SharePoint Admins - Can I get five minutes of your time?
Dear SharePoint Administrator,
I know you are busy. I know those business folks and corporate executives are driving you crazy with demands for additional SharePoint functionality. I promise to be brief. Can I get five minutes of your time this week?
I’d like you to perform the following five tasks. They shouldn’t take more than a minute each. The goal here is to give you a pulse on the health of your SharePoint environment. We’re not trying to fix anything as much as we’re being proactive and looking to not have anything break (forcing those long, drawn out support calls into Microsoft at 2AM). So, please just go down this checklist then dump this note into a recurring monthly appointment so we can do it every month. Remember what your mom said about an ounce of prevention…
Thanks!
The Magic SharePoint Elves
1. Check the date on your last SharePoint backup. If it is equal to this morning, move on. If it is last August, set aside some time to get this fixed.
2. Check the event log on your SharePoint servers. Red X’s are bad. If you see none, move on. If you see a couple, read them and set aside some time to troubleshoot. If there are lots, make time now to get this fixed. Remember, when SharePoint gets “sick” it stays “sick”.
3. Check the disk space on your servers. SharePoint goes to a very bad place when disk space gets low. Make sure there is ample space on all the necessary drives.
4. Check the SharePoint version numbers. Make sure you are at least to SP2 for SharePoint 2007. Make sure this version number is consistent across all your front end servers, including development servers.
5. Randomly test your search security. Pick two documents from two different places that are secured. Validate that you can discover them in a keyword search. Send those keywords to someone who does not have access and confirm the document is not shown. Pass this test to five business users.