Your
first installation decision is selecting the appropriate SharePoint
product for your implementation. After careful analysis, you can decide
which edition will meet your organization’s needs. SharePoint 2010 is
offered in two categories, with four editions within each of the categories—a total of eight editions from which you can choose.
Intranet (On Premise)
Internet (Cloud)
SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard Edition
SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise Edition
FAST Search Server 2010 for Internet Business
SharePoint Online for Internet Services
Note:
BEST PRACTICES
This chapter provides a brief overview of the two categories and the
editions within each of them. After gathering, organizing, and
analyzing your organization’s requirements, you will be able to
determine which editions fulfill your needs, and then you should
perform in-depth research on the possible choices before deciding which
one you will implement.
1. SharePoint Intranet Editions
There are four editions to
choose from if you plan to implement SharePoint as an intranet, or on
premise, installation. These include
The following sections provide
you with a brief overview of the features and advantages of each of
these editions to help you determine which one you should install for
your internal organization.
1.1. SharePoint Foundation 2010
In general, SharePoint Foundation
2010 is a good choice for smaller organizations or for department-level
implementations, because it provides an inexpensive entry-level or
pilot collaboration technology through a secure Web-based interface.
This edition of SharePoint 2010 is free for you to download and
install. You can use it to organize documents, organize schedules, and
participate in discussions through blogs, wikis, workspaces, and
document libraries using the underlying SharePoint infrastructure.
1.2. SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 requires you to purchase and install the program, along with the appropriate client access licenses (CALs)
that will be used by your internal organization. You can choose from
two types of licensing options available for SharePoint 2010: Standard
and Enterprise editions.
The binaries that are installed are the same for both editions, but
some features are disabled after you complete a Standard Edition installation.
The same installation source files are used for both editions of
SharePoint 2010, but the product key you enter during the installation
determines if the installation will have a Standard or an Enterprise
license. There is a price difference between the two editions, of
course, so you should analyze what your requirements are before
deciding which edition you need to purchase and install.
Standard Client Access Licensing
Organizations that want to deploy a business collaboration platform
that can be used to manage multiple content types will find the
Standard CAL option is the most cost-effective choice. With these
licenses, you are able to use the core capabilities of SharePoint 2010
to manage your content and business processes, search and share
information as well as users’ expertise, and simplify how people work
together across different organizations.
Enterprise Client Access Licensing
Organizations that want to take advantage of the advanced scenarios in
SharePoint 2010 to allow end users to search, create, and work with
data and documents in disparate sources using familiar and unified
infrastructure, such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, will
choose the Enterprise CAL option. You can use the Enterprise CAL
capabilities of SharePoint 2010 to integrate the program fully with
external line-of-business (LOB) applications, Web services, and
Microsoft Office client applications. This edition will promote better
decision making by providing rich data visualization, dashboards, and
advanced analytics along with more robust forms and workflow-based
solutions.
The good news is that a
Standard Edition of SharePoint 2010 can be upgraded easily to the
Enterprise Edition in Central Administration without performing an
additional installation. However, to change from an Enterprise Edition
to a Standard Edition does require you to uninstall the Enterprise
Edition and perform a new installation of the Standard Edition.
1.3. FAST Search Server for SharePoint
The FAST Search Server
edition of SharePoint is an advanced version of SharePoint 2010,
described in the previous section. It includes all of the functionality
of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition, with the addition of Microsoft
FAST Search technology. The FAST Search features include contextual
search (such as recognizing departments), more scalability of the
search feature, and the ability to add metadata to unstructured
content, making it easier to search.
1.4. SharePoint 2010 Online
This edition of SharePoint
2010 is a cloud version of the software that provides a hosted
SharePoint solution for your organization, similar to the Microsoft
Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can use this edition of
SharePoint 2010 to provide your organization with the functionality of
SharePoint without installing the product in-house. The SharePoint 2010
Online edition is available in two versions: Standard and Dedicated.
SharePoint Online Standard Version
The Standard version is a shared version of SharePoint with multiple
user bases, and it includes most of the functionality required to
support a company intranet that is focused on communication and
collaboration. The SharePoint Online version offers the following
functionality.
SharePoint Online Dedicated Version
The Dedicated SharePoint Online version offers more functionality,
including authentication methods and customizations, and it also
requires separate installations on separate servers for each user base.
A user base could be an entire company or simply a department, but each
installation is handled independently.
2. SharePoint Internet Editions
There are also four editions
to choose from if your organization wants to use an Internet, or cloud,
implementation of SharePoint 2010. You would choose one of these
editions if your organization will store SharePoint content that you
want to make accessible by way of an extranet or the Internet.
2.1. SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard Edition
This edition of SharePoint
2010 is for small to mid-size organizations that want to create public
Internet sites or basic extranet sites using the standard features of
SharePoint 2010. The functionality you have with SharePoint 2010 within
your intranet can be made available on an extranet or a public-facing
Internet implementation using this edition.
2.2. SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise Edition
This edition is for larger
organizations that want to create scalable customer-facing Internet
websites or private, secure extranet sites using the Enterprise
capabilities of SharePoint 2010. It is similar to the Internet Sites,
Standard Edition, but more scalability and management functions are
included in the Enterprise version of SharePoint 2010 for Internet
Sites.
2.3. FAST Search Server 2010 for Internet Business
This edition of SharePoint
2010 adds the FAST Search engine to SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites,
Enterprise Edition. FAST Search for Internet Business provides public
websites with flexible, search-driven capabilities including content
integration and interaction management.
2.4. SharePoint Online for Internet Services
This edition is similar to the
SharePoint 2010 Online edition, in that it provides a hosted SharePoint
solution for your organization. However, it is anticipated that this
edition will support more online capacity.
This chapter
will discuss several main points about installing SharePoint 2010 and
will help you understand how SharePoint should be installed, regardless
of what edition you are using. All of the following sections about the installation of SharePoint 2010 are relevant to any of the editions you choose to install.
3. SharePoint Server Roles
In planning the
installation, you also need to consider the different servers that you
need to have available to complete the installation of SharePoint 2010.
In your deployment plan, you need to consider the number of Web
front-end servers (WFEs) and application servers as well as their roles
within the farm. There are four primary server roles required during a
SharePoint installation.
Web front-end server
Application server
Database server
Active Directory server
The Web server role in
SharePoint 2010 focuses on handling the requests of clients and
rendering pages to them. The application role is optimized for
processing requests in the background. SharePoint information is
retrieved from the database server, and the Active Directory server
provides user authentication.
Note:
BEST PRACTICES
Although it isn’t required, best practice for optimal performance is to
have these server roles reside on different computers. However, if your
budget prohibits deploying different servers for each role, a single
computer can host more than one of these roles.
3.1. Web Front-End Server
After a completing the SharePoint 2010 installation
for the first time on a server, you have created your farm, and the
server is performing both the Web front-end server role and the
application server role. With the scalable architecture SharePoint 2010
provides, you should separate the roles so they reside on at least two
different servers. You can have multiple WFEs hosting the Web
applications that your users connect to, which will provide high
availability and, if configured, load balancing.
3.2. Application Servers
Similar to SharePoint Server
2007, you can have multiple application servers managing and serving
applications to the WFE servers. The architectural model of SharePoint
2010 offers great flexibility in terms of which servers provide which
services. You can start by running several service applications on one
server and expand the farm by spreading them across other servers.
For instance, a
SharePoint 2010 server could run Excel Calculation Services without
being accessed directly by clients. The same setup can be used for
services such as Search or Profile Synchronization.
3.3. Database Server
The database
server hosts the configuration, content, and service application
databases for the SharePoint farm, but it can also host databases for
other applications—although this is not recommended. Depending on the
availability and your performance requirements, you may consider using
a Microsoft SQL Server cluster. Alternatively, depending on the demand
that SharePoint 2010 generates from the server, it can be beneficial to
distribute databases across multiple SQL servers.
It is a good idea to
establish strong communications with the SQL Server database
administrators (DBAs) during the SharePoint 2010 planning process, to
make it easier to exchange information about databases being created,
database configuration, and backup and restore settings.
3.4. Active Directory
Active Directory is used by SharePoint 2010 for
different purposes, each of which requires different preparation.
First, SharePoint uses domain user accounts when running services.
Second, domain user accounts are configured as identities for
application pools in Internet Information Services (IIS).
User accounts from
Active Directory can be imported into a SharePoint Profile database to
enable enhanced social search capabilities. When user accounts are
imported from Active Directory for use in user profiles, make sure that
the metadata that describes the user is current. You can schedule
changes to be imported in an incremental fashion. Additional
information about users can be imported from other sources, such as a
human resources (HR) system.
