SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

FOREWORD

I have had the fortunate opportunity to lead the SharePoint Technical Product Management team from SharePoint 2003 to the SharePoint 2010 launch. Over the years, I've seen SharePoint evolve into a rich collaboration platform that has the capability to transform a company. It can help users work together, share information, find data, and build applications. It's a modern platform that has improved organizational productivity across small, medium, and large businesses worldwide. It's a popular replacement for technologies such as Lotus Notes, Documentum, and Windows file shares. And, although it has a lot of potential, it's really important to carefully plan for a successful deployment and end-user adoption.

One of the most common challenges I saw with early SharePoint adopters a few years ago was “under the desk” deployments. Individuals would deploy SharePoint on a single box under their desks, invite many people and departments, and then run into all kinds of issues pertaining to governance. Many people blamed SharePoint, when the real challenge was a lack of planning. This resulted in performance and governance challenges for customers. In SharePoint 2010, a lot of great IT professional and end-user features are available that help you with governance. But, at the end of the day, features can only help. It's important to carefully plan your deployment.

A SharePoint architect must think across multiple dimensions, including hardware, storage, network capacity, and configuration, ...