SharePoint Tip of the Month

October 2009: How The SharePoint 2010 Architecture Will Change The Way Businesses Look At SharePoint

The architecture of SharePoint 2010 fundamentally changes the way organizations will think about the platform.

• Smaller companies that have heretofore been limited to vanilla SharePoint hosting offerings will now be able to deploy customized solutions on a shared hosting platform.


• Large organizations that deploy a SharePoint server farm for shared services use by their employee base will no longer have to so tightly constrain their internal customers' use of the product because of governance issues.


• And third party providers will now have a vehicle for delivery of their value added features, functions and applications to the mass market via hosted services.

How will this all be possible? Following are some specific examples of what the new architecture offers:

• Multi-Tenancy and Distributed Services – For large enterprises who host SharePoint farms and distribute ownership of sites to administrators throughout the corporation, there is now the notion of tenancy. Each individual tenant will be able to pick and choose from among the services – i.e., Excel Services, Forms Services, User Profiles, etc. – that they wish to consume. Using this model, the services will consume fewer overall system resources than under the old model. Additionally, it will create the opportunity to define charge-back structures that fairly distribute infrastructure costs to those consuming the services.


• Stress Management – Under SharePoint 2007, quotas could be assigned to site collections for total disk space usage, but nothing else. With SharePoint 2010, a certain number of total “resource points” will be allotted to each tenant or site. The points are spent based on a number of server metrics, including memory consumption, SQL Query time, non-responsive processes, CPU execution time, and others. When an individual has consumed its daily quota of resource points, it will become unavailable without bringing down the other sites. Additionally, large list throttling will enforce limits on the amount of stress that lists with too many records can place on the overall server. Whereas the previous version of SharePoint only provided guidance on the number of items to keep in a list or view, the new version will minimize the impact of failing to adhere to this guidance.


• Sandbox Solutions – Sandbox solutions are pieces of code that can be made available to individual sites. In all previous versions of SharePoint, custom solutions were installed at the farm level. Farm administrators were often reluctant to allow custom coded solutions without long, detailed testing cycles, if they were willing to allow them at all. Sandbox solutions will mean that site owners can have local code that is only visible in their sites and can only impact performance locally. This will mean substantially less risk to server administrators in allowing custom code, which will mean wider availability and a reduced time to market for custom solutions.


• Improved Monitoring – Usage and health reports will provide system administrators with the ability to proactively identify problem areas and respond to them before they are noticed by end users. Additionally, better logging will make it easier to troubleshoot problem areas and error messages.


• Search Performance – An entire SharePoint Tip could be dedicated to what is coming with the search enhancements. With respect to large scale deployments of SharePoint, 2010 will now scale to 2 billion items per content index, 200 times that amount from the SharePoint 2007 platform.


• Vanity URLs – In SharePoint 2007, custom web addresses (i.e. "http://www.yournameinlights.com") were assigned at the web application level. This effectively meant a small limit – around 20 – on the number that could be hosted on a single web server. In 2010, they can be assigned to site collections, which means custom URLs can be distributed to a much wider audience.

The bottom line here is that SharePoint 2010 is going to be a game changer for many who previously found the platform to be either out of reach, limited, or impractical.