Company Overview
Brookfield Properties is an office property corporation that owns, develops and operates premier assets in the downtown core of high-growth North American cities. Brookfield Properties' premier properties define the skylines in many major cities including New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Houston, Toronto, and Calgary.
Client Challenge
Brookfield Properties is looking to implement an intranet solution that provides an enterprise-scale corporate communications vehicle. In addition, Brookfield Properties is looking to leverage the document management and collaboration features of MOSS 2007 necessitated by the thousands of documents created in its procurement, sale, management, and related business activities as a property management organization. Brookfield wants to be able to organize business documents in a consistent manner, share documents, manage workflow/forms, deliver relevant applications, maintain employee/property contact information and be in a position to flexibly grow the MOSS 2007 environment in the future.
Solution
The MOSS 2007 infrastructure is made up of a series of implementations, each with a specific purposes. A development environment made up of one Web front-end/index server and one SQL Server 2005 box is intended to provide a location for developers to unit-test developed MOSS 2007 functionality. A testing environment made up of one Web front-end/index server and one SQL Server 2005 box is intended to provide a user acceptance testing environment whereby a controlled and limited amount of employees can test the desired functionality specified in earlier designs. A pilot environment made up of one web front-end, one index and one SQL Server 2005 box is intended to provide a pilot environment whereby a larger number of users can provide additional feedback prior to a full production release of MOSS 2007 to the entire Brookfield Properties enterprise.
The production environment is a typical MOSS 2007 medium server farm implementation. Two Web front-end servers are load-balanced for redundancy and resiliency as well as throughput for user operations. One index server that hosts the shared services needed for enterprise search, content crawling, profile and audience creation, and offloading of indexing services from the two Web front-ends. Two SQL Server 2005 boxes in a clustered, SAN attached configuration for redundancy and performance.
One site collection hosts the intranet solution while another site collection hosts the DMS solution. This is to provide an additional level of performance through the isolation of services provided by the two solutions.
The information architecture was customized to the needs of Brookfield for both solutions leveraging numerous parent/child content types, site columns, web parts, aspx pages, and styling sheets. Features were developed to facilitate the future update and deployment of both solutions. To facilitate the overall look and feel of the solutions to meet the branding requirements of Brookfield, custom master pages, cascading style sheets, and page layouts were also built and deployed.
Microsoft Products
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32-bit and 64-bit)
Active Directory
SQL Server 2005, Enterprise Edition (32-bit and 64-bit)
SharePoint 2007, Enterprise Edition (32-bit and 64-bit)
Intelligent Application Gateway 2007
Team Foundation Server
.NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0
Visual Studio 2005
C#.NET
Benefits
By implementing the solutions above, Brookfield Properties realizes the following benefits:
Realization of an intranet and DMS solution originally planned for a non-MS platform that conformed to look and feel requirements
Implementation of an information architecture that supports desired document uploads and integration with third party tools while providing a data structure familiar to Brookfield Properties users
Centralized document collaboration and management
Packaged features and solutions that facilitate ease of code management, application deployment, and future extension of the MOSS 2007 intranet and DMS Solutions
A scalable infrastructure that provides a design for high performance throughput and a high degree of resiliency at the WFE, SQL, data storage, and network layers