I’ve seen more than one SharePoint project that had problems with scalability. In several cases, the problems weren’t caused by a careless system administrator or neglectful network engineer. In fact, there was usually plenty of bandwidth and server horsepower in a configuration that was ready to scale up and out. The problems were caused by the Business Analyst.
With SharePoint based ECM solutions in particular, scalability starts with the Business Analyst. Oversight during the analysis portion of a SharePoint deployment can result in not only performance problems but also the ability to provide breadth of functionality and consistency across the organization. The BA’s role in scalability is more than just walking through a worksheet with the sys admin trying to determine the number of users, bandwidth requirements, and average document size. It’s a combination of understanding of how SharePoint manages content, how users interact with content, and how content is distributed across SharePoint boundaries.
In this post we’ll talk about the management of content. I’ll follow up subsequently with how user interaction and content distribution impact overall performance and what the BA can do to mitigate potential scalability problems.
SharePoint manages content through the use of content types, metadata schemas, policies, and business processes. In SharePoint 2007, this functionality was usually localized within a specific site collection, meaning that the work done by one department to define and configure how they manage content could not easily be leveraged by another. Inherently, this limited the ability to scale out an information architecture across the organization. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done; it could but it took extra effort. At AIS we had several clients for which we created tools, processes and solutions to facilitate sharing across site collection boundaries and centralize management, but this involved customizations and was not accomplished out-of-the-box.
With SharePoint 2010, many of these 2007 hurdles are lowered or removed. The ability to deploy an information architecture and provide consistency across an organization is aided with new features like managed metadata, the content organizer, and sharing content types across site collection boundaries. Combining these capabilities with others, such as in-place records management, metadata navigation, and multi-stage retention for documents and records, really starts to put the ‘E’ in ECM.
At first glance it may appear that these new capabilities should make the life of the BA easier. However, I think the opposite is true. If you’re trying scale out content management features with some consistency and manageability across your organization you need to have a good understanding of not only your information architecture, but also how all this SharePoint functionality can be used to support it. This all starts with good analysis.
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