I'm sure many of you have read through the loads of technet resources, planning guides and books to work out what is the best way to start planning your SharePoint deployment.

So before I get into that, what is the Best Practice (BP) approach?

Whilst this varies from company to company, I'm glad Microsoft have recently released a consolidated view to simplify BP for SharePoint which looks great, but how does this new publication fit into the mix?

I recommend that you look into 3 parts of the planning to measure up your total solution best practice on your SharePoint deployments:

A) Plan right (Best Practice Recommendations)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx

B) The SharePoint Capacity Planning Accelerator (Performance planning)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dbee0227-d4f7-48f8-85f0-e71493b2fd87&DisplayLang=en

C) Best Practice Analyzer Tool (run this after your complete farm deployment to measure how you did)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cb944b27-9d6b-4a1f-b3e1-778efda07df8&displaylang=en