Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

SharePoint and Disaster Recovery Options

August 23rd, 2011
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AIS Network Blog SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery

The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide.

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

The complexity and diversity of the Microsoft SharePoint platform also applies to its disaster recovery options.  When it comes to protecting your SharePoint farm from the effects of a catastrophic event, there are numerous tools and best practices.  But which is the best fit for you?

I recently completed reading and studying the SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide by John L. Ferringer and Sean P. McDonough.  It’s a worthwhile read, if you have the opportunity and particularly if you are trying to determine whether your current procedure for backing up SharePoint environments provides adequate and proper recovery capabilities.

The book explains that there are three kinds of recoveries:

-          Content

-          Site Collection

-          Full Farm

If you need to do Content recovery, then the Content Database needs to be backed up. If you need to recover a Site Collection, then the Site Collection needs to be backed up. Content is backed up as part of a Site Collection, but a Site Collection is not backed up as part of Content. If you need to recover a full farm, then you need to do a Full Farm backup. Merely backing up the individual SQL Server databases does not capture enough information to recover a full farm. There are additional components that get installed on the server; these are not in a SQL Server database and therefore will not be available for a recovery.

This means that if your current procedure is to back up the SQL Server databases, then that method will not work for Full Farm recovery of SP 2010 Foundation or Server. According to Microsoft, this is an un-supported practice, which means you may get lucky and it might work, but then again, maybe not.

The only fully supported method for a full farm recovery is to do SharePoint Full Farm Backups. SharePoint Full Farm Backups are executed via:

1) SharePoint Central GUI,

2) PowerShell commands, or

3) stsadm command line.

Execution via PowerShell or stsadm can be scripted as batch jobs and scheduled. A full farm backup ends up including the SQL Server databases, but it also picks up the IIS configuration, the Hive, GAC components, and Customized Code – everything required for Full Farm Recovery.

In some circumstances, there may be a difference in the amount of space and time used to create a Full Farm Backup. FFB creates an un-compressed, directory structure, which would subsequently be backed up to storage for 14-day (or otherwise) retention. The “un-compressed” part will not be affected by those implementations using SQL Server Web Edition, since Web Edition doesn’t compress backups. For those implementations using SQL Standard or SQL Enterprise, this would result in additional disk space being consumed, because what was once compressed will no longer be compressed.

How are you approaching SharePoint 2010 disaster recovery?  I encourage your comments.

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Why You Should Care About SharePoint 2010 Administration

April 28th, 2011
Posted by: admin

Guest Blog

SharePoint 2010 is a very complex system… not only for a developer or consultant. It is also very complex for an administrator and regardless of your role as a developer or consultant in your company you need to understand the aspects of SharePoint administration.

And here is why:

As a developer your implementation is required to work not only in your environment but also in your customers environment. Since every customers infrastructure is different in the way it is organized your code might not work. Because of that a replication of your customers environment can save you lots of time and money because you will find errors during the implementation phase of your project instead of the going live phase. Of course it will keep you stress free and doesn’t impact the image of you and your employer.

As a consultant you need to understand the impacts of a SharePoint deployment. SharePoint is always deployed within an existing infrastructure. There aren’t only interfaces between existing servers and system… additionally you need to think about the administrator himself. He is the person who will be responsible for planning, deployment and maintenance. Bringing people with the right knowledge at the right time together is most important.

In order to get such an understanding an experienced SharePoint developer or consultant can be helpful. Otherwise a book about SharePoint 2010 administration is a good start and there are quite some books out there by Wrox, Microsoft Press, McGraw-Hill Osborne Media or Sybex. Usually a book for beginners is accurate since it doesn’t only tell you about administration it also tells you about the things behind features and functionality. Understanding the use case is a central part of the beginners book. If you are already familiar with the background of SharePoint 2010 you can switch to a professional book with a lot more detailed scenarios.

For a successful deployment and implementation of SharePoint 2010 it is the most important thing to get an understanding of basic administration. How do you deploy SharePoint? Which person does it affect? At which time do you need someone? Without thinking about that problems will occur and usually it’s too late or it requires more strength to revise it.

Choosing the right SharePoint book is essential since they cover content in a different way and in different depth.

Markus Ramirez is an independent SharePoint developer mainly in Switzerland but also in Germany and Austria. As a trainer he tries to sensitize people to take a look behind things in order to understand them.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

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