Weekly Newsletter Signup

• Upcoming
  Live Online Workshops

  • Excel and SharePoint: I didn’t know you could do that!
  • Easy Tabs Interface - Simple SharePoint Navigation for Complex Information
  • Train the Trainer: Materials and Resources for in-house SharePoint Training
  • Become Your Company’s SharePoint SuperStar!
  • Hack SharePoint Web Part Displays with XSLT
  • Business Solution: Health Care Case Management
  • Killer Calendars in SharePoint
  • The Basics of Content Types
  • Business Solution: Create a Compliance Report Intake System in SharePoint
  • Business Solution: Manage Input with Dynamic Feedback Forms
  • Live Blogging at SharePoint Conference 2009

• Ongoing Series

  • Article Archives (1000+)
    All Authors
  • This Week in SharePoint with Joel
    Joel Oleson
  • jQuery for Everyone
    Paul Grenier
  • The Calculated Column
    Dessie Lunsford
  • The Data View Web Part
    Laura Rogers
  • Stump the Panel: Q&A
  • Subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter

• Authors

  • Dessie Lunsford
  • Laura Rogers
  • Lee Reed
  • Mark Miller
  • Jim Bob Howard
  • Paul Galvin
  • Paul Grenier
  • Toni Frankola
  • Woody Windischman

• SharePoint Resources

  • Bits of SharePoint
  • Codeless Solutions for SharePoint
  • Get the Point
  • Innovation Matters
  • Path to SharePoint
  • Paul Galvin
  • SharePoint 911
  • SharePoint Blank
  • SharePoint Blogs at SharePointU
  • SharePoint for Non-Developers
  • SharePoint Forums at SharePointU
  • SharePoint Screencasts
  • SharePoint Use Cases
  • Social Media Talk Tweets
  • The Sanity Point
  • The Weekly Newsletter  

Sometimes with SharePoint you will find yourself in a Chicken and Egg situation! Many SharePoint specialists consider it a best practice to use many site collections in there environments than to have one big site collection. Each site collection can be assigned its own content database and therefore makes backup and restoration of SharePoint data more efficient than try to back up one huge database. This can however cause you other problems such as isolated content types, and difficulty to roll up data from lists and libraries that are distributed through multiple site collections.

Todd Bleeker gave an extended presentation at Best Practices Conference this week on “Best Practices for Developing SharePoint Web Parts”. I slapped together a quick down and dirty web cam recording with UStream, embedded below.
Todd was kind enough to send me the entire slidedeck along with the resources from his presentation. Crank up the recording [...]

The content from the streams are archived so that you can review the sessions and the notes taken in each. If you followed the live stream, I’d appreciate comments to the authors who participated so that they know what they provided is of value to people who couldn’t attend the event.

We’re going to stick a web cam in a couple of the sessions and stream them live, so you won’t feel so left out.

The live streams are setup. There are a couple ways to view them. Go to the Live Media Streams page. There are four panels. You can activate all panels, or choose only the ones you’d like to view. Here’s how they are setup.

There are 3 more real world lessons learned that should be mentioned here. These problems are not limited simply to web parts and related files. Items as simple as images and as complex site definitions (the blueprints that detail the creation of SharePoint sites) are all effected by improper non-WSP deployment. Site definitions, field types, event receivers, workflow, features all must be deployed via WSP. In addition CSS files, ASPX pages, and Master Pages will need to be deployed via WSP if they are to be used farm wide. As a general rule, if the item in question will affect the entire farm it will likely need to be deployed via WSP.

So, I’m going straight to the bad practice #2 because of conversations with some peers yesterday here in the UK. We see lots of blogs and articles about SharePoint Governance, and they are all very lengthy and probably applicable to most organizations. But, what I’ve seen is the average SharePoint administrator is the Exchange Admin, firewall admin, and sometimes the accountant! The point is – many folks don’t have time to go through a lengthy governance process. But, we know what kind of trouble they’ll get in without it! So, what’s the answer? I call it ‘Bare Metal Governance”