One of the biggest decisions that can determine your ultimate success or failure in implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is how you distribute the deployment. Luckily, our sister site SearchWinIT.com is offering some guidance from SharePoint expert Joel Oleson, who just published a tip about the three distribution models for implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server: centralized, regional and distributed.

Oleson’s tip is aimed at IT admins who are planning SharePoint deployments, but his advice works just as well for the solutions providers these admins often hire.

You may be thinking that centralized SharePoint deployments — where one site hosts all the SharePoint services, and users access them over the WAN — are the way to go with all of your customers, because they’re the easiest to manage. But when you factor in how network latency and bandwidth utilization can affect performance, as Oleson points out, you may want to consider another option.

Or you might want to go with the distributed approach — where every branch office has its own SharePoint deployment — because it’s the most simple to implement. But when you consider the inefficiency of having separate storage and maintenance at each site, that may not be the way to go either.

Oleson takes you through the questions you and your customers should be asking before implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, so you’re not stuck wishing you had asked them later. Check out his tip, and while you’re at it, take our SharePoint quiz and read about the best practices for implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

This guy is tight with HP insiders. And knee-jerk doubts aside, the idea is not so farfetched. Please note: I know nothing more about a potential deal than what this guy is saying. But, let’s think about it a second.
For one thing, HP has a big SAP services business. For another, ERP is not new to HP which used to field its own ERP for itty-bitty little customers like General Electric. It was called MM3000. Or MM-3000.

In the past few years huge software companies—Microsoft, IBM, Oracle—were all rumored to be interested in SAP. Microsoft was even forced, by an Oracle court filing, to admit it considered and dismissed the idea of buying SAP. OLarry Ellison must have loved causing that particular kerfuffle.)

The very notion that SAP, a huge software company, has been in play shows the impact of Oracle’s multibillion-dollar-purchases of PeopleSoft/JD Edwards and Siebel Systms, have changed the landscape. Or, looked at another way, it shows how the enterprise software landscape has forced Oracle to drive an unbelievable amount of consolidation.

So, as SAP unveils its A1S hosted ERP service for the mid-market this week, keep this notion of an HP-SAP combo in the back of your mind.

Let me know: Would SAP/HP be a winning combo? Or just another megadeal made in Wall Street

Barbara Darrow, a Boston-area journalist, can be reached at badarrow@comcast.net.