Sure Step Online Project Wizard – Architecture Overview and Benefits
In Sure Step, projects are a collection of documents, tools and templates that follow the Sure Step implementation methodology. When creating a new project, Sure Step Online Project Wizard will always retrieve the latest content ensuring that project documents are up to date. As the documents reside on SharePoint, it enables easy collaboration of the whole project team.
Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Online Project Wizard is a SharePoint hosted Silverlight application which harnesses the power of both SharePoint and cloud-based content storage. It can be hosted either on your local SharePoint 2010 environment or on SharePoint Online.
After a simple one time process for manually deploying the Project Wizard to the desired SharePoint environment described in the User Guide, Sure Step project can be created on the same site collection or any other accessible locally. (If the site collection resides on another SharePoint farm or web application additional configuration of the destination web application is required. This will be described in one of the later posts.)
Each time a Project Wizard is started it retrieves the configuration information and checks for compatibility. Only if a new version is required (which actually means that there were significant changes to the Sure Step content metadata model) a user will have to download the latest version and redeploy it to the destination SharePoint environment before continuing with the project creation.
Project Wizard retrieves the latest content metadata and generates the options offered in the wizard itself. Content as well as all the options offered in the Project Wizard are dynamically loaded from the Sure Step Online content repository. This enables seamless update of the Sure Step content, addition of new tools and templates, new solutions, project types and languages. This architecture ensures that each time a project is created using the wizard, it will contain the latest content available from Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Online without the need to regularly download and install client and content updates (which can be around 400MB for each language).
The Sure Step content is categorized into seven (industry related) solutions, six Dynamics product lines, five project types for implementation engagement type and numerous accelerators for diagnostic phase and optimization offering. An inventory of more than 750 tools and templates are available for use on each project with partial translation in nine languages. Projects are created for a specific Solution, Dynamics Product, Engagement type and a selected Project Type or accelerator. New project contains copies of all Sure Step documents applicable to selected criteria.
Sure Step Online Project Wizard can be deployed on the following environments:
- Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
- Microsoft SharePoint Online
More info and the links to resources can be found here.
