Architecture lifecycle management in the SharePoint world

This article is the summary of author's research and development experience in architecting Microsoft SharePoint solutions. SharePoint is a key word here because of some interesting aspects of solution development based on this platform. Developers' community has got some great researches out of any technological restrictions but in this particular article author came from the other side. He will not apply these architecture guidances to "the project" but he demonstrated how project development requires architecture evolutionary changes. Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most featured technological platforms. IT supports wide range of solutions, from the small-business collaboration portals to enterprise-level LOB, ERP or BPM operating in intranet, being partially exposed to partners via extranet and introducing internet-facing sites. But when you accept this platform as a basis for your solution you automatically accept all its restrictions. You have to build your solution according to internal SharePoint architecture or at least take it into account. This article will get you through of the entire SDL process starting with architecture elaboration and finish with architecture reuse and lessons learned. This article could be interesting for software engineers, consultants, project managers and business analysts working on SharePoint solutions or preparing integration with complex platforms with similar features and architecture. Author will put some useful practices together to help target auditory to deal with this kind of projects. Although this article seems to be architecture-oriented, author still emphasizes that project success is more important than the beautiful architecture diagrams. Finding the rule to balance project simplicity and architecture investments is up to software development team according to their experience and other circumstances.