each project plan
can have a WSS site automatically provisioined for it in which team
members can collaborate on Issues, Risks and Documents. Another big
plus is that those Issues, Risks and Documents can be linked directly
to projects or tasks withing projects.

The weakness of WSS is that you cannot get visibility across WSS sites
for Issues, Rissk and Documents. Once solution is to use Sharepoin
Portal Services like you are considering. Another solution is to write
SQL Reporting Service reports. They kind of look like Crystal Reports
and can query the SQL database and create reports for Issues, Risks and
Documents across WSS sites. SQL Reproting Services comes free with SQL
Server but requires a developer to write the reports.

Jonathan Sofer

 

[greyrabbit]

Im new in SharePoint Portal and need to know if it is easy to set it up to
achieve the visibility across WSS (on issue etc). Is it more like
plug-and-play kind of setup? and what is the estimated man-effort (assumed
average skill on SharePoint Portal)? TIA