| When I started working as a developer few years ago I imagined that I would spend all my days designing and coding complex enterprise solutions. As time passed I realized that significant part of any developer’s time is dedicated to deployment, google-ing the issues and bug fixing.
No matter how perfectly a solution works on your machine there comes a time when this solution should be migrated to the end user's server and should function just as perfectly on their environment. I found for myself that deploying SharePoint solutions could be quite challenging especially when working alone on a clients’ site. There are some bullet points to be followed in order to avoid the explanation to your project managers - ‘But this worked so fine on my machine...”. In my practice I try to test the piece of work both in isolation from other components and integrated in the whole environment. Each new functionality might easily break a whole site no matter if it is custom code or styling change. It is also highly advisable to make a list of any exotic steps you take in the process of getting something working as you will need to replicate them on the client’s environment. It could be anything - changing access permissions, changing application pool settings, changing a master page – just make a note of it as you do not want to reinvent it when you are deploying to the live box! Another challenge is how to organize all post-deployment processes. A SharePoint solution would generally require some lists or subsites to be created or master page to be changed or web parts to be added onto a page. In case you are the one who is deploying and configuring you would easily set these up. However in some cases you just send a solution installer file and client is responsible to get it running. In that scenario you have the option to provide your client with a long comprehensive user guide what and how to configure and be almost 100% sure that end user will get something wrong. Instead I am trying to encapsulate in the solution as much of these post-deployment steps as possible. Within relatively short time and some efforts you could complete almost any post-deployment task in custom C# code and make deployment process less error-prone.
So challenges in deployment process are numerous , it’s up to us to make it as smooth as possible and afterwards keep fingers crossed that our clients will like their new solution as much as we do.  | Raya Markova - Consultant Creative SharePoint |
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