For many of those that are planning, have deployed or are monitoring their SharePoint projects, Microsoft offers 3 SharePoint Solution Accelerators that will help your team in each of these areas.

SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool - allows IT professionals to inventory all of the computers in the network and identify servers that have SharePoint installed on them. The information gathered by the tool is used to generate reports that give IT the information it needs to bring the servers under its control. This allows the resources of the ever-changing SharePoint environment to be optimized and adjusted as needed.

SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool - a general-purpose modeling tool that complements SharePoint’s deployment planning documentation. With this tool and the analysis it provides, you can get a head start on planning your SharePoint topology. After you provide the tool with basic information about your organization, the tool provides a first approximation of the topology your organization needs.

SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit - works with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor the health state of the components in a SharePoint environment that affect performance and availability.  When there is an issue that may cause service or performance degradation, Operations Manager 2007 uses the management packs to detect the issue, alert system administrators to its existence, and facilitate diagnosis and corrective action.  The elements that they monitor include Timer service, Tracing service, Search service, Events, IIS and related Events, SQL Server database-related event and Server performance.

External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint - a collection of software and guidance that you can use to easily deploy a SharePoint-based environment for collaboration with people outside your firewall. The accelerator allows users to create collaboration environments that use the familiar SharePoint interface. Because the solution is easy to use, end users are more likely to use it rather than revert to email.