Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

10.6 Global Deployment Considerations 211

Chapter 10

volumes. Every content index is its own database, stored in a location that

can be changed with command line tools, but as such is slightly tricky to exe-

cute. You should instead follow a generous guideline and reserve about 50

percent of the content indexed for the index corpus.

If you’re used to sizing index servers for the previous version of Share-

Point, you’ll be glad to know that SharePoint index propagation now oper-

ates on a continuous basis, as we’ve mentioned earlier on in the book.

Therefore, you no longer need to reserve double the size of the corpus on the

search servers.

10.6 Global Deployment Considerations

We live in an exceedingly globalized world, so it’s not unusual for most of us

to work in distributed work environments, emphasizing the need for good

collaboration. For example, I’m writing this chapter in Ireland, while Kevin

is going to review it in Scotland and pass it to Emer in California. To work

efficiently, we must use the collaboration tools to work across time zones and

great distances.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that most SharePoint deployments must

consider how to best serve the collaboration requirements of the global work-

force. This might include simply hosting the services in a centralized network

hub and ensuring that the latency and bandwidth meet the needs for the

remote users. However, exceedingly today we must also consider the lan-

guage requirements a global deployment dictates.

10.6.1 Addressing Multiple Languages

If you are considering hosting services for multiple regions from a centralized

deployment, you will likely have to provide regionalized services for different

countries. Regionalizing SharePoint deployment ranges from time zone and

character set modifications all the way to fully translated site templates.

WSS allows any number of the languages supported by Office to be

installed on the same server with downloadable language packs, which must

installed on each of the WFE servers in your deployment. In addition to the

language packs that come with the necessary translated SharePoint tem-

plates, you need to configure the underlying operating system with the nec-

essary language files, such as keyboard files, fonts, and Input Method

Editors (IMEs).

MOSS 2007 multilingual support has been vastly improved from the

previous (frankly dismal) story in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which only

supported one language per installation. Now MOSS actually adds, on top of

all the supported multilingual features of WSS, extra features and templates.