Determining Your SharePoint Architecture: Centralized Or Decentralized?

By Christian Buckley, Director of Product Evangelism, Axceler

An important question to answer when moving to SharePoint 2010 is how to design the new environment – centralized, with a traditional, top-down managed portal, or a decentralized environment, featuring user-driven collaboration? Many companies struggle with this decision, and for good reason: these decisions determine how the environment will be managed, how customizations will be supported, and the level of difficulty of future upgrades.

There is no right or wrong answer as to how a SharePoint environment is managed. There are business process considerations, such as how the platform is to be used, how closely it will be tied to offline activities, and whether it will be integrated with your line of business applications. There are also cultural considerations, such as the technical capability of your end users, whether or not you have "power users" who need advanced capabilities, or whether the organization can support the rollout of entirely new capabilities that could change the way that it is accustomed to doing business.

Most organizations are familiar with the centralized environments of intranet portals. Some of the benefits within a centralized SharePoint environment include consistent use of content types and workflow, reduced metadata duplication, and documented customizations that make system updates and platform upgrades much easier. This model is easier to support and train end users, manage business processes, control information policies, and provide metrics and key performance indicators. It is also in better alignment with most traditional enterprise content management (ECM) platforms, making migration from these legacy systems to SharePoint easier.

But there are downsides to the centralized model: it takes a lot of design and planning, requires more upfront work and maintenance, an increased reliance on governance and formal change control boards, and difficulty managing across site collections and portals.