Just before we all went on our well deserved Christmas break we at Zipper finally released our Deployment Module built on SharePoint (WSS/Moss).
The name of the solution might be a bit confusing and might change over time, but for now we have decided to keep it as it’s built as a module to our ZervicePoint but it can be installed separately.

So what is it?
Imagine that you have a change- or roll out- project in front of you were you need to co-ordinate the migration or implementation for all your end users. In many cases this is thousands of users that need to be scheduled in a detailed project plan. Hopefully you have also thought of communicating the change so that the end users are well prepared. Even though we are now in 2009 this is incredible often handled with Microsoft Excel or likewise and a lot of manual work.
So what we have done is that we have built in our long time experience on how to co-ordinate these kind of projects, created a couple of supporting Workflows and packed it into a SharePoint Solution.

I have to say that it’s a very neat solution were you can import all your users, group the users into deployment groups and then with help from Workflows handle the communication to send personal emails, calendar invitation (very useful to schedule the users in e.g. a client migration) or even send them information via Text messages to their cell phones (used in some cases to send new password). All these types of communication material could of course be added directly to the site by e.g. the communication manager and yes, it supports as many languages as you need and it includes variable substitution so that the mail can include the end users migration date or unique person to contact.

In addition you can also add new custom workflows and by doing that you have to possibility to do more or less anything you want. An example could be that you are running an AD migration project and need to move the user in the AD so that the user gets new GPO policies. This could be done with the Deployment Module.

The package comes as a self extracting SharePoint solution and since much of it is built on standard SharePoint stuff you could see it as a heavily customized site template with extra features.

I will upload some screen shots within short so that you can get a better understanding of what it can do.