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A few days ago I attended a talk on SharePoint best practices, given by Joel Oleson at the Chicago MTC.  Joel definitely knows his SharePoint! (He was the first SharePoint admin when Microsoft first released the product internally for development & testing.) 

 

One of the topics of the discussion was "best practices for SharePoint scalability", an important concept considering the adoption rate of a new SharePoint deployment at most companies. Joel mentioned that the most scalable objects in SharePoint are site collections. You can have in excess of 150,000 site collections, while the recommended limit for top-level sites is only 125! The downside to having hundreds of thousands of site collections is that users are managed at a site collection level. So what happens when you need to add a user to a bunch of your site collections at once? Without a third-party management tool for SharePoint, you'd have to log-in to each site collection and add the user manually. Joel recommended the use of third party tools (such as DocAve) to overcome the limitations of the native SharePoint administrative interface. Using DocAve's central admin interface, you can add or remove a user or group of users from multiple site collections at the same time, saving lots of time! Check out this TechNet article to learn more about planning for SharePoint scalability.  And be sure to keep tabs on Joel's blog, where insights and info can always be found.