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Originally SharePoint Portal Server was designed for building and deploying workgroup-based solutions. It is now being used in a number of large intranet installations, and Microsoft has made available a license for using SharePoint Portal Server across the Internet.
So how scalable is it? SharePoint Portal Server is scalable enough to handle:
More than 500,000 documents stored in a single server, single document management workspace
More than 500,000 documents using a similar single server configuration where a majority of the content is stored on external information stores
More than 1,000,000 documents when dedicated SharePoint Portal Server content index and search server configurations are used to index external content stores
Due to its scalability SharePoint Portal Server can be deployed in a number of different ways, depending on the organizational requirements.
The first example is a departmental team with a single SharePoint Portal Server computer with a workspace that consists almost entirely of content stored locally. The amount of content stored outside the workspace is small and might consist of content sources pointing to one or two competitors' Web sites. The emphasis is on the document management capabilities of SharePoint Portal Server rather than its search capabilities (see Figure 11.10).
Figure 11.10: Small departmental solution.
This second example is a team using SharePoint Portal Server to search content stored on its file servers, database servers, and an Internet Web site (see Figure 11.11). The dashboard site displays organization-wide communication, such as announcements, vacation schedules, and finance information. The SharePoint Portal Server computer stores indexes for the configured content sources and makes them available to the dashboard site associated with the workspace. In addition to the content sources that link to documents stored outside the workspace, the workspace itself can contain documents. The group primarily searches its own content, with limited searching on Internet sites. Document management is required only for the documents stored in the workspace. The only users performing document management tasks are those responsible for updating the dashboard site.
Figure 11.11: Search Services with Single SharePoint Portal Server.
For improved throughput in larger SharePoint Portal Server installations, multiple servers can be deployed-each of which performs a dedicated task, such as dedicated index server, and another server dedicated for front-end searching and providing the dashboard (see Figure 11.12).
Figure 11.12: Multiple SharePoint Portal Server covering different tasks in a larger installation.
For very large organization-wide installations multiple servers are required to share the work load as efficiently as possible. This deployment will include at least three SharePoint Portal Server computers:
Server dedicated to searching
Server dedicated to indexing
One or more document management servers
The number of document management servers will depend on the number of users requiring that functionality and the volume of documents. Often, the allocation of servers will be per department, which also makes the associated management easier (see Figures 11.13 and 11.14).
Figure 11.13: Large-scale, organization-wide installation.
Figure 11.14: Organizational use of SharePoint can improve project collaboration.
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