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SharePoint Don'ts

Don’t touch SharePoint Designer until you’ve been working with SharePoint for at least at six months to a year full time!!! You will break your whole site if you don’t know what you are doing. You don’t need it yet, be patient. There are things you need to learn first. It is a very complicated tool for non technical users. You also need a good understanding of HTML, XML, XSL and CSS to make the best use of it. SPD is more of a developer’s tool. Don't go on Sharepoint Designer training until you've had at least 6 months to a year of fulltime SharePoint experience. You will just waste your money.

Don’t custom develop your entire solution until you understand what it can do out of the box. Remember that customised solutions are going to come with migration issues when the new version comes out. You will be tied to that solution for a very long time. Wait 6 months or so before customising your solution.

Don’t play around with content types until you understand how they work properly - never ever change the core Item content type ‘title’ field. If you rename that field there, you will mess up your entire content type database and it is near impossible to fix. You also need to understand where in the hierarchy to create content types or they won’t be available everywhere. Wait until you are comfortable with SharePoint before tackling list content types, get the experts in to help in the interim.

Don’t think you can use the out of box workflow (document approval) as an audit trail on a long term basis by default. Workflow history is deleted after 60 days. (And don’t just deactivate that feature in Central Admin, the log files will get too big and ten other things will fall over). So for example, if you are using workflow to approve board meeting minutes, the approval status you see in the document library now will not display in 60 days. Your auditors will have an issue with that. You need to speak to your techies for workable solution if you are planning on using SharePoint as an audit source.