So how does a visitor find what they need in a MOSS site without knowing who owns what? This issue requires more than just a short list of ideas. For starters, I’ve compiled a list of items to research:

Portal sites allow you to connect individual sites across an organization and consolidate access to existing business applications. For more details about this from Microsoft, click the following link:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102433171033.aspx

Administrators can define keywords and best bets at the site collection level. This allows the Search feature to bring up results for a term and its synonyms.

Users can inspect a searchable site map with the Site Map Web Part. The Site Map web part displays the site structure in a tree that you can expand and collapse. Click the following link to see a picture of a site map.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/MossSiteMapWebPart.aspx

My Sites are like personal portals. Content providers can target information to you, based on the information that you or your organization enter in your My Profile, such as your position title, organization, professional interests, current projects, and colleague relationships. 

Several kinds of web parts can aggregate information from multiple locations. Content Query web parts allow you to view information from any other site in your location. The My Sites site allows you to quickly access the areas of a site that you actively participate in.

Audiences are another tool. You can present applicable information to users by targeting relevant information for that audience. Click the following link for a Microsoft article about targeting content to specific audiences.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102432221033.aspx

• Share  templates across Site Collections as an .stp file (custom template).
• Import the .stp file into other site collection by adding the .stp file to the site template gallery.
• You can get additional templates from the Microsoft web site or other third parties.
• SharePoint Designer imports and exports packages (.cab files) that contain site templates.
• Exporting copies web parts, lists, and documents.

The Process of Installing Web Parts

• Custom Web part packages exported to other sites as cabinet, or .cab, files.
• Use the command line tool stsadm.exe to install Web parts from a Web part package on one or more virtual servers.
• stsadm.exe keeps a copy of the Web part package in the configuration database.
• Install web parts in \BIN. The assembly is available only to the web app.  When you install Web parts on the BIN directory, an assembly is available only to the Web application.
• To use stsadm.exe to install a Web part, use the following command line:

stsadm.exe -o addwppack -filename <path to Web Part Package> [-url <URL>] [-globalinstall]

Where:

-filename = the path to the cab file that stores the web part

-url = URL of the Web application on which you install the Web part. To install on all the Web applications, leave out this tag

-globalinstall =  optional parameter used to install on the GAC rather than \BIN

1. After installing web parts, add them to the site web part gallery.
2. Install the web part assembly.
3. Use the SharePoint Configureation Analyzer to check the installation.
4. Run the Configuration Analyzer again with the Save State Information option selected. This creates a reference XML file for recreating the mappings between GUIDs and typenames. This allows the analyzer to report the more readable types names of web part parts in its reports.

• The ASP.NET code access security feature assigns a level of trust based on SharePoint. You can configure this setting.
• By default, applications receive a level of trust appropriate for the evidence they present. For example, local applications must run in the My Computer zone with the Full trust permission set; applications located on a UNC share must run in the intranet zone with the LocalIntranet restricted permission set.
• You can change the levels of trust assigned to an application. To allow this, WSS 3.0 includes the ASP.NET default security policy files and policy files of its own. Code Access Security can be easily handled for an individual assembly if the administrator names it strongly and adds a policy for that assembly. The administrator can assign the appropriate level of trust to the application within the web.config file of that application.
• You can change the permissions associated with the installed assemblies, depending on the requirement and trust associated with the  assemblies. The easiest way is to change the policy applied to the Web application; this raises or lowers the permissions given to all the associated assemblies.
• You can change the policy by editing the web.config file that contains the trust level attribute of the specific Web app.
• The levels of trust available are:
• Full
• WSS_Medium
• WSS_Minimal

To modify the policy level for a Web application:

1. Open the web.config file of the Web application.
2. Search for: <trust level=”WSS_Minimal” originUrl=”" />.
3. Change it to: <trust level=”WSS_Medium” originUrl=”" />.
4. Save the file.
5. Reset Internet Information Services (IIS) by using iisreset in the command prompt.

Managing Users and Site Permissions

Guidelines for Managing User Accounts

When installing WSS 3.0, you must select the account modes for users.

Two types of account modes, based on the methods used for creating the account:

• Domain mode – import users into existing WSS environment. To create new domain accounts, use Active Directory Users and Computers option.
• Active Directory mode – used by ISPs who provide WSS 3.0 services to users on Internet. ISPs create unique accounts in Active Directory in the org unit that you specify.

Important The Domain mode is permanent when you install. The account mode affects the database configuration on your server or farm. You can’t change the user account modes after creating the configuration database.

• Administration for user accounts is the same for both account modes.
• The administration of the user accounts is consistent for all account modes. You can use the same method to assign permissions to users for both the account modes.
• If you select Active Directory mode, you can’t access all the administrative tasks in the Central Administration site, such as creating a top-level site or enabling self-service web sites creation. You must use stsadm.exe or the object model to do these things with Active Directory mode.
• The Minimum Password Age group policy on the domain controller is set to 0 days. In case this group policy is not set, users an’t modify their passwords, unless they are administrators on the server.
• You can’t use Active Directory account mode for WSS 3.0 installations on Active Directory Domain Controllers.

Best Practices for Managing User Groups

You should manage users with SharePoint groups, custom groups based on your organizational requirements.  

Best practices for SharePoint groups:

1. Assigns permissions to groups, rather than to users. It’s difficult to maintain user accounts.
2. Three default permission groups:
   • Owners: Full control.
   • Members: View pages and edit documents.
   • Visitors: Read-only.
3. Owners of information must be able to assign permissions to other users who need to share that information.
4. Might need to create custom group when default groups do not meet the security needs of a site.

How to Customize Site Permissions

Site permissions: Full Control, Design, Contribute, and Read.

 Customizing Security Configurations

What Are the Content Security Levels Available for a WSS Site?

Default site groups:

• Guest,
• Reader,
• Member,
• Contributor,
• Content Manager,
• Web Designer,
• Administrator

Considerations for Configuring Security for Lists and Items

• If you have relatively few items that require restrictive permissions, you should set permissions from the site level downward to the item level.
• If a site contains multiple lists with complex permission requirements, you just set permissions for the list and then for the items.  
• Minimize giving individual permissions to items; preferable to create new libraries in which the same group of users can be given access to the content.
• Complicated permissions strain the server when processing pages.

The Role of IRM in WSS 3.0

• IRM integrates with Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) to provide a centralized way to control document access. RMS provides information protection through persistent usage policies.
• WSS 3.0 supports IRM for documents in document libraries.
• To implement IRM for a file type, you must install a protector for the file type. This controls the encryption and decryption of rights-managed documents for a file type. IRM helps you control:
  • Actions that users can perform on documents they open from WSS 3.0 document libraries.
  • Sensitive information on the server.

  For example, if you make a document library available to users within your organization for previewing upcoming products, you can use IRM to prevent them from publishing sensitive content for external audiences. When users upload a document from a document library, the IRM permissions of the document determine the users’ permissions to access the content in WSS 3.0 security settings.

•  To use IRM in WSS 3.0, you must install RMS Client with Service Pack 1 (SP1) on every WFE on your farm.

To use IRM, do the following:

1. To open IRM, click Central Admin and click Operations.
2. On the Operations page, click Security Configuration.
3. Click Information Rights Management. 

What Are the Various User Rights in WSS 3.0?

• You can grant access permissions to WSS 3.0 sites to users through membership in site groups. When permissions are disabled, they become unavailable for site groups and the users in those groups.
• Each Web app has 33 rights available to the server. You can enable or disable these rights but cannot assign them directly to users.
• You must assign the rights to site groups.
• To enable or disable permissions on a Web application:
  1. Go to Start and click All Programs.
  2. Click Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.
  3. Click the Application Management link on the page, and then click the User rights for Web application link.
  4. Select or clear the specific permissions and click OK.
• Categories of user rights: list, site, and personal rights.

Considerations for Managing Access to Web Applications

• Manage access to Web applications with Web application policies.
• Use these policies to grant or deny permissions for user or service accounts across an entire Web application.
• You can permit a service account that is used by another process to access part of or an entire Web application.
• Using the policies, you can restrict access of users, such as preventing users from modifying Web parts. The Search service provides a special policy that gives access to the entire Web app.
• Use the SharePoint Central Administration site to set up web application policies. Site or Site Collection owners cannot view the users or permissions assigned to them. You
• A Web application policy is available for controlling anonymous access.

Adding a Policy Permission Level

The steps for adding a policy permission level are:

1. Click Central Admin, click Application Management > Application Security >  Policy for Web Application.
2. Click Manage Policy Permission Levels.
3. On the top bar, click Add Permission Policy Level.
4. Enter a name and a description for the policy level and select the appropriate permissions.

When adding a policy permission level, you might consider denial of permission. Denial of permission prevents users from having that permission, even if permission is granted in a site collection or site.

Adding Users to a Policy  

The steps for adding a user to a policy are:

1. Click Manage Permission Policy in the Quick Launch section in the left navigation bar.
2. Click Add Users.
3. Specify the user or users to whom this policy applies, select a permission level, and click OK.

The considerations for adding users to a policy are:

• Account operates as System option - The name of the account does not appear in the form of a system in logs and reports.
• You can use policies to deny or allow access across a Web application.
• If an action is denied at the Web application policy level, no user can perform that action in any site.
• Site-level permission cannot restrict the users who have the permission granted in the policy.

Considerations for Backing Up and Restoring WSS Data 

You can use backup and restore within the SharePoint GUI to back up content databases, Central Administration, or stsadm.exe for a whole collection.

To restore a site that has become corrupt or restore a site to a previous state, use Central Administration. You don’t have to have SQL Server to do this kind of backup; but you must have administrative privileges to the local server running WSS 3.0.Individual site backups are faster, but take longer to restore.

You can use the GUI to roll back a site to restore access permissions for a site.

You must create a scheduled task that calls a script for stsadm.exe for scheduled backups. Stsadm.exe doesn’t have a scheduler.

How to Perform a Backup and Restore in a WSS Farm

Use Central Administration or the other tools mentioned previously.

B. Managing Site Performance

The Role of Site Quotas in Managing Site Performance

To compute the quota limits:

Estimated size for site quota = Total amount of disk space available for content databases/Total number of sites per site collection

How to Define a Quota Template

Quota templates can define hard or soft limits for all sites on a virtual server. When a site reaches the warning level, notifications are sent to all site users.

The Role of Locks in Managing Site Quotas

Locking means the site becomes read-only when the site quota for storage is reached. Automatically locked sites display a disk full error message. Sites locked manually by administrator display an “access denied” error message.You must check current quota values before updating them or you can risk locking a site.

How to Apply a Quota Template with Locks

You can apply a quota template to a site collection or web application. You can set quota limits for the amount of stored data and for users.You can manage locks to block adding, updating, or removing information from a site collection.You can change the lock status at any point. For example, if the site quota has been reached and the site is automatically locked, you can change the lock status to allow users to access the site.

If you set a quota on a site collection, this overrides quotas set at the Web application level.

Methods for Recovering Disk Space

Create a backup, move the sites to another server, and then remove the sites on the old server.

Manage site quotas so you can observe the rate at which sites grow to plan for future server requirements.

Use short-term solutions like limiting log file sizes on the SQL server.

C. Monitoring the Server PerformanceBest Practices for Checking the WSS 3.0 Servers

You should check usage logs and server logs to monitor your system “health.” Check the servers every weeks for:

Site collection usage data,

RAM usage,

Event logs.

Because server RAM processes your web pages, RAM has a significant impact on WSS 3.0 peformance. You must check the following for RAM usage:

Task Manager can show you the peak RAM usage that indicates server usage. This helps you make sure the server has enough memory. 

Performance Monitor can show RAM usage over a time period and helps you plan memory requirements.

Important: Monitor RAM closely if the WSS box is on a virtual server to keep from using virtual memory. When virtual servers run out of RAM, they start using hard disk space. When all limits are reached, you can add more hard disk space or add a new SQL server using Central Administration. You can also span content databases across several SQL servers.

The Event Log on the server can help you figure out problems; you must turn Diagnostics Logging. View server event logs from Central Administration > Operations page. Or, use the WSS 3.0 management pack from the MOM server.

How to Monitor the Site Collection Usage Summary

You can use the Internet Explorer SharePoint interface to do this. View the usage logs weekly to analyze trends and identify sites that are not used.You can also look at detailed reports concerning storage using the Storage Space Allocation link on the Site Collection Usage Summary page. This page is available in the SharePoint Internet Explorer interface.

Methods for Monitoring Event Logs

You must monitor both usage logs and server logs. For monitoring event logs, use these two methods:WSS 3.0 Web Event Viewer - this provides information of all servers in the farm in the computer’s event log. You must specify thresholds. The Web Event Viewer shows all WSS 3.0 server events.MOM for SQL Server and IIS monitors WSS on IIS. WSS uses SQL Server for storing information and IIS for serving web pages. MOM generates reports to track all of these systems with the WSS-MOM pack. MOM is the best place to monitor the performance all three systems: SQL Server, IIS, and WSS 3.0.Important: You can also use other MOM packs to track problems with the WFE and back-end database servers.

D. Tuning and Optimizing PerformanceBest Practices for Dealing with Performance Issues on WSS Servers 

For running out of disk space or performance issues, you can scale up or scale down the WSS 3.0 deployment.

Low hard disk space - allocate additional space on the volume; split content databases between disks.

Performance on single server - use the Performance Monitor to check for bottlenecks; address the issues by using additional hardware.

Performance issues are usually related to CPU, hard disk, or RAM.

To improve hard disk performance, move data to a faster disk or add more disks.

Add a faster CPU or additional processors, especially for indexing and search.

For WFE servers, add more RAM. Use the Task Manager to determine peak RAM usage or use the Performance Monitor tool to track the usage over time. For virtual servers, monitor RAM to ensure you do not use virtual memory and affect disk input/output.

If the server reaches capacity, scale out and add additional content database SQL servers.

Performance on a farm - check to see if the bottleneck is caused by the WFE or SQL server: (1) for WFEs, add more of them; (2) for SQL servers, add more RAM, hard disk space, or a higher performance SQL server.

The Role of Performance Monitor in Measuring Server Throughput

To create a trace log:

On the Taskbar, click Start, and then click Run. Enter perfmon and press ENTER.

In Performance, point to the counter pane and, on the shortcut menu, select Add Counter.

Select Use local computer counter to monitor local computers. Select Select counter from computer to monitor a remote computer and enter the UNC path for the remote computer.

On the Performance object list, click several performance objects.

Select the counter for each object.

Click Add.

Counters for WSS servers

Processor - Percent processor time/total

Network interface - Bytes total per second/network interface

Logical disk - Percent idle time: C:, D:, and so forth

Paging file - Percentage usage

Memory - available MBs; page faults per second

System - processor queue length

ASP .Net applications - requests per second/total

SharePoint-specific counters

ASP .Net applications - requests per second/total

Web service - requests per second/total, individual portal, or IIS virtual root

Search - query rate or succeeded queries

Search catalogs - number of documents

Search catalogs - Queries rate

Solutions for Troubleshooting Performance Issues on WFE Servers

Continuous high CPU usage on WFE -

When WFE usage is greater than 80%, the worker process hangs, waiting for a back-end server response. You can stop and start the WSS 3.0 application in IIS witihout affecting other applications on the server. Thus, you can recycle the worker process in WSS.

Sustained nonzero value for the System\Processor Queue Length counter shows that processes are waiting to run or the worker process needs to be recycled. To identify the problem process, monitor the Processor Time counter with the Windows Performance Console.

High disk space usage on WFE server -

Web parts may not render if the OS disk volume is too small for a large Windows Server 2003 running ASP.Net and WSS. Disk space can drop below 10 percent on the WFE servers. Running WSS and ASP.Net strains the system; to fix the problem, scale up the WFE servers with 4 GB memory, with a page file of at least 6 GB.

In addition, you may need additional GB of disk space for the ASP.NET Web server cache on a large server. You might need to move the page volume to a second disk volume. This is because the disk space requirement for the OS files on a Windows Server 2003 server, running ASP.NET and WSS, is larger than the usual OS partition size of 5 to 10 GB.

WFE servers should be configured with larger OS partitions like as 18 GB of mirrored disk space.

Slow WFE server performance -

WSS 3.0 uses memory to cache Web pages, slowing the performance of the WFE servers. To address this, you can increase the amount of physical memory and available address space on WFE servers. WFE servers must have 4 GB of physical memory and you should use the /3GB switch to increase the address range of the servers.

Store the paging file on a different disk than the OS. In addition, the boot.ini hidden file launches the OS, usually on C: drive.

High usage sites to be configured on WFE server -

You should configure each virtual server with its own application pool. However, if you have many high-usage sites on a WFE server, you might not be able to configure each virtual server with its own application pool. With IIS 6.0, you can configure a Web garden application pool, an application pool with more than one worker process on a single server.

Improve performance by lowering the number of web applications on the WFE. This reduces the IIS metabase size, amount of server CPU, and memory usage. You must configure maximum limits for: (1) number of worker processes per server, (2) the amount of worker process virtual memory, (3) the number of application pools per server, (4) the maximum number of virtual servers per server, and (5) the number of virtual servers per application pool.

Best Practices to Troubleshoot Performance Issues on Database Servers

Use Moderate-Sized Content Databases – Set a target size for content databases to manage backup processes for large site numbers in multiple server farms. You can also limit the maximum size of the individual SharePoint site by setting the storage limit of an individual site to the recommended 2 GB or less.

Database Storage – Set up storage area network (SAN) environments for use by SQL Server clusters. This saves on costs for storage and hardware maintenance. 

Deploy Additional Content Databases – lower the limit for the database capacity reached value to a value less than the number of sites in the databse. Do this if the size of a content database gets close to the target database size. Reducing the value forces the creation of new sites in a different databse that has not reached the value of the database capacity reached limit. 

Monitor Disk Space Usage- enable the SQL Server database to use another disk volume if the free space on a back-end database drops below 10% to prevent file uploads from failing. This is a short-term solution. For the long tem, you should move the database to a new volume. 

Use File Servers, Windows Distributed File System (DFS), and SAN - 

To store documents that you don’t want to collaborate on, you should use file servers and DFS.

For large document collections, you can use SAN. WSS 3.0 can still index the files. This is necessary for files larger than the default limit in WSS 3.0, which is 50 MB.

You should use file servers to store: Large audio and video media files· 

Other files greater than 100 MB in size, such as disk imaging files· 

Microsoft IT-managed software product distribution files· 

Microsoft Access® database (.mdb) files and Outlook® personal files (.pst)· 

Scripts and executable files

Ensure Available Memory is Greater Than 50 MB - for back-end database and WFE servers. Otherwise, you will get failures when uploading large files to a library. If you increase the Maximum Upload Size from its default value of 50 MB, you must also increase the acceptable amount of available memory.

Troubleshooting Common Errors Encountered After WSS Deployment

“Cannot connect to the configuration database” - Password associated with the SQL server system account used to connect to the SQL databases has expired or changed. You should change the password associated with the sQL server system and reset it in SQL server.

Usage analysis must be configured manually for each new web application.

Set usage analysis with the stsadmin tool with setproperty operation.

If you have assigned an IP address in IIS, you must change to “All Unassigned” before you use WSS 3.0. Assigned IP addresses are not supported. 

If you see poor user request processing after adding more memory to WFE servers from 2 GB to 4 GB, you should add the /3GB switch to the WFE server boot.ini files. 

 A recommended best practice is to send data in through the web service back to the database.

Linked data sources take columns from different data sources. These data sources often don’t work. They often generate a general fault protection error.

To get creative with web parts, learn as much as you can about XSLT. You are not limited to the default style coding; you can override the code in SharePoint Designer.

Always limit the number of records in web parts that search millions of records. Need I say more?

You can export web parts with data views.

Best Practices Analyzer

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