ECM - MOSS Architecture.

I deal a lot with MOSS 2007 these days. I guess with $800M in sales and the massive massive marketing machine that Microsoft brings to bear you can avoid it. I believe that even Microsoft themselves have been surprised at the adoption of MOSS 2007 as a platform.

But putting that all aside what fascinates me, and drives me mad is the way that the MOSS 2007 information architecture hangs together. Why? well because I have dealt with other ECM systems before, you tend to come with some well ingrained expectations when you begin to look at MOSS. Expectations such as:

• A single repository for information that is single source, create once and find and edit anywhere


• The ability to set retention and disposal at a system level and configure for the information in context


• The ability to leverage information outside of organisational boundaries eg. have a policy document spread across all departments

So give some of these expectations I found that I had to do a mind bend when starting to dig under the covers of the MOSS platform. Microsoft has an architecture for MOSS that goes like this.

(Click the image to get an enlarged view)

From the diagram you can see that the Site Collection is the logical grouping bucket for information. Now most large organisations that deploy MOSS will have multiple site collections. But here is where the mind bend on my expectations start.


The following features of MOSS 2007 DO NOT work across Site Collections (SC's)

• Content Types - You will need to deploy content types across all other SC's
  
• Content by Query Web Part - aggregates across site(s) but not SC's
  
• Workflow - Only available to the site collection it is deployed to !!!
  
• Information Management and Retention Policies - Only set at the SC level
  
• Search - Certain features so not work across SC's
  
• Quotas - Want to control the space people use, this must be deployed across SC's as well
  

So this starts to create some interesting exercise.

Firstly for the Information Architect / records management experts as they try to make sense of how to construct a classification / metadata / security and access controls.

Secondly for the MOSS Administrators as they try to keep track of the deployment and changes to the information support features that need to be managed as well. This is a ripe area for the 3rd party developers to help and some have already identified the gap.

So the moral is, prior planning prevents a poor deployment !