SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

INTRODUCTION

By Brian Wilson

MICROSOFT COLLABORATION and companion development technologies have really come a long way over the past 20 years. Over this time, many different technologies have come and gone in the blink of an eye. Others have built up momentum, improving with each new version, providing valuable new features to meet the ever-increasing digital demands of the age in which we live.

One such technology that has done this brilliantly is SharePoint 2010. SharePoint is a culmination of more than 20 years of continual research and investment by Microsoft. Each new version has improved on the previous version, and provided a plethora of new features to incorporate into deployments of SharePoint. With each new version of SharePoint, the knowledge required to design successful deployments has grown astronomically.

In addition, from a design and architecture perspective, learning SharePoint 2010 is a huge undertaking that touches so many specializations. This makes it really difficult for an aspiring architect to understand what knowledge and skills are required to design solutions for SharePoint 2010. The result has been a tendency by SharePoint specialists to learn and focus on a subset of the capabilities of SharePoint 2010, and even then with a business adoption, design, infrastructure, developer, testing, or governance orientation, but not on the overall SharePoint solution provided to customers.

An increased breadth of architectural knowledge and a better understanding ...