Over 90 simple but incredibly effective recipes to administer your SharePoint applications
An administrator’s job is akin to being the Marines. They are the first ones to be called when there is an issue with SharePoint. Nothing gets done without their knowledge. Typically, the administrator has to decide who to bring in when an issue needs to be addressed. Additionally, administrators deal with management, end users, developers, and the power users.
The recipes in this article teach and expose useful and common functionality found in SharePoint 2010. The intent of the recipes is to create a SharePoint Farm environment that is efficient and monitored. For example, large lists have always been an issue in SharePoint in the past, with little or no support to address it out of the box. This is directly related to the performance of your SharePoint installation. This article has a recipe on a new functionality, throttling large lists.
PowerShell is a critical tool for the SharePoint Administrator. While the recipes may only show how to use the commands at a granular level, they may be combined to create powerful administrator scripts. As a result, many of the tasks that are performed today can be automated and collected at a macro level. After reading this chapter, think about how these techniques can be combined.
SharePoint Designer 2010 is a powerful tool that helps create rapid solutions using SharePoint. As the tool is free, any user can download and access its functionality. By connecting to a SharePoint site, users can freely make significant changes to the site. This includes the look and feel of the site, workflow, and connecting to external sources.
The issue with this amount of power is the havoc that can be done by creating customizations that inadvertently tax the SharePoint Server(s). The end result may be a degradation of the responsiveness of the SharePoint farm, adversely affecting the performance of the site.
Let’s look at the preceding paragraph in terms of a real workflow as an example. Workflows are very popular and can be done out of the box with SharePoint Designer. Zach’s trucking company hauls product all over the country. They get their work responding to a Request for Quotation. They can get up to ten RFQs per day.
The requirement is that when an RFQ document gets uploaded, several tasks are created in a separate list for multiple people. Using the task list, they can determine when the document is ready to be sent out.
The workflow can be created in SharePoint Designer (SPD) out of the box. If the person using SharePoint Designer is not well-versed in creating workflows, it is possible that he/she might create long running tasks and infinite loops. Over time, the farm performance will degrade. This is because at the heart of SharePoint, every call made goes back to the SQL database. An infinite loop could cause a list to become quite large.
A different issue has to do with usability and standards. As users with proper permissions can modify look and feel of individual sites, they can deviate from corporate standards. Multiply this capability with the number of users in your organization, and you will realize there is a very real issue with governance of sites in general.
SharePoint 2010 has a solution for these problems that can either limit a user’s capability in their site or take it away completely. This recipe shows you how and where to do this within SharePoint.
You must have farm level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.
Fill in the required information:
SharePoint Designer is a client application that is installed on the user’s desktop. This recipe shows how to disable SPD from working at a web application level.
The Site Collection Administrator can also modify the way SharePoint Designer works. To accomplish this:
The sections are self-explanatory.
If the Farm Administrator limits SPD access at the Central Administration level (as shown earlier in the recipe), the changes are reflected in red color on the form, with a message as seen in the following screenshot:
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