FOREWORD
I have had the fortunate opportunity to lead the SharePoint Technical Product Management team from SharePoint 2003 to the SharePoint 2010 launch. Over the years, I've seen SharePoint evolve into a rich collaboration platform that has the capability to transform a company. It can help users work together, share information, find data, and build applications. It's a modern platform that has improved organizational productivity across small, medium, and large businesses worldwide. It's a popular replacement for technologies such as Lotus Notes, Documentum, and Windows file shares. And, although it has a lot of potential, it's really important to carefully plan for a successful deployment and end-user adoption.
One of the most common challenges I saw with early SharePoint adopters a few years ago was “under the desk” deployments. Individuals would deploy SharePoint on a single box under their desks, invite many people and departments, and then run into all kinds of issues pertaining to governance. Many people blamed SharePoint, when the real challenge was a lack of planning. This resulted in performance and governance challenges for customers. In SharePoint 2010, a lot of great IT professional and end-user features are available that help you with governance. But, at the end of the day, features can only help. It's important to carefully plan your deployment.
A SharePoint architect must think across multiple dimensions, including hardware, storage, network capacity, and configuration, as well as information architecture and governance. It takes a deep understanding and planning to do a great job with architecting, deploying, and managing SharePoint, especially in organizations that centrally serve thousands of users. Poor planning can result in long response times, low end-user adoption, and even downtime.
This book does a great job in providing guidance on how to successfully deploy SharePoint. This book covers a number of deep technical subjects such as SharePoint 2010 platform architecture, as well as more governance-oriented topics such as defining your SharePoint 2010 governance model. I have had the pleasure of knowing Brian Wilson and many of the other authors/contributors who bring their real-world experience to this book!
— ARPAN SHAH
Director, Microsoft Project