This is off topic, but given my recent posts about SharePoint for legal project management,[1] I found Mark Gerow's recently article in Law Technology News about virtualizing SharePoint for law firm deployments to be quite timely.[2] Mr. Gerow heads the application development team at Fenwick & West.
Mr. Gerow does not discuss how or why Fenwick & West uses SharePoint. He instead focuses on the benefits of virtualizing SharePoint extranets and the challenges faced and overcome when migrating from physical to virtual servers. The article is refreshingly detailed and should be of interest to law firm IT managers currently running SharePoint on physical servers.
[1] Paul C. Easton, SharePoint for Legal Project Management--A Retrospective, Legal Project Management, Jan. 7, 2010, http://legalprojectmanagement.info/2010/01/sharepoint-for-legal-project-management--a-retrospective.html (last visited on Jan. 9, 2010); Paul C. Easton, Caselawg: Bringing SharePoint to Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management, January 7, 2010http://legalprojectmanagement.info/2010/01/caselawg-bringing-sharepoint-to-legal-project-management.html (last visited January 9, 2010).
[2] Mark Gerow, Virtualizing SharePoint, Law Technology News, Jan. 08, 2010, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202437644142&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=LTN&pt=Law%20Technology%20News&cn=20100108&kw=Virtualizing%20SharePoint (last visited on Jan. 9 2010).
I'd like to note that Fenwick is a Caselawg user since 2007 for their Litigation Support Group. The emphasis being that many firms have dedicated resources for SharePoint because it's used for many purposes in firms more importantly to date than litigation support. It becomes very economical for a firm that has SharePoint resources in place to purchase third party applications they they can support in house.
Thanks for pointing this out. Are you finding that many of your users are vitualizing their SharePoint extranets?