SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

5

Learning How Microsoft Uses SharePoint 2010

By Sam Hassani, Jim Adams, Scott Kleven

The Microsoft ecosystem encompasses a globally distributed workforce comprised of 180,000 full-time employees and vendors, which can be further broken down into four classes of users as follows:

• Office Dweller (40 percent full-time employees)
• Campus Nomad (40 percent full-time employees)
• Remote Users (20 percent of full-time employees)
• Business Partners (approximately 100,000 in total)

Microsoft's worldwide SharePoint deployment consists of approximately 35 TB of content distributed between three data centers located in Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. This content is made up from a number of different farms containing just under 200,000 site collections and more than 485,000 subsites.

This chapter takes a look at how the vastness of this SharePoint deployment not only allows the dynamic workforce to collaborate and work more efficiently, but provides the breadth and depth of testing for the product group to incorporate feedback from early adopters into final product releases. This discussion focuses on how an internal process known as dogfooding allows Microsoft to achieve this. This chapter also looks at some of the best practices and lessons learned internally at Microsoft when considering Business Continuity Management, virtualization, and governance at this scale.

KEY SITES AND SERVICES

Microsoft IT (MSIT) provides a full range of SharePoint hosting services (intranet and extranet) for all ...