TechEd08: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Administrative Architecture, Deployment and Operations Fundamentals (Part One)

As the title implies, this was a session intended for advanced users of SharePoint.  So advanced, in fact, that it was broken up into two parts, with a built-in intermission between them.  As such, I'll structure my posts accordingly, leaving it to you to provide your own intermission as you wish.  As noted previously, I am not an advanced SharePoint user, but I have willingly chosen to brave these stormy seas -without benefit of so much as a life-preserver- as a form of tech-blogging-as-conceptual-art for your reading pleasure.  (OK, also because my manager tasked me with covering the TechEd beat, presumably expecting a somewhat, shall we say, atypical angle.)

Shane Young, President of SharePoint911 and a MOSS MVP, was the common element between the two parts of this afternoon session.  For part one, Young was joined by Todd Klindt, a WSS MVP.  I wasn't aware that there were different flavors of SharePoint MVPs, but Young kicked things off with a little MVP humor, saying that he was "a MOSS MVP [but] Todd's a lowly WSS MVP ... don't hold that against him."

Beginning by explaining that SharePoint scales from a single server to multiple farms, Klindt suggested that you "think of a farm as any group of machines with SharePoint installed on them that point to a single configuration database."

Detailing the SharePoint container hierarchy with a helpful illustration (sorry), Young walked the crowd through the hierarchy from the top down.  The farm naturally sits at the top, and rolling up to it are, in order:  servers, Web applications, databases, site collections, sites, lists, and items at the "ground" level.

The presenters spent a good deal of time explaining the different servers involved in setting up a SharePoint farm.  These include:  the Web front-end (WFE) server, which provides the user-facing interfaces, and it was noted that there are typically from 1 to 8 servers with this role per farm; the index server, which "does all the heavy lifting" of crawling and indexing all site content; the query server, which responds to users' search requests, and which has a copy of the index file; the Excel calculation server (a.k.a., the application server, this is for MOSS Enterprise only), which handles calculations related to Excel workbooks, and the rendering component for which lives on the WFEs; and the database server, which runs SQL only, and on which SharePoint should not be installed.

It was explained that there will be no more 32-bit versions of SharePoint (2003 is 32-bit, but 2007 is 64-bit only), so it's a strong recommendation that 64-bit is the way to go for any new deployment.

As a final note in part one, and a subject about which Young is passionate (to say the least), the strongest possible recommendation of the session was that, when installing SharePoint, never choose the "Basic" install.  The reasons for this are varied, and I'm not going to go into them here but, suffice to say, Young would be most appreciative if you were to take this advice as gospel, and simply choose the "Advanced" install option.  And watch out, because even if you do, the default on the next install screen will force a "Basic" install unless you change the selection from "Stand-Alone" to "Complete."  Ignore this advice at your peril.

In part two of this session, Young is joined by Joel Oleson and Mike Watson.