The planning team needs to perform some final steps before handing off a template deployment plan to the deployment team. They need to do the architectural design and provide guidance to the deployment team as to what servers go where, how servers should be configured (basic server sizing), and what network capabilities need to go where.

They also need to define who from each of the technical groups represented in the planning team is going to act as the subject matter expert in each of the areas represented. Taking the knowledge of the plan first hand into implementation is one of the best ways to ensure that there is a direct transition from planning to deployment.

The Planning Tool helps with the transition process as well. It will output Office Visio diagrams of your completed infrastructure. The Litware team decides to take advantage of this ability.

This diagram provides a framework from which to refine the architecture of Office Communications Server for Litware. The networking and the server teams should drill down into more specifics. The server team will need to communicate real-world data figures for IM traffic, conferencing traffic, and (with input from the telephony team) the Enterprise Voice traffic to the networking team. The networking team will need to determine the expected network bandwidth requirements to support the additional load on the network. These calculations are based on metrics defined in the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Planning Guide. The results from this network capacity planning should be helpful for the telephony team to plan for additional phone trunks if necessary.

Most companies already have hardware standards in place. Litware is no exception to this, and they are fortunate to have standards beyond what the recommendations call for. The information that was gathered through the Planning Tool provides for a strong basis for determining number and suggested configuration for servers. The server team defines the hardware requirements based on their existing standards but does not change the quantity of recommended servers. They believe that by exceeding the requirements, the servers will remain sufficient for the company’s needs up to the three-year cycle that is currently dictated by their policy for server hardware refresh.