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Microsoft?® Office SharePoint?® Server 2007 Administrators Companion - page 15

Summary

SharePoint Server 2007 is a complex, maturing product that offers your organization solid potential in managing and working with your information in a better, faster, and smarter manner. This book attempts to offer a great deal of information in a short amount of space. There is much to learn about SharePoint Server 2007, so let's get started!

Chapter 2: Architecture for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Overview

Before reading the details of how to design, deploy, and manage SharePoint Server 2007, you should understand the overall plan Microsoft used to develop it. Just as Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps turn raw data into meaningful information by providing a context, so this chapter will help provide a context for SharePoint Server 2007 itself. The rest of this book is about the details; this chapter is about the big picture of architecture.

Before Microsoft developed SharePoint Server 2007, it first developed a plan to build the platform. This plan, known in the industry as an architecture , described in detail how the 2007 Microsoft Office release and SharePoint Server 2007 would be organized-how all the components would work together. Microsoft's architectural plan for the Microsoft Office system goes further than this immediate product release. A good architecture plan is also a vision or strategy for future growth and development. The architecture plan, which guided the development of the 2007 release, provided an excellent platform for today while allowing room for some services and features to be matured and developed in later releases.

Architecture planning is the process of organizing a set of concepts and ideas that lead to repeatable and effective decision making. With a well-thought-out and thorough architecture, individuals are able to make independent decisions that fit with the overall technical design. A robust architecture also provides a set of tools that can be used to objectively assess the quality and fit of decisions made by others. These aspects of architecture are said to be logical rather than physical . This means that they define patterns of thought used in making technical decisions rather than the organization of physical technologies that are described in a physical architecture. Because they represent a method for organizing thoughts and decisions, logical architectures, by their nature, can be difficult to understand. They are conceptual and not concrete.

To make sure the logic of SharePoint Server 2007's architecture is easy to understand, this discussion begins with a concrete example from the past. As you'll see, once the technical jargon is removed, logical architecture planning is nothing new. To help understand the concepts of Microsoft's leading-edge architecture, a brief discussion of the American railway systems of the 1800s will prove useful. This particular discussion will focus on the railway of North America because it was an achievement brought about by a large number of people from many different countries . Working without common language, they were able to unify a wild continent with a well-designed railway system. The railway system worked because its architects had a plan.

Enterprise Architecture and SharePoint Server 2007

In creating SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft developed an excellent enterprise architecture plan. This plan, although seemingly complex, has the following main concepts built into it.

Modularity and Reusability

The 2007 Microsoft Office system runs in the existing Microsoft Windows 2003 environment because it is designed with minimal dependence on any specific version of the Windows operating system. The Microsoft Office system is organized into independent and encapsulated services that are connected through a set of standards and rules known as the provider framework . To make administration, support, organization, and deployment easier, these services have been organized into the applications associated with the Microsoft Office system, including SharePoint Server 2007.

Extensibility

The SharePoint Server 2007 architecture also provides you with the ability to extend its capabilities and services without disrupting the core software platform. An example of this is Microsoft Office Project Server 2007. When installed, Project Server 2007 provides project teams with all the services they need to implement project management methods in the enterprise. Rather than create a competing and largely incompatible enterprise project management tool, Microsoft created a modular application that extends the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007 to meet the demands of project management.

Scalability

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Possibly the most meaningful advancement in SharePoint Server 2007 is its ability to scale. Need greater user interface capacity? Just add more first-tier Web servers. Need greater shared services capacity? Just add more second-tier application servers. Need to handle larger databases? Just add more third-tier database servers. SharePoint Server 2007 offers flexible and unlimited scalability in any tier of the architecture, without requiring a redesign and redeployment of the other two tiers.

Its scalability includes giving you the ability to scale out the SharePoint Server 2007 services as well. If you have a need to crawl and index large volumes of information, you can scale out the number of search servers to accommodate your needs. If user demand is very high for queries of your index, install more index servers. If your Excel calculation needs are high, consider installing more than one Excel Calculation server. SharePoint Server 2007 is scalable in any manner you want so that you can create any topology configuration that meets your needs and can adapt as those needs change.

Separation of Concerns

The architecture of SharePoint Server 2007 has been created to provide separation between the concerns and operation of the various architecture layers . In other words, the entire three-tier environment can be deployed to a single server or it can be deployed to any number of Web servers, application servers, and database servers, and in any combination. The SharePoint Server 2007 logical architecture is not tied to any particular physical deployment architecture because the various aspects of the architecture have been separated from each other. They are not intertwined in a manner that dictates how they are deployed, which frees administrators to make capacity planning, business continuity, and deployment decisions that are driven by the needs of the business organization and not by the constraints of the software.