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26/11/2011

Sharepoint Admin's Best Practices [MSDN]


Best Practices for SP Administration:
1.       Don’t create too many Web applications. Its specified that 4 web applications are enough on a server.
a.       Intranet / Portal
b.      My sites
c.       Team sites
d.      Partner Access
2.       Don’t mess up with IIS settings of Central admin. SP likes to save the changes to Config DB, and Central admin works well as far as IIS Settings and Config settings match.
The only change which has to be done at IIS for Central Admin is SSL Settings.

3.       Always use SharePoint framework solutions. If you are deploying the files manually, it hurts when expanding the farm and you will end-up in ill practices like dragging dlls to GAC, manual file drops to root folders and web.config modifications not being copied.
4.       The SharePoint installer might tempt you for a standalone installations and its easy to do. But you will end up with single SQL server express which hurts you when it comes to upgrading to a farm installation.
5.       DB auto growth settings :
·         Autogrowth is good. Keep it on for safety (it should be considered a contingency only).
·         Pre-growth is good. Ensure your databases are pre-grown to approximately their estimated size according to Microsoft's recommendations.
·         The default autogrowth settings are bad. Increase the growth increment in order to improve performance and reduce fragmentation.
6.       Document Farm configurations, if you are not using a Third party tools.
In short, a full-fidelity farm backup (that can be used for restoration) is still not possible without using third party tools. If you don't have those tools available you must document your configuration.
7.       No direct operations on Database.
According to this white paper, the following maintenance tasks are recommended:
• Checking database integrity (ensures that your data and indexes are not corrupted).
• Defragmenting indexes by either reorganizing them or rebuilding them (applies mainly to indexes; fragmentation can be reduced by setting a large database start size).
• Setting the fill factor for a server (allows index performance to be fine-tuned).
• Shrinking databases to recover unused disk space (white space caused by deleting documents, libraries, lists etc.).
Note that Microsoft do not recommend configuring auto-shrink operations, and advise only to shrink content databases due to the fact that other types of databases (e.g. SSP) do not typically undergo a large number of deletions.
8.       Use PowerShell. In first look it will look like a mess, but its lot easier to manage with PowerShell thank any other tool.
9.       SharePoint capacity planning recommendations:
Study the limits of design , app and configure as per the guide lines given by MS.

Is it helpful for you? Kindly let me know your comments / Questions. 

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