Joel's SharePoint Architect Blog

When you’re designing an Information Architecture with SharePoint in mind, there are some technical limitations and boundaries that will influence your choices in how you create Farms, Web Applications, Site Collections and Sites.

Microsoft documents 3 different main kind of limits inside SharePoint:

1. Boundaries – these are physical limits beyond which SharePoint will not let you reach.
2. Thresholds – these are default limits that you can increase or decrease, but there may be knock-on implications of changing these values.
3. Supported Limits – these are empirically tested values for usage of different SharePoint artefacts beyond which it is possible and feasible to stray, but you will be out of support by Microsoft.

A full list of these SharePoint limits is available on TechNet. But here are some of the main ones you’ll encounter.

SharePoint Boundaries – Maximum Values

SharePoint Thresholds – Maximum Values

SharePoint Supported Limits – Maximum Values

Hopefully you’ll find these to be a useful starting point when turning an Information Architecture view into a Site Hierarchy in SharePoint.

Technorati Tags: Information Architecture, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Architecture