Designing Effective Logical Architectures and Site Taxonomies

1. Designing Effective Logical Architectures and Site Taxonomies Dan Usher 26 June 2009

2. Agenda • Introduction • Logical Architecture • Taxonomy • Project Planning • Technical Requirements • Scenarios • Conclusion

3. Introduction • Who am I? Dan Usher Booz Allen Hamilton, Associate SharePoint Architect and Implementation Engineer MCP, Security+, MCTS • Who are you?

4. Where I’ve been… • What environments have I worked in? • What have I seen? • What is this talk about?

5. What could go wrong? • Logical Architectures skipped… • Site Collections gone viral… • Site Permissions are confusing… • Where’d my admin access go…. • Information can’t be found… • Search isn’t working right… • System seems to be dragging… Was this system intended for users?

6. System Visioning…

7. What’s a vision look like? • What’s the context of your use for SharePoint? • What are you trying to accomplish with SharePoint? • Do you need to be able to aggregate and roll up data to dashboards? • Do you have a defined organizational hierarchy?

8. Vision components (cont’d) • Are Workflow or Business Process Management tools a need? • Consider the context of your environment and requirements • SharePoint as a Service? • Small order of document library • Large order of Business Intelligence and Excel Services • Medium order of collaboration

9. Stepping into Contextual Thinking… • Considerations, Tradeoffs and Compromises to meet the Context • Assessing the context… …every situation has its circumstances

10. Do you feel like it’s like this?

11. Logical Architecture and Users • Defines the underlying information lifecycle management framework • Impacts usability of information and experience • Defines process flow

12. Logical Architecture • What defines a logical architecture? • Why is a logical architecture important? • How can you really make use of a logical architecture? • What does a logical architecture consist of and look like?

13. What technically makes up a logical architecture? • Web Zones (Intranet, Extranet, Internet, etc.) and Zone Policies • Different Authentication Models • Content Databases • Application Pools • Web Applications • Multiple SSPs • My Sites • Collaborative Team Sites • Secure Content Authoring and Publishing • Site Collections

14. Windows SharePoint Services Example Reference: http://bit.ly/sps-ref-wssLA

15. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Logical Architecture Example Reference: http://bit.ly/sps-ref-mossLA

16. How is your logical architecture affected by your requirements? • Extranet / Public Facing Website • Permissions models • Authentication Schemes • Interoperability with other applications • Silverlight & WCF • How you anticipate your users interacting with your platform

17. What is a taxonomy? • Taxonomy is the science (and art) of classifying a broad range of things. Originally used to classify plants and animals – phylum, genus, species, etc. – taxonomy is now applied to everything from product inventory to web sites. Reference: http://bit.ly/sps-ref-tax

18. SharePoint’s Site Taxonomy • SharePoint Farms • Web Applications • Collections of Site Collections • Collections of Sites • Managed Paths • Nesting Paths / Excluding Paths • Reflection of the Organization • Requires out of the box thinking • Federated Search • Shared Services across Farms

19. What’s that look like?

20. But do I really need a taxonomy? • Why not just deposit everything in a single document library? • Search will solve all my problems… • What document is authoritative? • End User Impact

21. Taxonomy Limitations • Cross Site Collection Navigation • CodeProject.com – Shared Navigation Provider • Content Types & Site Columns • Workflows • Security Groups available through a Site Collection

22. What about permissions? • Well it depends on the site taxonomy… • Inheritance and Breaking it… • …and re-inheriting it • Web Application Policy • Overriding all your other policies… • Defined in a Governance Plan hopefully? • SharePoint Groups • AD / LDAP Groups • Single Users

23. Taxonomy & Logical Architecture – What’s the Bridge? • Site collections and their web applications • Site Collections root container for sites • Web Applications tied to content databases and infrastructure • The design goals for site collections in the model are to satisfy requirements for URL design and to create logical divisions of content.* Reference: http://bit.ly/sps-ref-sc

24. Is there a secret to taxonomy success?

25. Project Plans • How does a project plan fit into logical architectures and taxonomies? • Or rather… • How does a logical architecture and taxonomy fit into a project plan… 

26. Project Plans http://go.spdan.com/hmewo • Microsoft has a project plan for planning…

27. There’s no turning back??? • Critical Mass has been reached… • SharePoint has gone viral…

28. Course Corrections… • Never too late to pin down a way ahead • SharePoint’s flexibility provides for change • Third party management and migration tools • SharePoint Admin Toolkit • Moving to Features rather than WSS v2 webparts • Migrate to a clean environment • Utilize a proxy for access

29. Technical Requirement Considerations • What’s the vision again? What will the platform provide for? • Heavy Collaboration? • WCM Publishing? • Workflow Application Development Platform? • How much content will there be? • How will it be accessed? • What will be the level of usage? • Are we dealing with a cross domain solution? • Do we have SLAs to meet?

30. What are your limitations technically? • Surrounding Infrastructure • AD • Network Capacity • Boundaries • Offline Capability • System Memory • IIS • Number of Web Applications • Number of Identity Pools • Number of sites / site collections

31. Technical limitations (cont’d) • DNS • Authentication Methods • PKI / SSL / Wildcard Certificates • Network Interfaces / IP Addresses • Storage It all ends up impacting the end user experience…

32. What’s a good reference? • Planning for Software Boundaries • Office SharePoint Server - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/262787.aspx • Windows SharePoint Services - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287790.aspx

33. Scenario 1 – Requirements • Small Organization (250-300) • Document Management • Collaboration • Federation • Low Budget • Information Rollups

34. Scenario 1 – Considerations • Taxonomy may reflect the organization’s natural divisions • Single Site Collection Use Case • Allows for the roll up of information easily • Allows for the re-use of SharePoint Groups • Shared Information Architecture • Works well with small numbers of users • Out of the box method…

35. Scenario 1 – Potential Solution • Small Farm Infrastructure • Use of SharePoint Designer for Customizations • User Management Tool (USPM 07, DeliverPoint, DocAve, Quest, etc.) • ADFS for partner federation • Taxonomy using… • Single Site Collection • Rolled Up Information • Security Group Madness • User Training

36. Pirate Nosh Taxonomy Example

37. Pirate Nosh Logical Architecture Example

38. Pirate Nosh – Example Physical Architecture

39. Scenario 2 Requirements • Collaboration • Document Management • Workflow • Records Management • Large User base - 100k users

40. Scenario 2 Requirements – But wait there’s more… • Complex Permissions • Extranet Access • Smartcard Authentication • High Availability • Integrity of Data • AD Infrastructure - Security Groups

41. Scenario 2 – Potential Solutions • Integration of 3rd Party Records Management Solution • Third Party Wiki Integration (Confluence, MediaWiki, etc.) • Windows Rights Management Server / Information Rights Management Server • Epok for Extranet • User Management through AD or Third Party Tools • Large Farm Infrastructure

42. Scenario 2 – Potential Solutions • SQL Configuration • Mirroring - remove the complexity • Clustering - better scalability • Mirror the data of the cluster - best of both worlds • Log Shipping • Third Party Mirroring Tool • Split DNS for internal and external accessibility • WCM System • 3rd Party Workflow Tool (Captaris, K2, Nintex, etc.)

43. Scenario 2 – Considerations • Typically doesn’t get planned overnight • May or may not reflect what an organization actually looks like • Best to plan it out with time • Start small capability set wise and grow… • Discover functional capability needs during initial roll out… • Don’t forget about your end user 

44. Binary Brewery Logical Architecture Example

45. Binary Brewery Taxonomy Example

46. Binary Brewery Physical Architecture Example

47. Conclusion I Each SharePoint implementation project requires that you examine the contextual considerations of the environment and define a vision. Defining such a vision will provide goals to work toward, to make your implementation both successful and effective to end users.

48. Conclusion II • Your requirements drive your taxonomy and logical architecture... • Which in turn drive your hardware requirements... • If you don't know what you're going to use SharePoint for, start off small and scale your farm up as you go... • Crawl… Walk… Run…

49. Conclusion III • What you start with on Day One isn’t what you’re going to end up with in… • Six months… • A year… • Day 472… Remain Flexible!!!

50. Conclusion IV User adoption in and of itself will cause your environment to change… …adapt to the context as it changes.