SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

4

Design Principles for Successful Deployments

By Ian Morrish

As the title of this chapter suggests, design principles are key to delivering a successful SharePoint project. The role of a SharePoint solution architect is critical not only to creating the solution architecture and how it is implemented, but to ensuring that the design principles used are appropriate for the desired solution. A one-size-fits-all approach cannot be used for many aspects of the design.

A SharePoint solutions architect must have a good understanding of the project requirements, and be able to map these requirements to the SharePoint platform. This chapter highlights some of the design principles and requirements for a solution. In particular, you learn about the following:

• Determining the desired solution
• Determining solution characteristics
• Understanding SharePoint management
• Designing for storage
• Designing for governance
• Designing for IT
• Designing for users
• Designing for information workers
• Designing the information architecture
• Involving key users in the design process

DETERMINING THE DESIRED SOLUTION

Many factors determine the most appropriate design for a project that relies on SharePoint as the foundation and, depending on the type of solution, will require different approaches and skills. Microsoft describes SharePoint's capabilities based on the tenants of sites, communities, content, search, insights, and composites. However, businesses usually want to deploy SharePoint based on business ...