How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

If SharePoint Server 2007 is your solution, then your staff will be
roughly equivalent to Exchange Server or any other enterprise
application. But, if SharePoint is a solution AND a platform, then you
will need several more people - admins, power users, designers, and
developers. Think about SAP or PeopleSoft staffing numbers if it will be
your total solution.

If you are migrating a medium to large implementation and new to the
technology, a 2 day design engagement with a SharePoint Server 2007 MVP
would help you significantly in the long-run.

Thank you this is very interesting. I'll check out the training.

It depends...how big is the deployment, how many users, is it a distributed
deployment (multi server/multi geo), is it WSS or MOSS, what do you intend
porting across from the existing .net apps?

I'm estimating over 30,000K users, some anonymous access. I would say 60+
collection sites. It is currently a med server farm 2003. Want to do both MOSS
and WSS 3.

We intend to migrate only a few apps, but primarily build new ones as the
requirements come in that are "sharepoint" friendly with the ability to do it
all in the site. I question the "optimization" of it all since calling large
sums of data like using Business Intelligence tools are really slowing the
portal down.

Can you share any of your orgs info?

in my opinion, it largely depends on the level of "adoption" of sharepoint in
your environment, how the portal  technology is being used and what the present
or desired "value" is that your business needs.

Example: if "Search" alone is important to your business, then it could
potentially require a full-time low/mid level dedicated administrator to get the
results desired and the value.

Let me ask you a question, how many are on your SharePoint staff right now?
(supporting your 2003/v2 environment)

Right now I have 7 asp.net developers and 2 DBA's. However, we've
only started learning portal  in the last year (maybe 2 of the 7 apps
dev are doing list based dev solutions, they try to troubleshoot
search issues with MS Premiere). Now as we've grown Sharepoint to be
our business enterprise solution, we have less asp.net dev and more
built in the sharepoint framework.

Hence the need for a portal engineer/administrator has become a big
challenge to demonstrate to management. Search is very important to
us and I try to explain that is something an engineer does and not a
apps dev.

What size farm and sites do you have? I'm looking to justify a team
to support  60+ site collections on a med farm.

We have a medium farm (2 FEWs/search, 1 IDX/JOB and a dedicated 2-node
A/P SQL Cluster)

12 portals (shared services)

4,500+ user profiles

98 Audiences

500+ alerts

90 Site Collections (3000+sites - including MySites)

7150 webs

31,173 lists

296,235 list items

Again, there is no single "right" way to do SharePoint either implement,
configure or support. It is largely dependent on the type of business
and the other factors I mentioned in my previous email.

In our farm, we strictly control the provisioning of Site Collections to
the business. In order for a business user to obtain a Site Collection,
they must complete some training that we put together on a training page
and fill out some paperwork.

Once a site is provisioned to a user, "THEY" become the admin for that
site and are responsible for its administration and content.

However, there is still a need for one  or more to administer SharePoint
itself from the Technology, IT, Architecture, Configuration perspective
- I do not see a way around this as of yet. The world has not invented
software that can install, configure, backup/restore and administer
itself yet... maybe in the future and the Corporate penny pinchers will
celebrate in delight to be rid of the nasty IT Admin.