Take a look @ the Best Practices web site(s) (http://service.sap.com/bestpractices) and (http://help.sap.com/bp_bl604/BL_US/html/index.htm for US Baseline). These sites will point you to an OSS note for the quick guide. READ THAT GUIDE. It is important. For the US baseline, you can find the quick guide by the following:
1. Launch a browser to http://help.sap.com/bp_bl604/BL_US/html/index.htm
2. From the left hand nav, go to Explore & Evaluate-->Activation
3. In the "Implementation Information" area you'll see a link to the Quick Guide
My reccomendation would be to build up a reference system (not your real development environment) to run through the activation first. This will get you used to the Solution Builder and walk you through what you can and cannot personalize during the activation. Once you get familiar with the process, then you can move on to your development environment. The best practices are a pretty good resource for using the SAP system the way that SAP has designed the system to be used. They are a great way to jump start your implementation by getting you to a usable baseline system that you can use to iterate on with your business folks.
A couple other notes that are good to read prior to getting started are 1564115 & 1225909 for general info on how to go about implementing Best Practices.
