I recently started a role as a project coordinator and one of my tasks is to develop a second version of one of the firm's SharePoint sites to give it increased functionality to the users.
This SharePoint site is very strange and has been highly customised.
In short, the main function of the SharePoint site is to act like a database to store information on previous deals that my organisation has been involved in. Each entry in the database has a fake holding document within a single document library folder. Metadata is then tagged against each document to provide the information on the deal - there are 35 different fields that need filling in per deal.
We are a large organisation and already have 10,000 deals/documents in the library (this covers a period of 2 years). The SharePoint site is being accessed from 30 offices globally and we can probably expect to have between 25 - 50 users on the site at any given time. We currently have two servers for the site (not dedicated servers), one sql server and a document storage server.
There are also 5 other similar sites running using different libraries but these are much smaller (the largest has 3,000 entries but they do have proper documents attached to them. The attachments tend to be rather large 5 - 15mb and on average 3 people will be downloading docs at any given point.
My immediate concerns and questions are as follows:
Performance - the site is already extremely slow when running searches on the metadata and downloading documents. Will performance continue to decreasing dramatically as the site grows?
SharePoint as a technology - as far as I am aware SharePoint was not designed for this. Do you think that the system will start to become unstable as it grows? I also read that each folder should only contain 1,000 docs but that there can be 1,000 folders. Does this mean you can have 1 million docs in each library without folders?
Future development - ideally I want to start to query data from some of our other SQL based databases and display it in the site. Is SharePoint the best tool to do this?
From discussions with our in house IT team and the people involved with the site it seems that SharePoint was used because it was cheap! Although we have 200 IT personnel we have nobody with SharePoint expertise and only have a few people who claim to know about the technology (but from discussions with them I suspect that they are not entirely sure about the technology, I also know that this was their first SharePoint based project).
To get up to speed I have read 3 SharePoint books and have developed my own SharePoint site at home to learn the technology. This is all well and good but I have no experience with SharePoint sites of this size and our IT department keep brushing my concerns to the side and cling to the fact that the site was cheap to make.
What do you think I should do/suggest we do going forwards. I am not confident in the site or the technology and would be happier with a proper database but convincing management may be tough (as from a users perspective the site seems to work). Can you point me towards any supporting evidence regarding SharePoints ability in this area that would help me sway my managers?
Thanks for your help,
Jon
