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Tips, Tricks and Best Practices :IT Pro's OnlyUse SHIFT+ENTER to open the menu (new window).Open MenuOpen Menu

Gotcha's, tips, tricks, best practices for various out of box features on SharePoint for beginners, with some help for new server administrators
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54
  
If you are a developer in charge of branding, make sure you package and deploy the custom look and feel properly or it will be erased with the next software upgrade.  Also make sure your branding is compatible with the out of box themes available.  Heather Solomon is the authority on this.  Branding should only be tackled by experience and specialised developers, a lot can go wrong.  DO NOT remove the default breadcrumbs when designing branding for team sites.  These breadcrumbs are crucial for navigating through the platform by the helpdesk teams.
Leave professional branding to the professionals.  You don’t need to go to those extremes on a ring-fenced team site.  If you are trying to make your site “look pretty”, use the CEWP and PowerPoint to do so.
IT ProSite DesignVersion AgnosticBest Practice
85
  
Don’t put team sites and intranet sites on the same web application and site collection in large organisations.  It is not scalable.  Best practices is one web app for intranet sites, one for team sites, one for My Sites, one for operational sites if applicable (custom developed solutions).  If they are all on one web app, and something goes wrong with a 3rd party components, you could crash the entire platform.  Restores will become tricky if you need to restore just one subsite.  Backups can also become too large to handle.
IT ProTechnicalVersion AgnosticBest Practice
86
  
50,000 site collections per content database.
15GB per site collection (default quota max).
50 MB file size limit (recommended) up to 2GB (max).
2000 items per list view.
IT ProTechnical2007 AllBest Practice
87
  
Site quotas can only be set at site collection level, not subsite level, take this into consideration when planning your Information Architecture.
IT ProTechnical2007 AllTrick
88
  
Don’t just override the 2 month retention period in Central Admin for workflow.  The log files get too big and the task alerts stop going out and 10 other things fall over.  You need to do proper planning on a database level if you need to keep workflow associations on a long term basis. 
IT ProCentral Admin2007 AllTrick
89
  
When using explicit managed paths, remember the new site collection won’t display on the source site as a subsite.  Tell the Site Collection Administrators to need to add links to both to access either.
IT ProTechnical2007 AllTrick
90
  
Change the regional settings on a server level to your country's specific date format and allow all sites to inherit the settings.
IT ProTechnicalVersion AgnosticBest Practice
91
  
Remember SharePoint is a business tool, your job is to keep the system stable, let business manage it thereafter.  Make sure you have processes in place to request functionality that affects everyone, and set up the initial structures; but business needs to take responsibility for overall governance and rollout into the organisation.  Communicate!!  Business and IT both need to be represented at governance forums.
IT ProGovernanceVersion AgnosticBest Practice
92
  
Don’t give end users access to SSP no matter how much they beg - they can destroy half the platform from there.
IT ProSSPVersion AgnosticBest Practice
93
  
Make sure all the Audit Settings have been activated on the site collections you create for users or you won’t be able to extract reports.
IT ProPlanningVersion AgnosticTrick
94
  
When task emails stop going out, check the Timer Job Status in Operations on Central Admin first.  Check when last they went out and if it was successful.  If that is where the problem is, stop and start the timer job to reactivate them.  If that is not the issue, check the SMTP server - if it failed at anytime, it would have affected the tasks from SharePoint.
IT ProCentral AdminVersion AgnosticTip
95
  
Make sure you understand the service accounts on the farm.  Check with your internal ISO policies, they may require that the passwords change every X time frame.  This is very tricky to do and can take a long time, plan for it.
IT ProTechnicalVersion AgnosticTip
96
  
If you are planning on using Excel Services, remember that you need to add the spreadsheets to the Trusted File Locations for each division that requests them.  You need to have a process in place to ensure that the source of these files can be trusted, check with the owners of those systems / locations if we can access their data, as well as a process for business to request a location to be added. (Part of Governance).
IT ProGovernanceVersion AgnosticBest Practice
97
  
SSP has separate permissions, if you give someone access to Central Admin they won’t automatically get access to SSP.  You need to add them as administrators there too.
IT ProSSP2007 AllTrick
98
  
Don’t mess with the default settings, for example the out of box functionality is there for business users to leverage.  For example, the default upload limit is 50MB.  If you make that much less, you will affect how long it will take for the business to do bulk uploads from file shares.  It affects the single file limit as well as the multiple file limit.  Training is also done on all the default settings, advise your Governance team if you have changed any of these and be open to changing them back with the right motivation.
IT ProPlanningVersion AgnosticBest Practice
99
  
You need some kind of 3rd party administration / management tool on large implementations, like DocAve or ControlPoint.  Permissions management and restores become a nightmare.  Migrations, backups, storage, dormancy and web part usage need to be managed properly.
IT ProGovernanceVersion AgnosticTip
100
  
Admin Toolkit 4 has some measure of permissions reporting, so that would be greatly beneficial for your end users as they can extract their own reports without bothering IT every 5 minutes. 
IT ProTechnical2007 AllTip
101
  
Don’t just switch things on and off without planning and communicating, you are going to make an enemy out of business.  It affects the front-end. 
Attend an end user course!  I know it sounds mad, but you need to understand what happens on the front-end because what you do on the back-end is going to directly impact your users.  You need to understand the service you are supporting.
IT ProPlanningVersion AgnosticTip
111
  
Don't ever edit the default new, edit or disp aspx files - you will break your site collection, they are very interlinked.  Copy them and edit the copies.
IT ProTechnicalVersion AgnosticBest Practice