SAI Infrastructure Group works with the Business Analysts, Process Owners and Internal client IT team to understand the SharePoint applications scope, targeted LOB, distribution of user community, requirements to access external data and security based on business rules to design and architect the SharePoint Farm. ITIL based requirements gathering workshops uses SAI developed functional template to confirm that all the parameters required for proposed farm are obtained, discussed and validated by the SAI Engineers.

SAI Architecture document describes in detail, the current specific implementations of various SharePoint services. This is followed by a detailed project plan and knowledge transfer process, allowing the clients to manage their own infrastructure.

SAI has implemented server farms when the population and branch offices are distributed across multiple locations. The limitations of using SSP over WAN is overcome by SAI design of parent-child farm topology. The design allows the user profile to be replicated across the various SSP without the need to purchase MOSS enterprise version and use SAI User Management SharePoint solution. Users can create ‘My Site’ only in the farm to which they belong to and search service is distributed across SSP to provide region specific search results.

Requirements and necessity for SSP in the farm is based on services which are to be shared across all the Web Applications in the farm. SAI Infrastructure workshop findings determine the SSP implementation for the proposed farm. Multiple SSP for the farm or sharing SSP across farms are recommended as per the specific client needs. SAI deployment model implements delegation of search services across the server farms and also provides enterprise search functionality across all the farms.

Publishing Portal topology designed by SAI provides a real separation between various functional farms. Deployment model is based on Microsoft recommendations and takes advantage of SAI Content accelerator solutions, in providing added services like automatic conversion of documents to standard file format (like PDF) and followed by publishing to single or multiple DMZ farms.

SAI design of content deployment topology confirms that each server farms functionality follows the rules of 'Division of Labor'. For example, 'users facing' perimeter farms have content creation functionality locked down. The farm is optimized only for publishing and not for content creation. Security is provided by separate Authentication and Membership provider without the need to use the corporate directory. For better search performance, multiple SSP is implemented in the DMZ farm to have two index servers.

Branches across 16 countries in 3 continents, were the geographical distribution of a leading retail company specializing in finished garments. In addition the company also had 130 stores in remote locations not connected to corporate LAN. SharePoint is used as a primary collaboration platform for various projects either on team, branch or corporate level. Document management functionality with high availability search was identified as crucial success factor for adoption by the user community.

SAI Infrastructure team had designed the SharePoint Farm Architecture, with 3 farms, one for each continent. Child farms were responsible for indexing their local contents and corporate farm crawls the contents across multiple farms. Users can search the contents initially within their business unit, and then expand the scope to their country and later to entire company User profile was synchronized from the corporate farm to the child farms. Users can create ‘My Site’ only in the farm to which they belong. ‘My Site’ contains information about people skill set and levels of expertise in various fields and these details are included in the search results.

Few business units required the contents to be available to the external vendors and was accomplished by the DMZ farm and SAI content deployment topology.