Best practice for easy deployment of multiple solutions

Question

One of our product will consist of multiple SharePoint solutions. Now we're wondering what would be the best way to provide an easy deployment to our customers? At the moment we deploy each solution by hand, which is OK during development process but not acceptable for our customers.

For your information, we're using VSeWSS 1.3 for development and solution packaging.

So how do you offer your solutions to your customers? Do you write installation scripts using STSADM commands? What other options do we have?

Answer 1

WSPBuilder

Personally I use WSPBuilder for packaging and find it much easier to work with than VSeWSS. However if VSeWSS is working for you then that's great.

One of many the benefits I found of using WSPBuilder is that it's easy to integrate into a build system. It's just a simple, but clever, commandline tool.

Batch File

For deploying multiple SharePoint solutions to our customers I usually provide a batch file that contains the necessary STSADM command and prompts them to enter any environment specific data i.e. site collection urls etc...

SharePoint Solution Installer

There is also a nice GUI installer,called SharePoint Solution Installer, that you can use in-conjunction with SharePoint solution files. Check it out it might suit your needs.
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SAF - SharePoint Action Framework

It's worth pointing out SAF; which is an extremely comprehensive framework that can automate installation and configuration tasks, using either MSBuild, Powershell, Stsadm or a custom SharePoint feature.

Answer 2

We just use plain old batch/cmd files. If you need to "productize" this, just wrap up all solutions in a selfextracting rar package and have it run the batch file after unpacking.

Answer 3

Stick to Microsoft products. Powerbuilder is being groomed to gradually take over from STSADM for this type of task. In a farm scenario (remember, yours may have to grow over time), this would be the tool to use to push out solutions to all front-end Web servers.

EDIT:

MS are preparing a final version of VSE 1.3 to ease the migration of 2007 solutions to the 2010 environment.

Answer 4

Have you looked at Microsoft SharePoint Designer?

not sure if it will do all you need, but it does allow you to package sites or individual objects that you can then run on another SharePoint install.