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• Logical architecture components – server farms, service applications, application pools, web applications, zones, content databases, site collections, sites, and My sites.
• Service applications architecture – key service applications provided by SharePoint are business data connectivity service, Excel services application, managed metadata service, search service, and user profile service. Based on how the services are deployed in the server farm, the service applications can be classified as single farm services, cross farm services, and enterprise services farm.
• Storage architecture – core components of the SharePoint storage architecture are the databases that are created when the SharePoint is deployed. These are as configuration database, central administration content, content databases, and service applications databases. Binary large objects (BLOBs) are unstructured binary data streams. SharePoint supports two advanced BLOBs storage solutions. These are external BLOB storage and remote BLOB storage solutions.
• Security architecture – authentication modes supported by SharePoint 2010 are classic-mode authentication and claims-based. The authentication provider is a software component that facilitates one of the two authentication modes. Popular authentication providers are Windows based, form-based and Security Assertion Markup Language token-based.
• Network architecture – core network elements of the SharePoint server farm are data center, central site, regional site, local user, and regional user.
  

SharePoint Scalability and Availability
Any SharePoint architecture design should be able to adjust, grow, and scale out to fulfill the requirements of a growing organization. It should also provide the ability to scale SharePoint components to meet the organization’s unique conditions. Moreover, each individual user should have quick access to the SharePoint content and applications. The SharePoint scalability models are:

• Scaling up – scaling to a more powerful and bigger server by adding more processors and memory. It has advantages of handling heavier load without requiring significant changes to the server at a lower cost. However, it is single point of failure.
• Scale out – expanding the server to handle heavier load. It provides high availability in the server farm with better performance and more flexibility. However, scaling out is harder to manage and it is more expensive than scaling up.
  

The SharePoint architecture design should also consider high availability for the system. High availability provides hardware or software failover and minimizes user downtime by maintaining applications availability in case of hardware or software failures. Moreover, high availability ensures uninterrupted SharePoint operations for an organization in situations like catastrophic failures or natural disasters. SharePoint provides high availability solutions by allowing redundancy of server roles within a server farm and redundancy of server farms, also known as stretched farms.

• Availability within a server farm – involves running network load balanced multiple front-end web servers, multiple application servers, and clustered and/or mirrored databases.
• Availability across server farms – involves closely located multiple server farms with high-bandwidth connections.
  

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ISO 15489 defines classification as the “systematic identification and arrangement of business activities, and/or records into categories, according to logically structured conventions, methods, and procedural rules represented in a classification system.” Although ISO’s definition explicitly refers to records, the same definition of classification can apply to all content and not just records.

The purpose of classification is to have a uniform information schema that both people and applications can use for saving, organizing, sharing, and retrieving information. Taxonomies and folksonomies are two examples of classification structures.

Content Classification in SharePoint
In SharePoint, taxonomies are ultimately structured with content types, metadata, and containers such as sites, libraries, and folders. The hierarchical nature of taxonomy can be implemented in SharePoint by taking advantage of the inheritance features of content types, as described in the previous module on Content Types and Metadata.

Consistent Metadata Assignment
A basic capability available in SharePoint is designating what type of information is permitted for a given column. By choosing certain column types, you can enforce consistency of metadata values and therefore encourage more accurate classification. By choosing a column type of choice or lookup, for instance, you can restrict entered values for a given column to a predefined list from which users select. Limiting metadata entry to specified list values helps to enforce consistency with how content is described.

In earlier versions of SharePoint you can specify a default value for a column or site column and SharePoint assigns that default value to any new item or document that uses the column. SharePoint 2010 offers new, additional functionality that allows you to specify default values for columns at the list, library, or folder level.

SharePoint 2010 also includes new functionality called Managed Metadata that can greatly improve the quality of content classification. Managed Metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define and then use as attributes for items in SharePoint 2010. The Term Store Management Tool allows you to manage in a central location the terms and term sets (Managed Metadata) to be used across sites and throughout the SharePoint farm. The tool allows you to add, modify, and delete terms. For each term you can specify whether the term is available for tagging, the language to use for the term labels, and descriptive text that helps users know when and how to use the term. A term’s properties also include a Default Label (for the preferred term) and Other Labels (synonyms of the term). You can designate columns as a Managed Metadata type, which binds the columns to specified term sets.

The various features available in support of consistent metadata assignment facilitate the automation of processes that act on the content, such as using the Content Organizer. Drop-off Libraries and Content Organizer Rules can be configured to automate the classification of records into a Records Center.

Social Tagging
Social tagging is user-defined tagging of information, performed by the information’s consumer. A folksonomy is generated as a result of social tagging. Contrasted with managed metadata, a folksonomy’s term set grows organically, rather than being predefined. SharePoint 2010 includes many new pieces of functionality to support social tagging. Three in particular are: social tags, Enterprise Keywords, and tag clouds.

Social tags are user-generated words or phrases that describe pieces of information. By default, all authenticated users can add social tags to documents and other SharePoint items. In addition to being stored in the social tagging database, user-entered tags are also added to the Enterprise Keywords term set called the Keywords set. Enterprise keywords are simply words or phrases that have been added to SharePoint Server 2010 items from social tagging or from use of a new, predefined site column named Enterprise Keywords. The Enterprise Keywords column can be added to your content types to provide users a semi-structured way of describing content.

Tags are typically presented in a tag cloud, which is a visual representation of tags in a folksonomy. In SharePoint 2010, tag clouds are displayed via a tag cloud web part, which aggregates the tags that a group of users has applied to information.

Social tags and Enterprise Keywords are exciting new functionality, but they are offered with certain limitations and cautions. Without active management, you could find that tags and keywords are being abused or misused. Despite the limitations and cautions though, social tags and Enterprise Keywords in SharePoint 2010 offer many benefits. Primarily, social tagging encourages collaboration among users.
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Functional Communities
Functional Communities are a set of simple SharePoint Community features appropriate for users of SharePoint to contribute informational items about similar goals. Among these features are:

• Lists and Libraries
• Discussions
• Calendars
• Alerts
• News feeds
  

Enterprise Collaborative Communities
Enterprise Collaborative Communities are SharePoint Communities that offer more sophisticated features that provide additional interaction between members of web communities when virtually networking amongst each other. Each of these new Enterprise Collaborative SharePoint Communities offers many features that make communication within these web communities much easier to participate in, track, and search for information.

Offline Communities
Offline Communities are SharePoint Communities that offer features similar to the standard SharePoint Web interface, but in an offline environment. These features offer the ability to use SharePoint content while disconnected from the SharePoint system. Content may be created or updated offline, and will be synchronized with the SharePoint system when the user is next connected to it.

Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 is a term that is used to describe the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 systems are:

• Freeform - there should be no learning curve or other restrictions on using the system
• Network-oriented - all of the content in the system is web-addressable, usually in the form of URLs
• Social - its information should be accessible, its membership and content should be diverse and that its structure should be open and amenable to change
• Emergent - it can detect and leverage the collective wisdom of the community
  

Components
There is a wide range of components that SharePoint provides that can be used to construct and manage SharePoint communities. They include web parts and particular types of the following:

• Lists and Libraries
• Calendars
• Discussions
• Shared Documents, News and Alerts
• People Profiles, Photo and Presence
• Status Updates
• Ask Me About
• SharePoint Workspace
• Note Board
• Recent Articles
• Organization Browsers
• Colleagues, Social Bookmarks
• My Network
• Keyword Suggestions
• Managed Metadata, Taxonomies, Tags and Tag Clouds
• Blogs
• Wikis, Tag Profile Pages
• Ratings
• Office Applications
• Group Work Site
  

Records Management and Compliance with Communities
Record Management and Compliance are hard to apply to SharePoint Communities because of the communities’ dynamic nature, the context-dependent nature of the content that they contain, the difficulties involved in identifying actual record content and the risks to privacy and ease of use that these management techniques might introduce. SharePoint Communities require governance in order to avoid exposing the enterprise to undue risk.
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Building Blocks
The building blocks are the fundamental elements of SharePoint. They consist of the following elements:

• Lists
• Items
• Columns
• Content Types
• Libraries
• Folders
• Document Sets
  

These elements enable SharePoint to define collections of related items that are presented as lists or libraries. Columns are assigned to lists, libraries, or content types to define metadata properties about an object. Metadata information gives context and meaning to documents and items managed within libraries and lists. Folders provide an additional level of grouping which can be managed within a list or a library while document sets enable sets of documents to be managed as a single item.

Presentation Layer
The presentation layer provides a set of components and objects that provide insight into the items and content managed within lists and libraries. In addition to providing a visual presentation, they also expose functionality, a set of actions that can be performed on a managed item. These presentation layer components consist of:

• Master pages
• Web part pages
• Web parts
• Silverlight Support
• Ribbons
• Forms
• Navigation
  

Master pages provide a consistent presentation and layout to the content and web part pages within a site. Web parts and web part pages enable users and administrators to personalize the presentation of different components used to display lists and content. In some instances, Silverlight objects are embedded using web parts to provide another level of sophistication. The sites implemented within SharePoint present information to clients using forms to quickly view and edit document properties and expose functionality using ribbons. Ribbons, new to SharePoint 2010 and context sensitive, expose functionality and actions that can be executed on the managed content. Navigation through the site is made easy using quick links to reference the most important lists and libraries and the top link bar provides access to additional sites and locations.

Solution Management
SharePoint components and parts module presents and details the fundamental building blocks needed to implement SharePoint solutions. Managing solutions brings the building blocks and the presentation layer components together to show how sites and solutions are created. Some of the items used to manage solutions include:

• My Site
• Team Site
• Site Templates
• Web site
• Site Collections
• Web Application•
  

The concept of ‘My Site’ and ‘Team Site’ in SharePoint provides clients with centralized solutions where users can manage content related to tasks they perform. My Site provides a personal work space where users can manage their documents and information. Team sites, on the other hand, are used to collaborate on common goals between groups of individuals and provide a work space to manage such efforts. All solutions, including the ones to manage documents, are managed using sites, site collections, and web applications and are deployed using custom and pre-defined site templates managed in solution galleries.

Servers and Farms
Servers and farms are introduced to describe how SharePoint services are provided.

• Servers
• Farms
  

Servers and server farms provide the top most containment in SharePoint implementations. Servers are the physical hardware that implements one or more components to provide SharePoint services. Server farms are collections of servers that provide key services and functionalities used to provide and manage a SharePoint implementation.]]>Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:13:51 GMT