Nick Hadlee's Blog on SharePoint and Other Occasional Rants…

Perhaps this is a bit unhealthy but Saturday morning seems to the time when I am catching up with the aggregated feeds and generally perusing the web. A few recent posts stood out as pretty useful so this is my online reminder to have a look in some further detail again next week. Emailing the links won’t have the same effect as a quick post.

1.) Ivan Wilson was talking about the Storage Space Allocation Reports that can be viewed by Site Collection administrators. Generally SharePoint has some pretty basic reporting out-of-the-box, and these set of stats on the physical storage being used by lists, libraries and documents in your site collection definitely help in getting some better information about your SharePoint environment from SharePoint itself. I didn’t see anything about the sub-sites though? I am hoping there is some site usage reporting too as this is a fairly fundamental statistic. Largest sites in the site collection would definitely be one of the things I would want to view from a storage allocation report. Ivan mentions these reports are only available if the site collection has been allocated a storage quota, which is generally good practice to keep the site collection storage within some defined limits, and apart from getting managable site collection databases by using storage quotas there is the added bonus of these reports.

2.) Adding some structure to Wikis via templates by Michael Hofer was mentioned by the the folks at Get the Point. They said this approach was recently used by Microsoft for a critical project. That’s a pretty good endorsement so I think I am going to look at this one a bit more closely as it will fit some upcoming requirements on a project.

3.) Gary Lapointe picked up on something posted by Stefan Goßner that moving site collections between farms is now a supported operation via Backup/Restore. Previously the only “supported” method was an Import/Export, which I have always found pretty slow and it can sometimes have its quirks, not to mention you can’t retain any of the object ID’s (GUID’s) of the sites, lists and libraries which is a real pain when webparts in your site stop working. A custom import method like one of Garys commands or the very useful Content Migration Wizard by Chis O’Brien is generally needed and almost a necessity for many content deployment scenarios.  Even though moving site collections using the command line hasn’t been problematic for me so far, its good to know it’s now a supported method to move content between farms.