In this chapter, we will cover:
Administering SharePoint Designer
Configuring a Managed account
Creating a new policy for web application
Configuring Resource Throttling (large lists)
Installing a feature and activating it
Restricting web parts access in the farm
Learning timer job management (including server affinity)
Running a timer job on demand
Configuring Sandbox functionality
Governance is a large topic on its own. There are books dedicated solely to this topic. What is being covered in relation to governance are ten items that, when used, makes your life as administrator a bit easier.
An administrator's job is akin to being the Marines. They are the first ones to be called when there is an issue with SharePoint. Nothing gets done without their knowledge. Typically, the administrator has to decide who to bring in when an issue needs to be addressed. Additionally, administrators deal with management, end users, developers, and the power users.
The recipes in this chapter teach and expose useful and common functionality found in SharePoint 2010. The intent of the recipes is to create a SharePoint Farm environment that is efficient and monitored. For example, large lists have always been an issue in SharePoint in the past, with little or no support to address it out of the box. This is directly related to the performance of your SharePoint installation...
A Managed account in SharePoint is an account that is completely managed by Active Directory.
Service accounts are a prime example. These accounts are typically domain-level accounts that are managed in Active Directory (AD). Being an active directory account means it is subject to the policies implemented across the organization. For example, a user may have to change their password every six months. The policy may dictate that the password meet certain criteria such as containing upper case and lower case characters.
The problem with this scenario in SharePoint terms occurs when the password needs to be changed. The service stops working when the password expires. If the account is the identity for multiple services, they stop working too, which potentially brings a working SharePoint installation to a stop.
In many organizations, there is a division of responsibilities that can prohibit the SharePoint Farm Administrator from changing the password of an AD...
There are times when it is critical for the Farm Administrator to designate security policies for a web application. An administrator can do this from Central Administration and it overrides security implemented at the site collection and at sub-site level.
The following are some useful scenarios where this may be implemented:
Enterprise organizations need to designate at least one person as the Site Administrator. Once assigned, they are now the administrator of the web application. This is not to be confused with the Farm Administrator or a Site Collection Administration.
When bringing sites online, it is advantageous to set up security to deny access to all users. Allow access to only those users who are your beta users. After the site is live, you can remove these restrictions.
In this recipe, we will show how to create a new policy and then add users to it.
At the very heart of SharePoint are lists. Just about everything in SharePoint is a list. It can be stated that SharePoint content is list driven.
One of the shortcomings of the previous version of SharePoint was that performance began to degrade if a list had more than 2000 items. This doesn't mean if a list had 2001 items, the performance degradation was noticeable. A SharePoint list could have millions of records. Let's break down exactly what happens when a user requests information from a list.
A user clicks on a link to see the items in a list. It invokes a query back to SQL to pull those items and present them. The query looks at how many columns are on that list and does a "select all" operation. The more columns in a list, the more data that is returned, and the longer it takes to select all of that data because it is number of rows multiplied by number of columns.
Resource throttling is a set of configuration items built into the software...
One of the tasks that inevitably fall upon a SharePoint Administrator is the process of installing features and solutions. Features are solutions typically written by developers. They perform a business function such as workflow or a web part.
With the advent of the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox, Site Collection Administrators can upload and maintain features. However, there are many situations in which a Farm Administrator needs to install a farm-wide feature.
Deploying a feature can be done through Visual Studio, but when implementing on production servers, this is not the way to install a feature. A feature in production should be installed by an administrator and this implies the use of PowerShell.
This recipe shows how to install a farm-wide feature and activate it.
You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.
Feature must be deployed to the 14\template\features folder.
Web parts are the components of an organization's site that provide modularity and flexibility. Web parts are ASP.NET server-side modules that are available to be put into a page via a web part zone. The modules perform all different kinds of functions based on an organization's needs.
SharePoint 2010 Enterprise comes with 60+ web parts. In addition, an organization can create their own web parts based on business requirements.
There are two considerations to think about with regards to governance of web parts in the context of this recipe.
What a web part can be allowed to do
What web parts are available to be put onto a page
You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.
Timer job management is important when administering and monitoring the health of an organization's SharePoint installation. A timer job is a process that runs and performs some type of action. Timer jobs run in the farm on a specific server, which can be designated.
This recipe will show where and how to manage the timer jobs, including how to assign a server to timer jobs.
You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.
1. Open up the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration website.
2. Click Monitoring. Under the second section named Timer Jobs, select the Check Job Status option.
3. The following information is displayed:
Timer jobs
The servers on which they are running
The associated web application
The status of each job
The time when each job was finished or their scheduled start time
On the left-hand side of the screen are the categories for filtering the display of timer...
Sometimes it is necessary to run a timer job immediately. The reasons for this are varied. It may need to be done due to the fact the job failed previously. The administrator may need to do it based on a business process dependency.
This recipe shows how to run a timer job immediately.
You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.
1. Open the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration website.
2. Click Monitoring. Under the second section named Timer Jobs, click Check Job Status.
3. There are three sections: Scheduled, Running, and History. Click on the time job you wish to run.
4. We have chosen the Immediate Alerts option and here is the resulting form:
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5. Click on the Run Now button.
The term Sandbox brings to mind a research and development paradigm in the minds of most of the technical folks. A Sandbox is typically a physically separate testing area where developers can implement different code configurations without affecting production. The Sandbox is seen as an area to unit test the development code. Only when it has passed with zero defects, is it moved into a production environment where it will be tested on a system.
SharePoint 2010 has an infrastructure component called the Sandbox. The intent of this component is to provide developers with an area to deploy code that is managed and will not adversely affect the associated web application. The Sandbox addresses the pain organizations have to face when deploying code that is fully trusted and must be managed in some manner by the Farm Administrator.
The Sandbox is physically tied to the production box. Code within the Sandbox is running in production.
Solutions deployed to the...
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