Plan the logical architecture when deploying an EPM/Office SharePoint Server 2007 extranet environment

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

This article describes how to plan the logical architecture model in an Enterprise Project Management (EPM)/ Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 extranet environment. For an overview of this chapter about how to plan for EPM extranets, see Plan an EPM/Office SharePoint Server 2007 extranet environment.

The model shows a generic deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Project Server 2007. The model applies almost all of the logical architecture components and shows how these are incorporated into the overall design. This section describes the design goals for the model and explains how these goals are achieved by using the logical architecture components illustrated in the model.

About the logical architecture model

The model shows a corporate deployment for a fictitious company named Fabrikam, Inc. The deployment includes one server farm which hosts the corporate intranet and the partner Web site. The architecture contains one farm only.

Intranet

The corporate intranet includes the following applications:

• Published intranet content (such as HRweb)

• Collaborative team sites

• My Sites

• PWA

• Project Workspaces

Together, these are the content and collaboration sites that employees will use on a day-to-day basis. Individually, each of these applications represents a distinct kind of content. Each kind of content:

• Emphasizes different features of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

• Hosts data with different data characteristics.

• Is subject to a different usage profile.

• Requires a different permissions management strategy.

Consequently, design choices for each of these applications are intended to optimize the performance and security for each application.

The use of a single Shared Services Provider (SSP) brings these three applications together to provide the following:

• Navigation across applications.

• Enterprise-wide search.

• Shared profile data.

The following figure shows the five applications that make up the corporate intranet.

Partner Web

The Partner Web application hosts externally-available sites for secure collaboration with employees of partner companies. This application is intended for employees to easily create sites for secure collaboration. Key factors that drive design choices for this application include the following:

• Content isolation   Partners are not allowed to access other kinds of content hosted on the server farm at the exception of Office Project Server 2007 content (PWA). Additionally, with a dedicated SSP one can also isolate content by doing the following:

  • Scoping search to only the site level.

  • Not allowing navigation across site collections.

  • Not making profile data available across site collections.

• Separate authentication of partner accounts   Partner accounts are managed through forms-based authentication. Partner accounts are not added to the corporate directory.

• Permissions management   Individual site owners manage permissions to their sites, inviting only necessary participants to collaborate.

In the model, the Partner Web application is hosted by the same farm that hosts the intranet content.

Server farm

The model incorporates the use of one server farm. This section describes the licensing requirements that affect the number of server farms that are required in a corporate environment and notes the topologies of the server farms that are illustrated in the model.

Topology of the server farm

Each server farm in the model is composed of multiple servers that have the following topology:

• Two front-end Web servers

• Five application servers

• Two database servers clustered.

The model shows the logical architecture of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Project Server 2007 by showing that:

• All sites are mirrored across front-end Web servers.

• The SharePoint Central Administration Web site is installed on an application server to protect it from direct user access.

In reality, the number of server computers and the topology of the server farm are not important to the logical architecture, except to increase capacity and performance, as needed. The logical architecture can be designed independently from the server-farm topology. The performance and capacity planning process will help you size the server farm to meet performance and capacity goals.