Don’t: Don’t be surprised when the groupware system finds quirks in your environment or when your environment creates quirks with the groupware system. A complex system such as this will sometimes react slightly differently in each environment. Most of the issues you find will be small, but you will need to be willing to work with them or work around them.

Do: Perform internal alpha and beta test phases before implementation to discover the quirks that might occur in your specific network environment. Alpha testing should be done in a lab environment separate from the production system. Experienced and inexperienced users should run through written test matrices, and report whether the outcome of common procedures is as expected.

Beta tests should be performed with a limited roll-out on the production system. Choose a small workgroup of users who are willing to go through training, use the product, and report any problems they may find. Survey the users at the end of the beta period to gather information they may not have reported during the beta.

These extra steps of alpha and beta testing are, believe it or not, very beneficial. When I first participated in a roll-out that included these tests, I thought they were unnecessary roadblocks to the actual implementation. However, every time these testing procedures were followed, we found issues that were much easier to deal with before full implementation. Many times we discovered show-stopping bugs, reported them to the manufacturer, and received a field test patch within a few days allowing us to proceed. Very few users were impacted by the problems because they were discovered in the testing phase.

In short, many IT professionals act as though there is never enough time to test, but plenty of time to troubleshoot…that is until they find themselves in the throes of debugging a poorly implemented production system. Real users are a lot more critical and unforgiving than beta testers, so make sure that you don’t short change the testing portion of your deployment plan.