Comments on: Microsoft SharePoint can’t scale, but people want it anyway.

By: Jethro

Jethro — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:53:09 +0000

Doesn’t “scale well” mean you don’t have to throw hardware at it? How many accounts per box, and how many concurrent logins?

Personally I think 5-digit numbers for the first answer and 4-digit for the second are reasonable to expect. Like 75,000 accounts and 2000+ concurrent users on a single Dell 2950 with 2 CPUs and 8GB RAM.

How do *you* define scalable?

By: Christophe

Christophe — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:02:51 +0000

Where did you see a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list???

By: kid

kid — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:32:04 +0000

Totally biased review. SharePoint ships with Windows Server so it does not cost anything extra. It also scales very well. Sure one table can be used for one site but then each site can exist in it’s own table in it’s own database which could be an SQL cluster. So SharePoint will scale to really, really high levels, it can handle about as much hardware as you can throw at it.

By: Gia Lyons

Gia Lyons — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:04:57 +0000

Randy, thanks for the comments. When I have the time, I’ll go read the whitepapers re: operational maintenance capabilities with SharePoint and get better informed.

By: Randy Holloway

Randy Holloway — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:49:26 +0000

Gia- there are many inaccuracies in the InfoWorld piece regarding how SharePoint works and its technical/scalability/storage limitations. Of course it isn’t a perfect product, but what’s presented here isn’t accurate.

In terms of social capabilities, we previewed some features in 2006 that got delayed and I think that has hurt perception in some areas. We have a lot of new add-ons and templates that make SharePoint great for social computing (I’m obviously a bit biased). I’ve certainly heard many good things about some of the newer IBM collaboration tools as well.