I have created a new SharePoint 2007 MOSS Intranet. Our admin people are purchasing backup/restore software and I will eventually have to verify a restore of the farm backup they create. Has anyone got some suggestions on a best practice for this? Ours is a small 2-server farm built with VMWare VMs on SAN. How will I know that the restored version is a duplicate of the original in every way and what should I look out for?
In answer to the remarks:
There's no checklist. The problem is the dynamic nature of SharePoint. Team Sites come and go, as do documents and libraries. Who's to say one of your users didn't delete a document library and then you think after a restore something is missing.
I think the best bet would be to require your users to do a quick scan after a restore, see if they miss anything major, like sites or libraries that are supposed to be there. You yourself could have a "homemade" checklist that you follow to check if all major features deployed by you (features, timerjobs etc.) are still there.
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Is Sharepoint my best option to replace an aging network of fileshares? There's approx 1TB of data residing among 3 fileshares (1 DFS, 2 NAS boxes). A document management system is in place for new things - the file shares are now just read-only archives/legacy. Our users would simply need to be able to search for and open the documents.
Users are finding it difficult to locate their documents in the file shares and windows search does not often help. Sharepoint was suggested as something which would play nicely with Office documents (99% of the content) and have a good search facility.
Not being a Sharepoint Developer or having had any training on it, I'm getting a little lost. I have set up a test server to try it out using SP2013. I have managed to index each of my file shares and have created a search page. However, results aren't consistent with the indexted items. I assume I need to somehow get the relevant metadata from the files but I have no idea how to go about this.
Could anyone suggest some resources for help on this subject (my searches have mainly turned up paid-for Sharepoint addons or outdated blogs) and any experience of doing something similar? Also happy for any suggestions on ways to achieve this using other software/platforms.
I went with Microsoft Search Server 2010 in the end.
Sharepoint is basically optimized to be a document manager. I think you don't need to buy or donwload addons.
For your problem, metadata are the key! You need to properly specify the metadata.
I give you the theory of a plan document management in SharePoint 2013 :
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263266.aspx
A nice introduction to metadata :
http://fr.slideshare.net/gzelfond/document-management-in-sharepoint-without-folders-introduction-to-metadata
Be careful to use the Microsoft documentation for the beginning. From my experience, its difficult to start with this documentation because you have several things in it. There is also good books/ebooks that you can find easily to start well, and probably more simplified than MS documentation.
I'm not sure if this should be posted here or over superuser, but how does one go about mirroring a Sharepoint 2007 site? I have admin access, and the mirror doesn't need to be nice and pretty; it just needs to be presentable and readable. Also, I need all the shared docs to be copied as well.
We use to have WinHTTrack to mirror the Sharepoint, but that broke a few months ago due to some of our recent security changes. I tried the username#password:domain method but that resulted no luck.
It depends a little bit on how and where you want to mirror it.
If you have a separate SharePoint farm (even a single server - one tier - farm), you can rely on backup / restore, export / import or content deployment to have another copy up and running that will be a mirror of the existing one.
If you want an offline version, depends on what kind of content you need (collaboration stuff ?) you can use Microsoft Groove 2007 that offers an offline mode for some of the targeted data.
I've found this great tool that can mirror the SP site for cheap: http://www.metaproducts.com/OEPR.html
If WinHTTrack did satisfy you, why not just fix it?
There are solutions around the web to have WinHTTrack work with NTLM authentication: http://forum.httrack.com/readmsg/7513/index.html
However the download link seems to be broken (geocities..), but you could try to search for NTML proxy solutions and try to setup your own.
We'll be upgrading a client's MOSS public internet site soon from a Cumulative Update to SP2 and are conscious that there will be downtime (to perform the upgrade and possibly troubleshooting!). We would like to add a holding page so that visitors still get access to key contact details and a message that the site is under maintenance.
Does anyone have any tips for doing this type of thing with SharePoint? I know of the app_offline.htm file that when dropped into the web root, will automatically prevent access to the rest of the site but wasn't sure if this was standard practice in the SharePoint world?
Any tips?
Cheers, James.
If the app_offline.htm works for you, then by all means, use it.
I think that it will the best option for you, and to the best of my knowledge SharePoint doesn't have any other means of putting itself offline.
As this is a public intranet site you are updating, presumably there is already a test environment for it that is close or the same in configuration. It is important to follow exactly the same steps for updating the test environment as you would for production. These should be documented as well and followed to the letter to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. This way you are much less likely to run into problems.
I would try app_offline.htm as you suggest (like Magnus I don't believe there is another way to take SharePoint offline). If your test environment updates with this in place you should be fine.
I work for a large organization and we have been utilizing SharePoint for document library. Yesterday my boss called me to his office and asked me:
"I heard that SharePoint is an ECM! So what can it do for us?".
"What kind of problem do you want us to solve utilizing SharePoint?", I replied.
"I want to know what it means when they say it is a ECM and how it can help us?", He said.
I told him it has Document Management, WorkFlow, Records Management, Search and some other stuff.
Anywho, He wants me to put togetter a list of things that SharePoint offers as an ECM.
You might find some useful info on the MS ECM team's blog.
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server has a substantial content management system available. What was previously Microsoft Content Management Server was discontinued and that functionality was put under the Sharepoint umbrella. Usually this is referring to web content, but it can honestly be any kind of content relevant to an enterprise. It is intended to be a direct competitor to all the major WCMS out there, focused especially on the enterprise (governance, auditing, security model, etc).
That having been said, the current iteration of MOSS's EWCM pretty much blows. If you can develop your CM strategy to be parallel to MOSS, it can work out OK, otherwise it's much more pain than it's worth. Use SP for document management and use something else for content management.
Sharepoint is a collaboration platform restricted to a windows environment
Give Alfresco communities (labs) a go is my opinion here as it 'acts' as a Sharepoint server so Microsoft Office suite will not notice the difference but your wallet will...
Er... think the boss got a bit too much $$$ to spend. But really, an't we supposed to deploy a technical solution to solve a business problem.
The list of features can be found at
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/product/capabilities/Pages/default.aspx
Does anyone have any strategies/tips/traps for moving to Team System? Should it be done in baby steps, or all at once? Should we migrate our SourceSafe library over, or draw a line in the sand and move forward? Is it worth brining SharePoint into the mix? Any thoughts are appreciated.
I've never had to migrate to TFS, but have used it pretty extensively for the past couple of years.
Regarding your question on Sharepoint, we've found it pretty useful in conjunction with TFS. We use it primarily for documentation management and for storing other "non-technical" artifacts related to the project. Some dev teams advocate keeping documentation in source control alongside source code, which is OK, but in my experience our project stakeholders have an easier time accessing relevent project documentation via the Sharepoint portal than they would having to interface with source control.
I basically was able to distribute the URL to the sharepoint site associated with our TFS team project to the concerned non-technical team members and have been able to avoid constantly e-mailing documents around, so it's been great for us.
It may just be too much work to do it all at once.
I feel that it is easier to divvy out projects to different people one at a time.
That way they can move them across and ensure that each works okay before closing out the SourceSafe.
You will always want a backup of the SourceSafe "database" around just in case.
I do not know how to migrate from SourceSafe to TFS and keep the comments and versions.
By far the easiest it to just add the projects in, but having migrated that way in the past, we always missed the ability to find out what others had done to particular files.
If you find a way to migrate, I would go that way unless it is hideously expensive.