Sharepoint Scale Up

Introduction

Any enterprise platform needs to be able to adjust, grow, and scale out to fit the needs of a changing organization. SharePoint is no exception to this rule, and the creators focused on the ability to scale certain components within SharePoint to be able to adjust to the unique conditions that exist in various environments. For small organizations in need of simply document management and team sharing, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) offers a rich set of easily deployed capabilities. For larger or growing organizations, the full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server product allows for the centralization of information and the distribution of knowledge.

Mapping SharePoint Functionality to Business Needs

When deploying SharePoint, the primary concern in regards to scalability is how many users will utilize the system. . In addition to total number of users, the following factors should be identified to more fully understand the load placed on a SharePoint server:

* Number of users

* Pages per user per work day

* Length of work day (hours)

* Type of work performed and level of Office integration

* Size of document repositories

Planning for Capacity with SharePoint

When designing a SharePoint environment, it is always best to start the design simply and then expand on that design as needs arise. With SharePoint, this means that a single server should be planned and other servers added as new constraints are identified. A single server should not exceed several general limits in SharePoint, and those limits should be understood. These limits are as follows:

* Number of SharePoint users fewer than 2,000—The number of specifically defined users in a SharePoint site should not exceed 2,000, or the risk of performance degradation arises. If more users are needed, Active Directory group membership can be used to scale the number of users to the tens of thousands.

* Site collections of fewer than 50,000—Each site collection...