SharePoint Server Farms at Microsoft Corp.
I have worked with Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007 quite extensively. That is from development, installation, configuration, and capacity planning perspectives. I have been fortunate enough to go to many Microsoft partner training events and learned allot of how Microsoft uses SharePoint as their intranet internally. I have been asked by clients, "What is the proper way to deploy SharePoint?", "Does Microsoft use SharePoint for their internal projects or as their intranet?", "How did Microsoft deploy it across the WAN?", and "Do you think Microsoft SharePoint 2007 can scale?". My answer was always "Yes" along with some supporting detail.
Some could not believe it, Microsoft using their own product, but to me it makes perfect sense. They are a big corporation, if they make it work internally they can find all the bugs and problems first hand. They can answer most of the questions before their customers bring them up. So, I appreciate Microsoft for doing that.
Here is how Microsoft has it deployed globally. They have three SharePoint Server farms deployed globally where each server farm has its own indexing server, about 130-140,000 site collections, and a master indexing server in Redmond that indexes all three server farms. They have the best deployment of security trimmed search results across their global deployment of SharePoint. Security trimmed search results simply mean that if a user issues a query for content, they will only view content that their credentials will give them access to. This feature set makes Microsoft search in SharePoint very attractive to enterprise search customers.
So, let me tell you what are the regions where they have SharePoint deployed. The three regional SharePoint Server farms are: MEA (Middle-east/Africa) based out of Dublin, Asia/South Pacfic based out of Singapore, and the Americas (North and South) based out of Redmond, WA.
As a treat, I figured I would give you the opportunity, to hear for your yourself, how Microsoft is using SharePoint Server 2007 internally from program managers of the Microsoft Information Technology (MSIT) group. Click on the play button below to view the streaming video.
Office SharePoint Server at Microsoft: 12 TeraBytes of data and counting
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