4.1 Design Workshops

Before you start the design phase and workshops, you must complete the assessment phase, in its entirety. This is covered in detail in Section 2.0, Performing Pre-Design Activities.

The first thing you must do during the design phase is to work with the teams across the organization to identify who is responsible for what, and identify how to structure the design teams and schedule the meetings to get everyone with a stake in the project in a room to flesh out the details of the design elements. Plan to break down the design into manageable chunks, then put it all together as you develop the detailed design document and infrastructure architecture diagrams.

Conducting design workshops is the best way to consider each of these individual elements of the overall design. A workshop is an informal gathering of all individuals that have a stake in the success of that particular element, where you use a detailed agenda to direct the discussion.

For example:

Topics for design activities should include, but are not limited to, the following:

  1. Infrastructure topics, including Management Zone configuration, user sources, role-based administrative accounts, folder structure, and placement of services. The overall infrastructure layout should be developed with the most senior members of the customer's IT departments.

  2. Device discovery and agent deployment.

  3. Migration tactics, if applicable.

  4. Software packaging.

  5. Software delivery.

  6. Device and user policies.

  7. Inventory gathering and reporting.

  8. OS deployment, including consolidation of existing OS images (for example, Universal Imaging).

  9. Remote control capabilities.

  10. Database design, including maintenance, performance, scalability, fault tolerance, backup, and restore procedures.

  11. Administrative roles, including individual roles required by the customer, and identifying who is required to have an assigned administrative account with what level of access.

It is important that everyone involved agrees on each of the individual design elements. If you do not have consensus, you will likely face deviation from the design in the future. The objective of this phase is to build a solid design for the overall infrastructure that is based on best practices outlined by Novell. Every intricacy of the design needs to be well documented because this will be a reference during the deployment and long after the deployment is completed.