Chapter 2: Planning and Architecture
When planning SharePoint architecture and solutions for an enterprise, it takes time and patience to achieve successful requirements that give defined goals and time-frames. During the planning phase, there will be many documents that will need to be produced. These documents will come from the following areas:
- Assessments
- Design
- Research
- Needs
- Use cases
- Project resource scheduling
The planning of tasks also gives metrics on the time to complete them, which involves project milestones and start and end dates for targeted deliveries. This planning will encompass all time-related information needed to move the project forward at a steady pace.
Designing architecture for a SharePoint enterprise requires different resources and is based on a technical set of requirements. These can be found in the new and deprecated features, removed features, and any gathered data provided during the assessment of your current environment that we completed in the previous chapter. The design encompasses detailed information about the network, server platform, SQL and SharePoint configurations, and any area of IT that is configured during the installation and configuration process that will support the product life cycle. This design document should be a living document as it also provides details on those areas for future reference and can be changed as needed when changes are made to the environment to include future changes made to the architecture.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Planning – overview
- Planning – how to find the best architecture based on requirements
- Planning – cost of your environment
- Planning – resources
- Planning – SharePoint farm design
You will learn in this chapter how to plan and prepare for a SharePoint implementation. This task is very detailed and there are varying reasons why this is the case. There are many areas to cover to make sure you get a clear understanding and successfully implement a project of small to large size. You will also learn how to manage costs and resources and how to design your farm based on company security and requirements.