November 2010 - SharePoint Tips

Jenny Branham -Expert in Residence Controlling the availability of permission levels within the environment can help insure better success in maintaining SharePoint compliance with set governance or policies. Not controlling the standardization and availability of these roles can lead to such issues as large and non-objective taxonomies, accidental access to sensitive materials and much more. Help head these issues off with a little bit of planning...

Sean McDonough -Expert in Residence When administrators initially discover configuration-only backup and restore in SharePoint 2010, a common response is elation. “Finally,” many think, “I can copy or clone my farm configuration. I’ll be able to create a common configuration template and leverage it everywhere. No more manual settings!” Unfortunately, a closer look reveals that this isn’t at all the case. The ability...

Michael Foertsch -Expert in Residence One of the new features in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to modify the built-in workflows for your business needs. You can do this by using SharePoint 2010 Designer. Open one of the built-in workflows, say the Approval workflow, and use it as a template for building your own Approval workflow with your own business rules. ReTweet this Tip!

Sean McDonough -Expert in Residence In SharePoint 2007, administrators commonly sought and requested a mechanism to copy configuration information from one SharePoint environment to another. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft introduced the configuration-only backup and restore to address this need. A configuration-only backup functions much like a standard farm (catastrophic) backup, and it even produces the same type of output in terms of files and...

Sean McDonough -Expert in Residence When using SharePoint’s built-in catastrophic backup capabilities to protect your farm, a best practice is to start any new backup set by creating a full backup of the entire farm and all of its components before considering the use of differential backups. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: without a full backup to use as a point of reference, SharePoint can’t accurately determine what information...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence In SharePoint 2010, there is a new feature called Managed Accounts, which allows you to let SharePoint handle all your service accounts and automatically change the password based on your corporate policies. If you still want to manage a password change, you can then configure it so that you will receive an e-mail when the password is about to expire. Managed accounts can either be added from Central Administration...

Sean McDonough -Expert in Residence Full farm (catastrophic) backups that are initiated through Central Administration, STSADM.exe, and PowerShell (in SharePoint 2010) all leverage the same underlying object model code (in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Backup namespace) to carry out their operations. The path that is taken to invoke that code isn’t the same in each of these cases, however. Backup and restore requests that are submitted...

Mattias Karlsson -Expert in Residence Creating site templates is a good way to let your end-users create sites that are pre-configured and contain the lists and libraries you want them to contain. This is often done to unify the look and feel while retaining a common structure of sites. If you want to create a site template, you should start with a blank SharePoint site and modify it as needed. When you are done, go to Site Settings and then click...