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Setting Up a Development Environment

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pholmes1234

Programmer
Mar 20, 2007
1
US
I'm new to Sharepoint. What's the best approach to set up a development/test environmet for an existing site?
 
This really depends on several questions. I will try to address most scenarios.

If the environment is for unit code testing, user acccpetance testing, release managment and new code deployment? Answers to these questions will determine several different solutions. How much custom code development will occur on SharePoint? Are we developing custom web parts?

Setup the test environment utilizing virtual servers so that your SharePoint binary files, server farm are located on one server and your databases are located in another. If your production environment's topology is such that you have these two server seperated I would try to mirror the development environment as closely as possible. Use the same naming convetions so that imports and exports can be done using the SharePoint command line utility stsadm. Stsadm utility is a great way to keep these environments consistant.

Do not load SharePoint using the express version of SQL, unless this is what you are running in production. Future databse testing should be performed where database environments are consistant.

In our environment we have three instances of SP. One production, one testing, and one sandbox. We use the sandbox for teh higher risk testing, experimenting and knowledge sharing. We use the development for unit code testing, final user acceptance etc...then we deploy to production when appropriate.

Hope that helps - Joe
 
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