Sharepoint - Challenges
Ready to turn off your File Servers?
SharePoint is great as a DMS, ECM, RMS – but I would not go as far as to suggest that you should move all of your files off your file servers and put it into SharePoint.
When storing content in SharePoint you are using SQL storage space. This generally means more fault tolerant disks, possibly a SAN in many cases. Your file servers may be using a more economical form of storage. So consider what content is worthwhile moving to SharePoint and what should remain.
In addition, there are some files that don’t benefit from the SharePoint storage features such as installation media. Other very large files such as videos and virtual machine images are not suited for SharePoint storage.
Easy to view external data, not update
While you can very quickly implement a solution in SharePoint to view information from many systems, it is not so quick to implement a user interface to update information that does not live within SharePoint. It’s still possible, but you will either have to install 3rd party web parts or develop your own
Think about your data structures
For content that you are going to store in SharePoint, you need to put some fore-thought into how you are going to structure it. You cannot treat a SharePoint list in the same way as you would a database table. Concepts like referential integrity are not supported by lists. You also have to determine the best way to scale up your data requirements. If you are going to be handling large numbers of items, you may want to split them across different lists, sites or content databases
Not designed as an OLTP System
The needs of an Online Transaction Processing System are very different to those of a document management and collaboration system. If you are looking to implement a solution that is going to have to process a large number of concurrent transactions, you should be considering other platforms in your Enterprise Architecture
High-end Digital Asset Management
As we mentioned in our discussion on File Servers, SharePoint does not handle large files particularly well, and when we get up to the high end digital asset management, we are dealing with files in the 100s of megabytes. SharePoint does have the Image Library out-of-the-box for basic image management needs today. Microsoft have also announced the Interactive Media Manager which will be built on the MOSS platform
Software Development Lifecycle
Finally, when your developers do start working on the SharePoint platform, there are a few things you should be aware of. SharePoint only runs on Windows Server 2003. This means that developers will either run a VPC or a development PC with Windows 03.
Deploying changes between Dev, Test and Production environments needs to be thought through in advance. Certain changes can be easily deployed using features. However, configuration changes can be more difficult to track, especially if you cannot simply backup and restore.
Customizing the look and feel has improved a lot since the previous version. However, it is still not straighforward, and your designers are going to need to get familiar with the process and limitations.