Conceptualizing and Architecting a SharePoint Farm

The following list denotes the high-level steps that should be followed before architecting a SharePoint environment:

1. Define the business needs that should ideally be met by the project.
2. Map business needs to technical solutions in SharePoint 2010.
3. Define the number of farms required to satisfy business and technical needs and to provide for publishing and other features.
4. Define the number and scale of intranet versus extranet environments, using guidelines from Chapter 13, “Deploying SharePoint for Extranets and Alternate Authentication Scenarios.”
5. Define the physical architecture that will be required to deploy the technical solutions.
6. Define the security requirements, including number of service accounts and the rights they require.
7. Define the number of third-party and other MS solutions to properly secure and deploy.

Refer to Chapter 2, “Architecting a SharePoint 2010 Deployment,” for more information on these tasks.