Design SharePoint Topology -Part1

Base Knowledge

Table of Contents

    Designing an inter-site navigational Taxonomy

    Taxonomy is a branch o Science concerned with the classification. The core navigational elements of SharePoint are:

    • Site –> smallest element in the taxonomy and includes lists and libraries.
    • Site collection –> grouping of sites which are related by parent-child relationship

    As the site collection grows the following issues appear(Scalability issues):

    Scalability issues

    Security groups

    As long as the administrator is adding subsites to certain collection, the need to administer the security will become complex. Each subsite will have two options whether to inherit the security (default scenario) or not. Each of which selection will add 3 levels by default which are visitor, member and owner which will be widely to administrate.

    Permission Inheritance

    As the volume of the data increases, the surface area affected by permission change layer. Small change in a permission could expose sensitive data at the lower level site, list or library.

    Taxonomical Changes

    Structure change in site columns and content types will affect the site as well especially if the parent column or content type is changed.

    Recycle Bin

    Recycle bin of the site collection will receive thousands of documents which must be stored in the event of restore which will be requested by the site collection administrator.

    SQL backup and restore

    As long as the content increases, backup and restore rules and durations will increase.

    Navigational Terms

    The navigational terms can be categorized as:

    1. Global and current –> the major navigation page areas present in the traditional web design.
    2. Structured –> automatically generated links when list/ library is created.
    3. Managed –> it gives the ability to build metadata structure that assign the navigational taxonomy to the site.

    Design a basic Taxonomy

    1. There is already a parent child relationship within the site collection.
    2. Design inter-site taxonomy is dependent on how navigational relationships which can be configured between distinct site collections. The design is more about the philosophy of how SharePoint farm will be used.

    Functional Navigation

    Design the site navigation around activities not around site structure. This gives flexibility and keep the design safe from company structure change such as new employee, request leave, complete all the forms or any HR related action.

    Designing site columns and content types

    List columns

    Columns scope is the list and it is not reusable and if it is repeated for two or more lists to modify the column you have to visit each list which is difficult to maintain.

    Site columns

    • When a site column is created on a particular site, it will be available to all subsites to that site.
    • They can be associated to any any list or library within the site. Any modifications which will be done to the site column, will be directly applied to all lists and libraries associated.
    • They are available only within the site collection which they were created in. To overcome this issue, Managed metadata service (MMS) can be used since it allows creating local and global term sets. Global term set is used as storage to be used in list/site columns across multiple site collections.

    Content types

    It defines the attributes about the item (metadata and properties) and provide activities associated with each item such as workflow, info management policies, document templates.

    Content types behave in hierarchical fashion so if it is created on the top level or any site, it will be available to all subsites. Also, they are related to item, page, folder and documents.

    After creation, it can be associated to list or library. Any site collection when it is created when it is created, it is automatically populated with a set of content types which are composed of out of the box site columns.

    The number of content type depends on the site template and the enabled features for the template.

    Content type Hub

    • Site collection that has been specified to provide content types to other site collections.
    • MMS is configured to allow the content hub to be the only source for centralized content. It is configured to consume content types from hubs’ content type gallery.
    • Content types are published by content type subscriber timer job on regular basis.

    External content types

    They incorporate business connectivity service (BCS) functionality. They are very useful since the users don’t need to know or deal with the data source. SharePoint has so many web parts to display the data coming from external content types