These are my suggestions on how to achieve more based on my experience on working in the FE sector for 4 years with SharePoint. As well as helping you get greater benefits from SharePoint I’m hoping you might be inspired by some of the different uses of SharePoint we’ve seen.
Key features 3 virtual servers rather than a single server as this will perform better. The 3 servers are: Web/Query server handles the web front-end and query roles. The query server handles the search requests. Index Server SQL server Key features of this are: SQL server is a virtual server rather than a physical server The web and query servers are combined. The drawbacks of this architecture are: SQL is virtualised and uses a large share of CPU and memory Have 2 copies of the Index (1 on web/query and 1 on Index) Web and Query roles are competing for resources
Key features here are: Web Server and Query Server are separated SQL Server is on a pair of clustered physical servers Advantages over the previous simpler farm: Specific redundancy on SQL Server hardware – SQL Server will failover if one server fails SQL Server cannot hog resources in the virtual environment No contention between the web and query server Disadvantages Cost is much higher because we need more physical hardware
NLB – Network load balancing
This is an example of a how people need to change the way they work and the benefits
Add Security Groups to reflect college structure Active Directory should be synchronised with your college database(s) Parabola’s AD Sync product Remember – SharePoint part is about updating the User Profile directly (for data which won’t fit in AD)