Chapter 4: Designing the Logical Architecture
In This Chapter
Planning SharePoint 2010 site and services topology
Using multiple SharePoint server farms
Choosing service applications and Web Applications
Designing site collections
Although you might be tempted to fast-forward the planning stages to the actual SharePoint deployment, with a plan to start small and grow with the requirements, you have some good reasons to dare to think big from the beginning — especially when deploying SharePoint 2010.
The best reason of all can be summarized in a single word — change. Change is inevitable in business, but most system administrators who have dealt with storing data can undoubtedly tell you that change is always painful and, more importantly, usually costly. Not necessarily in actual currency, but most definitely in effort and time.
SharePoint has matured in how it manages organizational change without significant disruption to end users or reclassification of data, but you still need to carefully consider the site topology to avoid having to move data across site collections or Web Applications. These moves can lead to issues with features such as hyperlinks, bookmarks, and embedded document links, as well as certain metadata fields such as Create At and Created By. For example, Unique Document IDs allow users to open documents by clicking a hyperlink that contains the ID number. That ID number stays the same, even if the underlying file is moved to a new folder on another site ...
