For a SharePoint Cloud solution, a requirement is the ability to host multiple clients and departments in an isolated way, providing isolation to their workloads and administration while still providing all the platform features required. Some clients will need their own work areas, and the ability to host applications which will not hinder other sites deployed within the same farm.
This principal of isolation is referred to as Multi-tenancy. This is referring to the isolation of data, operation services, and management. In our current version, 2007, you can obtain this type of isolation at the Site Collection Level or the Web Application Level. Each has their pros and cons and have to be planned very carefully to be scalable. Many Site Collections are much more scalable and manageable than several Web Applications. However, Site Collections currently only provide limited isolation, while several Web Applications can be an administrative nightmare.
SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 is already providing great improvements to Multi-tenancy. A new feature has been introduced called Site Subscriptions. They are a way to group sets of Site Collections based on their clients (or tenants) requirements of data, features, security and administration.
It allows you to partition data based on their subscription, and also allows you to divvy out administration based on their subscription. To go even further, there is another new feature called Feature Packs, that group together site features that you then can associate to subscriptions. This allows you to take Site Collections and manage them in an even more granular isolated way as currently. You can define these Feature Packs and Subscriptions to match clients Service Levels, or security requirements, organizational structure, etc.
So picture this, you have one SharePoint web page, where your client (tenant) goes to subscribe to the SharePoint services they need to meet their needs. Based on what the client selects for their requirements through that page (service levels, security, organizational, features) it then auto subscribes them to an existing subscription and feature pack, or builds them a new subscription and feature pack and they are within minutes taken to their new area.
Thinking, ya right, that would be heaven...well close...just SharePoint 2010 in the Cloud :)
Want to read more? Here you go...these are great articles!
No comments:
Post a Comment