Robin Meure Daniel McPherson - zevenseas - rapid circle - implementing governance in sharepoint 2010

Implementing Governance in SharePoint
2010
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© 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Implementing Governance in SharePoint 2010 August 2010

Implementing Governance in SharePoint
2010
Robin Meuré (MVP) and Daniel McPherson (Authors)
zevenseas
Bill Baer (Contributor)
Microsoft Corporation
August 2010
Applies to: SharePoint 2010 Products
Summary: SharePoint 2010 provides a rich set of capabilities that empower business
users. For example, Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 enables users to collaborate with each
other, tag and rate content, self-publish, and even develop their own solutions. These
new capabilities require clear guidance to both underscore their benefits and realize their
potential while maintaining a level of consistency and control within an organization.

© 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 2
To comment on this paper or request more documentation on these features, contact SharePoint IT Docs
(itspdocs@microsoft.com).


Overview
SharePoint 2010 provides a rich set of capabilities that empower business users. For
example, SharePoint 2010 enables users to collaborate with each other, tag and rate
content, self-publish, and even develop their own solutions. These new capabilities
require clear guidance to both underscore their benefits and realize their potential while
maintaining a level of consistency and control within an organization.

The challenge for IT organizations is to create an appropriate level of centralized control,
while at the same time, avoiding any impact on the business benefits derived by placing
power in the hands of end users.

Control can be enforced through workflows and other processes, encouraged through the
documentation of best practices, or assured through monitoring and reporting. Effective
governance will require the combination of all these, and more, in a way that suits the
culture of your organization.

This document focuses on the “back end” of SharePoint Governance – the technical
implementation. It provides high-level guidance on the many configuration options
SharePoint provides to enable you to manage the environment for the benefit of all. For
more information about the “front end” of SharePoint Governance - the business aspect,
refer to the following whitepaper: SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning.

For more background information concerning SharePoint governance in general please
refer to the following documents:

- SharePoint Server 2010 Governance model
- SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning
- SharePoint Server 2010 Governance Resource Center



Contents
Overview.............................................................................................................. 3
Farm Controls ....................................................................................................... 6
Service Accounts ................................................................................................ 6
SharePoint Managed Accounts .......................................................................... 6
Password Management .................................................................................... 6
Changing Accounts .......................................................................................... 7
Diagnostic Logging ............................................................................................. 8
Event Throttling .............................................................................................. 8
Correlation IDs ............................................................................................... 9
Event Log Flood Protection ............................................................................... 9
Trace Logging ................................................................................................. 9
Usage Data and Health Data Collection ............................................................... 11
Web Analytics .................................................................................................. 12
Traffic .......................................................................................................... 12
Search ......................................................................................................... 13
Inventory ..................................................................................................... 13
Health Analyzer ............................................................................................... 14
Timer Jobs ...................................................................................................... 15
Releases and Upgrades ..................................................................................... 15
Backup ........................................................................................................... 16
Central Administration ................................................................................... 16
Scripted Backup ............................................................................................ 18
SQL Server Database..................................................................................... 18
Web Application Controls ...................................................................................... 19
Content Database Management ......................................................................... 19
Supported / Blocked File Types .......................................................................... 20
Security Policies ............................................................................................... 20
Resource Throttling .......................................................................................... 21
Application Pools .............................................................................................. 22
Security ....................................................................................................... 22
Reliability ..................................................................................................... 23
Solutions and Features ........................................................................................ 23



Farm Solution ............................................................................................... 23
Sandboxed Solutions ..................................................................................... 24
Search ............................................................................................................... 25
Index file location............................................................................................. 25
Content Sources .............................................................................................. 25
Customization ..................................................................................................... 26
SharePoint Designer ......................................................................................... 26
Branding ............................................................................................................ 27
Themes........................................................................................................... 27
Master Pages ................................................................................................... 27
Site Controls....................................................................................................... 28
Security and Permissions .................................................................................. 29
Access Requests ........................................................................................... 29
Quotas ............................................................................................................ 29
Storage Limit Quotas ..................................................................................... 29
Resource Limit Quotas ................................................................................... 29
Resource Throttling ....................................................................................... 29
Lifecycle Management....................................................................................... 31
Site Deletion................................................................................................. 31
Archiving / Site Backup and Restore ................................................................ 31
Auditing .......................................................................................................... 32
Provisioning and Self Service Site Creation .......................................................... 32
Secondary Owner .......................................................................................... 32
Managed Paths ............................................................................................. 33
Multi-Tenancy ..................................................................................................... 33
Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 33
Additional Resources ........................................................................................... 33
About the Author................................................................................................. 34



Farm Controls
This section describes any functionality that is relevant to governance that operates at
the farm level. This means that this functionality has an impact on the entire SharePoint
environment.

Service Accounts
Many services and components that make up SharePoint Server run under the context of
an Active Directory User Account, which is often referred to as a “Service Account”.
These accounts are not used to log on interactively because they are reserved for use by
Microsoft Windows® Services, Internet Information Services application pools, and
SharePoint service instances. For this reason they require a different, and in some ways
more challenging, approach to management.

The following sections describe how SharePoint 2010 makes working with Service
Accounts easier.

SharePoint Managed Accounts
Managed Accounts are a powerful account management concept that is introduced in
SharePoint 2010 and that is specifically designed to simplify the secure management of
accounts that are used for services and components.

A Managed Account is an Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) user account whose
credentials (username and password) are managed by SharePoint Server. They are
created either during the initial configuration of SharePoint Server or by using
SharePoint Central Administration or Windows PowerShell. Once registered, an account
can then be assigned to services and components within your SharePoint environment.

The benefit is that you only have to enter the credentials once. From that point onwards
credentials are stored in a secure, central location where they can be managed
regardless of which components or services they're assigned to. For example, when
creating a new Web application in SharePoint Server 2010, you no longer need to enter
a user name and password when creating a new application pool. You can simply select
from one of the existing Managed Accounts.

Password Management
Managing passwords that are assigned to accounts that are responsible for the various
services and components in SharePoint Server has, in the past, been a difficult task. As
a result, many organizations used accounts whose passwords were configured to never
expire. Because these accounts often had privileged access to SharePoint resources,
securing them with a password that never changed could be considered a security
vulnerability. Managed Accounts solve this problem.

Using the “Configure managed accounts” link (in the Security | General Security section
of SharePoint Server 2010 Central Administration) you can take advantage of
functionality that will automatically change expiring passwords on “Managed Accounts”
for you, or if you prefer, notify you when a password is about to change. This process



integrates tightly with AD DS to ensure that defined account policies (strength, age, and
so on) are respected.

Changing Accounts
To change the Managed Account that is being used by a service or component of
SharePoint Server, you can use the “Configure Service Accounts” functionality. In the
past, a number of these changes could only be done by using the stsadm command-line
tool, detailed TechNet documentation, and a series of manual steps. As a result it was
error prone.

Configuration (User Interface)
 In Central Administration, click Security and then in the General Security
section, click the following items as discussed in the earlier in this article.
o Configure Managed Accounts


o Configure Service Accounts

o Configure password change settings



Diagnostic Logging
SharePoint 2010 includes improvements in the management of the Unified Logging
Service (ULS) logs that make it easier for administrators to troubleshoot issues. These
are described in the following sections.

Event Throttling
Event throttling provides a dial to administrators to enable them to turn up or turn down
the events that SharePoint Server logs based on how critical events are. Throttling is
broken down into two sections:

a) Destination
Log entries can be reported in two places. The first is the Event Log, which is the
standard Windows Event Log. Administrators can use the Windows Event Viewer
application to view events. The second is the Trace Log, which is a text-based log
format that stored on the file system and is specific to SharePoint Server.
b) Category
The event throttling dial can be applied to specific categories which map directly
to SharePoint functionality. This enables an administrator to increase the logging
detail for SharePoint components individually, thereby managing the size of the
logs and the amount of information to review.

The default settings for all categories are as follows:

 Event Log: Information
 Trace Log: Medium Level

During normal operation, these settings are an appropriate balance of detail and
performance. During substantial reconfiguration of SharePoint Server, the installation of


custom solutions, or when SharePoint Server is experiencing issues, the throttling level
should be changed to Verbose. This ensures the availability of the maximum amount of
information for troubleshooting by enabling the logging of less severe events.

Finally, after completing troubleshooting, logging can be returned to the default by
selecting the “Reset to default” option in the throttling drop downs.

Remember: Consider storing log files on a different drive to the SharePoint binaries and system components
to ensure the smallest possible impact on performance.

Correlation IDs
Correlation IDs are GUIDs that are assigned to events which occur during the lifecycle of
a resource request. This value is surfaced within Error Messages, the ULS logs and tools
like the developer dashboard. This value helps an administrator locate and isolate a
specific request across the ULS log, Usage Logging database, and Microsoft SQL Server®
Profiler for debugging.

Correlation IDs also span machine boundaries. If a request crosses a machine boundary,
such as a front-end Web server calling a Web service on an application server, the
assigned Correlation ID can provide a complete overview of what transpired throughout
the lifecycle of the of the request.

Event Log Flood Protection
New to SharePoint Serve 2010 is functionality that prevents the Event Log from being
flooded with large numbers of repetitive events. This is called Event Log Flood
Protection. When it is enabled (which it is by default) it will start trimming events after
the same one is logged five times within two minutes. At this point it suppresses all
further entries and throws a summary event after two further minutes that describes the
number of times the event would have been repeated. Administrators can tune these
thresholds based on their requirements.

Trace Logging
Trace Logs can quickly consume disk space, especially when configured to use the more
verbose output settings. To manage this growth, administrators can implement two
types of restriction:

a) In Office SharePoint Server 2007 the only restriction you could place on log file
growth was to set a value for the total number of log files to be kept. The default
was 96 log files. Each log file contained 30 minutes of entries to provide a total of
48 hours of logs. In SharePoint Serve 2010 the overall size of the logs has been
dramatically reduced. Administrators determine the number of days that log files
should be kept. The default value is 14 days.
b) Administrators can also place a limitation on the overall disk space that log files
can consume. This is disabled by default, but it provides an additional layer of
protection aimed at stopping disks from filling up.

Finally, with SharePoint Server 2010, the folder containing the logs has NTFS
compression applied, which means that all SharePoint log files and compressed.


Additional Resources
 What's New: ULS Logging
 Configure diagnostic logging
 ULSViewer
 In Central Administration, click Monitoring and in the Reporting section, click
Configure diagnostic logging.



Usage Data and Health Data Collection
In addition to Diagnostic Logging, SharePoint Server 2010 also proactively logs
information that is related to the overall health of the farm. An administrator can
individually select the events, such as the usage of features, page load times, and search
queries, that are monitored.

Because this functionality consumes disk space and has a performance overhead,
dedicated disks are recommended to prevent I/O contention and overall performance
bottlenecks. Like Diagnostic Logging, care needs to be taken to manage it appropriately.
The following options are available to administrators to do this:

1) Health Data Collection
Health reports are built by taking snapshots of various resources, data, and
processes at specific points in time. The number of Timer Jobs to schedule will
depend on the number of events you selected to monitor. The frequency of these
jobs can be modified to manage the performance impact.
2) Log Collection Schedule
This Timer Job is responsible for collecting Usage Logs from servers in the farm,
processing the logs, and then populating a centralized database from which logs
can be queried for reporting. Once processed, the logs are deleted from disk,
freeing up the space they were consuming. The frequency of this job can be
modified to manage the consumption of disk space.
While providing powerful new functionality for administrators, developers and third party
vendors can also extend this functionality. This allows for the addition of new types of
indicators and the creation of richer reports.

 Configure usage and health data collection
 Configure SharePoint Health Analyzer timer jobs
 In Central Administration, click Monitoring and in the Reporting section click
Configure usage and health data collection.



Web Analytics
The reports generated by the Web Analytics functionality in SharePoint provide detailed
insight into how your SharePoint environment is being used, and how well it’s
performing. Administrators should become familiar with these reports and how they can
create their own (directly in the browser) to plan future capacity and to produce
benchmarks to compare with future farm configurations.

All of these reports can be used to help you decide if the current architecture remains “fit
for purpose”, meaning that it meets the desired service levels.

The reports are divided into three categories and can be reviewed based on Web
Application, Site Collection, Site, and Search Service.

Traffic
The traffic reports help administrators answer questions like:



 How much traffic does my farm serve? (# of Page Views)
 Who visits the most often? (Top Visitors)
 How do visitors find your site? (Top Referrers)

In addition, it provides statistics about the “Daily Unique Visitors”, “Top Destinations,”
and browsers used, among others. Reviewing the information presented in these reports
would, for example, enable you to customize your navigation so that the most commonly
accessed information is also the easiest to find.

Search
These reports are focused on helping an administrator understand how people are using
search. It does this by answering questions like:

 How many searches are being performed? (# of queries)
 What were people mostly searching for? (Top queries)
 What queries are failing? (Failed queries)

In addition, it provides statistics about “Best Bets”, “Search Keywords,” and more. By
using these reports you could, for example, review the most commonly used Search
terms and then work with the appropriate people in the organization to match it to a new
“Best Bet.” Adding the smarts of people to the smarts of SharePoint Search makes for
the best possible search experience.

Inventory
Inventory reports tell administrators about usage, answering questions like:

 How much disk space is being consumed? (Disk usage)
 How many sites have been created? (# of sites)
 What languages are in use? (Languages Usage)

While these reports are useful for capacity planning, they can also help you understand
how well your information architecture is performing. For example, John, an
administrator at Contoso, is responsible for ensuring that the SharePoint environment
remains “fit for purpose” as it grows. John can use these reports to not only understand
the state of the environment today but also plot trends which enable him to increase the
capacity of the SharePoint farm before it becomes a problem for end users.

 View Web Analytics reports
 In Central Administration, click Monitoring and in the Reporting section click
View Web Analytics reports.



Health Analyzer
As described in the Usage Data and Health Data Collection section of this document,
SharePoint Server has features that log and gather detailed statistics about all aspects of
the SharePoint environment. The Health Analyzer uses this data to identify possible
problems and then proactively researches and recommends solutions.

Many solutions that it finds will include a Repair Now link that users can click to
automatically resolve the problem. Others will link to online help which is constantly
updated with the latest advice.

Like the “Best Practices Analyzers” available for other products (like Microsoft
Exchange), it includes a rule set which administrators can extend and which is
continuously compared to the existing settings and metrics drawn from your production
environment. Rules are applied across a number of categories, including security,
performance, and availability.

Because some rules are not applicable to every environment, an administrator can
disable or modify rules to accommodate the needs of an organization.

The following diagram illustrates the output that the Health Analyzer produces. You can
see in the “Availability” category that the drives on server “SP2010” are at risk of
running out of disk space.

In the security section you can see a recommendation concerning the permissions that
are assigned to accounts that are used by application pools. By following the steps
outlined in the solution, you’ll have a more secure farm.

Because the Health Analyzer uses a standard SharePoint list, standard functionality such
as Alerts and RSS Feeds can be used to ensure that you are immediately notified of any
issues and recommendations.

 Overview of SharePoint Health Analyzer
 Viewing and resolving SharePoint Health Analyzer alerts
 SharePoint Health Analyzer rules reference


 In Central Administration, click Monitoring and in the Health Analyzer section,
click Review problems and solutions.

Timer Jobs
Timer Jobs perform tasks on a scheduled basis. For example, timer jobs process usage
logs, import profile information from AD DS, and update the Activity Stream. By
performing these tasks on a schedule, administrators can minimize the impact on the
overall performance of the SharePoint environment. For example, timer jobs can be
scheduled to run when SharePoint Server is experiencing its smallest load such as after
business hours.

SharePoint 2010 introduces additional flexibility. When you add a new Content Database
to a Web application you can nominate a preferred server for the execution of related
timer jobs.

Releases and Upgrades
SharePoint administrators are responsible for ensuring that each server in a SharePoint
farm is running an identical version of SharePoint Server. This includes service packs,
hotfix rollups, and SQL Server database schema versions. Any inconsistencies can result
in problems that are difficult to troubleshoot.

This was a challenging task in SharePoint Server 2007 because there was no simple way
to determine exactly what version a particular server was running, and in turn, what was
missing. With SharePoint Server 2010, administrators have the ability to “Check product
and patch installation status”. This page provides a central location for monitoring the
build, versions, and status of each component in your server farm.

 Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Server 2010
 Verify upgrade and review upgraded sites (SharePoint Server 2010)



 In Central Administration, click Upgrade and Migration and then click Check
product and patch installation status to check the status of the current farm
and front-end servers.

 To check on the databases of the database server, click on “Review database
status”

Backup
SharePoint Server offers a number of approaches to backup and restore. Each approach
meets a specific requirement. This document will briefly review the three most common
approaches:

 Central Administration Backup
 Scripted Backup
 SQL Database Backup

Central Administration
Central Administration includes two types of backup that can be performed and one type
of restore.

Farm Backup and Restore
The “Farm Backup and Restore” functionality provides a way to perform unscheduled
backup and restore of the entire farm or individual farm components. This screenshot
illustrates the various components that can be selected for any one backup.

Although there are far too many items to describe individually in this document, the
SharePoint 2010 Farm Backup is far more comprehensive than the SharePoint Server
2007 Farm Backup. It is however worth describing a couple important additions.



Solutions
SharePoint Server 2010 has the option to back up and restore any solutions that are
installed on a farm. This overcomes a limitation in SharePoint Server 2007 which
required administrators to store and track the specific version of any installed solutions
independent of SharePoint Server.

InfoPath Forms Services
Similarly, it’s now possible to create a backup of the configuration of the Forms Services
Service Application. This is important if you have administrator-approved forms and are
using centrally managed data connection libraries. You no longer have to store and track
those forms separately.

Granular backup
New to SharePoint Server 2010 is the ability to perform what is termed a “Granular
Backup”. This functionality surfaces capabilities that were previously only available by
using the stsadm command-line tool and supports the export of individual lists.

Note: This is a one-way operation. There is no support in Central Administration
for restoring or importing from the packages created this way. This would need to
be done by using the command line.

Recover from an unattached content database
A useful and powerful addition to the restore capabilities supported by SharePoint Server
is the ability to recover data directly from an existing, unattached database. In this case,
“unattached” means a Content database that is online in SQL Server, but which has not
been attached to a SharePoint Web application.

This is ideally suited to the situation where you would like to restore the contents of a
site collection without having to go through the steps of attaching it to a Web
application. Its most commonly encountered when you want to restore an earlier version
of a document from a previous database backup. By using this feature you can browse
through the content of the database and choose to back up a site collection, site, list, or
even a single document.

Configuration Settings
New in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to make a backup of the current configuration of
various SharePoint components, such as Web applications. Although this has a number
of advantages, following are three of the most significant:

1) It enables you to test a new configuration, safe in the knowledge that you can roll
back to a “Last Known Good” configuration if something doesn’t go according to
plan.
2) You can use the Configuration backup as a “Template” and restore it to a new
environment which ensures the two have identical configurations. This is ideal for
setting up development or test environments.
3) Provides a way for you to document your configuration so that you have a
benchmark for comparison later. This is useful when troubleshooting issues.



Scripted Backup
Scripts provide the greatest control and flexibility when it comes to backing up
SharePoint Server. Most administrators prefer to write their own. The new and
comprehensive support for Windows PowerShell in SharePoint Server 2010 makes it easy
to use and powerful.

Backup procedures that can be completed in Central Administration can also be
completed by using Windows PowerShell. This is beyond the scope of this document.

SQL Server Database
In many organizations, mature and disciplined processes already exist for backing up
SQL Server databases. SharePoint Server can integrate with these existing processes,
effectively “outsourcing” SharePoint content backup to SQL Server.

With that said, this backup is not comprehensive, and it’s recommended that you work
together with your SQL Server administrators to ensure that gaps are filled with the use
of standard SharePoint backup tools. It’s worth noting that an important “gap” includes
the Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) functionality supported in SharePoint Serve 2010. If
deployed, care should be taken to ensure this is part of your backup strategy.

 Backup (SharePoint Server 2010)
 Backup: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server)
 Back up a farm by using SQL Server tools
 In Central Administration, click Backup and Restore

To back up the configuration settings of the farm, in the Farm Backup and
Restore section, click Perform a backup, check the Farm checkbox, and then
click Next On the next page you can select whether you want to back up content
and configuration or only the configuration.



Web Application Controls
The following section describes the configuration options available to administrators and
that operate on a per Web application basis.

Content Database Management
All site-based information in SharePoint Server is stored within a “Content Database”
and a single Web application is able to support multiple content databases. Careful
planning needs to go into the number of site collections that you will store in a single
content database and the average size of those site collections (managed by using
quotas). This simplified method will then give you an estimate of the maximum size of a
content database, which in turn, is an important number to consider when planning your
backup/restore strategy. However, proper planning and considerations are important to
maintaining a scalable environment.

 Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server
2010)
 Database types and descriptions
 Database management
 Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server:
Performance Recommendations and Best Practices (Whitepaper)



 In Central Administration click Application Management, and in the Databases
section, click Manage content databases.

Supported / Blocked File Types
This functionality enables you to stop certain file types from being uploaded to
SharePoint sites. The main reason for this functionality is to enforce security by blocking
files which have commonly been exploited (for example .vbs and .bat).

 Manage blocked file types
 In Central Administration click Application Management, in the Web
Applications section click Manage web applications, select a Web application,
and then click the Web Application Blocked File Types icon in the Security
group of the ribbon.

Security Policies
Policies provide a way to permit or deny access to specific user accounts throughout an
entire Web application. For example, by default, the Content Access Account, which is
used for crawling content, has Full Read access to all content in each Web application.

Policy can also be used to grant support personnel full access to the specific Web
applications they are responsible for, without the need to give them administrative
access to the farm. For example, John is an administrator at Contoso and works closely
with the Collaboration support team on its Team Site deployment. To ensure the support
team has the access it needs to help users, John has given the “SharePoint Support”
group full control of the Web applications that host Contoso’ s team sites. By taking this



approach, the support organization has access to only what it needs and with only the
permissions that it needs. This ensures the security and safety of information that is
stored in other Web applications that are hosted on the same SharePoint environment.

NOTE

Changing the membership of security policies will result in a security crawl of the environment. To help
mitigate such occurrences, consider assigned permissions to groups as opposed to individuals.

 Manage permission policies for a Web application
 In Central Administration click Application Management, in the Web Application
section click Manage web applications, select a Web application and in the
Policy group of the ribbon click User Policy.

Resource Throttling
“HTTP Request Monitoring and Throttling” is a new feature in SharePoint Server 2010
that can be used to control resource utilization within your server farm (on one or more
servers). It helps prevent a server from running out of required resources to serve
existing jobs and high priority user requests.

It works by checking a set of performance counters on a server against a set of
predefined thresholds. When a threshold is reached, which indicates that a server is
under too much load, the feature begins to throttle GET requests.

SharePoint Server 2010 ships with the following HTTP Request Monitoring and Throttling
defaults:

Performance Counter Min Max
Processor% Processor 0 99
Time
MemoryAvailable Mbytes 20 3.402823E+38
ASP.NETRequests Queued 0 500
ASP.NETRequest Wait Time 0 30000



A server enters a throttled state after three successive checks have failed. A server
remains in the throttled state until a successful interval has been completed.

 In Central Administration click Application Management, click Manage web
applications, select a Web Application, in the Manage group of the ribbon click
General Settings, and then click Resource Throttling.

Application Pools
Application pools define the context in which a SharePoint Web application executes. It
provides a security boundary and isolates the impact of issues that an application
encounters from those running in other application pools. This makes the overall design
and continued management of application pools critical to the security and reliability of
SharePoint Server.

The following basic guidelines can help you to determine whether or not a Web
application should have its own application pool.

1) Should the content within the Web application be restricted to only a specific
audience?
2) Does the Web application host custom applications?
3) How critical is the content served by the Web application? Is there a specific
service-level agreement (SLA) in place?
4) How much memory does your server have? How many application pools are in
use?

To help you answer these questions the following sections provide more details about
the security and reliability aspects of the design of application pools.

Security
An application pool runs under a specific Service Account which is referred to as the
Application Pool Identity. This account has full rights to the information that is contained



within the application pool and defines the highest possible privileges available to any
executing code.

This is best demonstrated by the SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges method in the
SharePoint Object Model. This method enables solutions to temporarily impersonate the
Application Pool Identity, which is used mostly to access external resources. Once
elevated, code can access any information on the server that is secured by using the
Application Pools Identity. If that identity were given farm administrator privileges, it
would be able to do almost whatever it liked.

Reliability
If an issue is encountered that is specific to a particular application pool (that is, it’s not
a farm or SQL Server issue), negative impact will be limited to only those Web
applications that are running within the context of that application pool. Web applications
that run in different application pools will, generally speaking, be unaffected.

Application pools also provide other capabilities which, when combined, aim to make a
Web application, and the overall server it’s running on, more reliable. This includes
ensuring there are limits on the amount of memory and CPU that the application pool
can consume.

 Managing Application Pools in IIS 7

Solutions and Features
Because SharePoint Server is a platform it has been designed to accommodate rich
customization to meet specific business requirements. Part of the platform provides
developers with a Solution Framework that defines how custom code should be packaged
to take full advantage of everything SharePoint Server offers.

SharePoint Server 2010 has two types of solutions:

1) Farm solutions. These are essentially identical to the solutions that Office
SharePoint Server 2007 supported.
2) Sandboxed solutions. This is a new type of solution that takes advantage of the
new sandboxed execution model.

Farm Solution
Farm solutions are installed by administrators directly on the SharePoint farm itself.
Solutions are made up of binaries and artefacts, which after being deployed, are placed
in any of the following locations:

1) Web Application BIN folder
2) Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
3) The Solution Hive



Farm solutions can take advantage of the full range of SharePoint customization options
described in the SDK. Given this, it’s important that a strict governance process ensures
that custom code adheres to a set of standards such as naming conventions, code
standards and detailed testing.

Sandboxed Solutions
Sandboxed solutions operate within a single site collection and can be installed by site
collection administrators. While they are packaged in a similar way to farm solutions, the
artefacts and binaries are never installed physically on servers running SharePoint
Server. They are instead hosted and executed with in a virtualized sandbox which
ensures the following:

1) It cannot run or execute any code considered unsafe.
2) Any instability does not affect other applications, even those within the same
application pool.
3) It has access to only a limited subset of the SharePoint object model.

Although sandboxed solutions are limited in terms of their access to the server,
SharePoint administrators will need to implement governance around the following key
areas:

1) The definitions of resource points that support the calculation of a solutions
resource consumption
2) The definition of resource quotas which determine the amount of resources that
sandboxed solutions can consume in a given site collection
3) The creation of “Solution Validators” which, during the upload of a new
sandboxed solution, can check to confirm compliance to a set of standards.

 Sandboxed solutions overview
 Sandboxed solutions administration
 In Central Administration click System Settings and in the Farm Management
section, click Manage user solutions.



Search
When configuring the search service the following aspects need to be considered.

Index file location
Due to the significant disk traffic generated during crawls, SharePoint Search indexes
should be on their own dedicated disks. In terms of disk space consumption, the rule of
thumb is that you will need around 30% of the total corpus.

Content Sources
A content source defines one or more locations which contain content that is to be added
to a SharePoint index and a schedule of when content should be crawled. Generally you
should keep the number of content sources to the minimum required in order to meet
your indexing requirements.

Content sources can now be assigned a priority, either “High” or “Normal.” Content
sources set at the High priority are processed first. For example, Contoso has a relatively
small team site which contains the most recent news about the company. Given the
timeliness of the information, it’s important that these can be found in search as soon as
possible. By creating a dedicated content source, setting it to index frequently, and
giving it a High priority, it will be prioritised above the overall intranet indexing process.

 Manage search topology
 Enterprise search administration
 In Central Administration click General Application Settings, in the Search
section click Farm Search Administration, click the name of the Search Service
application, click on Content Sources on Quick Launch, and then edit the


desired content source.

Customization
While business can benefit by allowing users to customize SharePoint Server, in many
cases administrators would like the option to limit some types of customization.

SharePoint Designer
A number of restrictions on the use of Microsoft SharePoint Designer can be made on
both a per Web application and per site collection basis. These are described below:

 Allow the use of SharePoint Designer.
 Allow users to detach pages from the original page layouts.
 Allow users to modify the master page and page layouts.
 Allow the management of the URL structure.

Note: If you allow users to modify the master page and page layouts, users can
override the standard look and feel that you have implemented.



 Enable or disable declarative workflows (SharePoint Server 2010)
 Getting Started with SharePoint Designer 2010
Applications section click Manage Web Applications, and select the Web
Application that you want to configure. In the Manage group of the ribbon click
General Settings, and then click SharePoint Designer.

Branding
SharePoint Server provides different ways to approach the exercise of branding sites.
This is beyond the scope of this document; however the following resources provide
detailed guidance.

Themes
Theming provides the simplest way of customizing the look and feel of a SharePoint site.
SharePoint Server ships with several standard themes and you can create and upload
new ones by using Microsoft PowerPoint® 2010 in addition to other Office 2010 client
applications.

In many cases, themes work against an organization's desire to have standard
SharePoint site branding. In this case a SharePoint administrator can disable the
theming functionality on a Web application basis by unchecking the Apply Themes and
Borders permission.

Master Pages
SharePoint Server 2010 now allows Application Pages to reference a custom Master
Page. This means that even pages located in the _Layouts folder and that are used by all
sites in the farm can adopt a standardized look and feel. This functionality can be
enabled per Web application by using General Settings.

 Plan for using themes


 Page Layouts and Master Pages
 Master Pages
Applications section click Manage web applications and select the Web
application that you want to configure. In the Manage group of the ribbon click
General Settings, and then click General Settings.

 To disallow the use of themes, in the Security group of the ribbon, click User
Permissions.

Site Controls
This section of the document highlights aspects of governance that apply directly to sites
and site collections.



Security and Permissions
Access Requests
Access requests make it easy for people to request access to sites to which they are
currently denied. Users simply click a Request Access link, which then generates an
email message to the site administrator. This message includes a link to the site
permissions, where, with just a single click, the user is granted access.

Quotas
Quotas are an important way of keeping your SharePoint environment under control.

Remember: The default values provide a good guide as to the levels SharePoint considers to be acceptable in
terms of resource consumption, and care should be taken before increasing.

Quotas do this by placing an upper limit on resource consumption. The design and
implementation of quotas is an important step and one that is more easily done at the
outset before the usage of SharePoint sites have begun to grow.

Quotas also play an important role in capacity planning by setting a fixed upper limit on
resource consumption, which can then be increased over time and as the farm grows.

Storage Limit Quotas
Storage quotas are all about placing a restriction on the total amount of storage that a
single site collection can consume. You can have any number of quotas with varying
upper limits, and these can be applied to site collections at any time.

Resource Limit Quotas
Sandboxed solutions introduce the concept of “Resource Limit Quotas.” These govern the
overall use of resources by sandboxed solutions within a single site collection on a daily
basis. A Resource Limit Quota is made up of a number of points; each point maps back
to a unit of resources. This complex topic is beyond the scope of this document; however
the type of resources that it measures includes the following:

 Abnormal Process Termination Count
 Process CPU Cycles
 Process IO Bytes
 SharePoint Database Query Count

Just as with storage quotas, you can define multiple templates and apply them to site
collections as required.

Resource Throttling
While we previously discussed Resource Throttling at the Web application level, it has
also been introduced at the site collection level. The introduction of Resource Throttling



is designed to allow SharePoint Server to more gracefully manage specific operations
that are known to consume significant amounts of resource.

Large List Optimization
The most common example of a large list is a query that returns more than 5,000 items.
Administrators now have tools that enable them to restrict the execution of these
operations, whether executed as part of a custom solution or created by using the
SharePoint UI. This includes the following:

 Maximum number of items a database query can involve at any one time.
 Maximum number of Lookup, Person/Group, or workflow status fields that a
database query can involve at one time.
 Maximum number of unique permissions that a list can have at one time.

 Create, edit, and delete quota templates
 Manage site collection storage limits
 Plan quota management
 Manage lists and libraries with many items
 Performance and capacity test results and recommendations (SharePoint Server
2010)
 SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: software boundaries and limits
 To manage quotas, in Central Administration click Application Management
and in the Site Collections section, click on Specify quota templates.

 To configure the Large List optimization, in Central Administration click
Application Management, in the Web Applications section click Manage web
applications, select the Web application that you want to configure. In the
Manage group of the ribbon click General Settings, and then click Resource
Throttling.



Lifecycle Management
Deleting information is as important as creating it. This section of the document explains
just a few of the important elements that should be considered when you define your
site lifecycle.

Site Deletion
SharePoint provides a “Site Use and Confirmation and Deletion” capability that enables
you to set a policy that deletes site collections automatically after a certain period of
time. This process always involves site administrators and provides them with an
opportunity to override the deletion process. The actual configuration of site deletion is
done on a per Web application basis.

Archiving / Site Backup and Restore
Unfortunately SharePoint Server doesn’t provide a standard mechanism for archiving
sites before deletion. However, based on the strategy that you define as part of your site
lifecycle, a custom solution can be built to meet your requirements by using the
SharePoint API.

For example, a custom solution could check for collaboration sites that have not been
used for more than six months and automatically back them up before deleting them
from the collaboration Web application. Furthermore, sites could then be automatically


restored to the archive Web application as read-only for users to recover documents that
they may be missing.

 Manage unused Web sites
 In Central Administration click Application Management, in the Site
Collections section click Confirm site use and deletion.

Auditing
Auditing adds a detailed layer of tracking operations that end-users perform on list
items, documents, lists, document libraries, and Webs. This is typically done to ensure
compliance with regulations or to protect secure or restricted information.

Auditing should be enabled only where needed. It comes with significant overhead. Not
only does it increase processing that is required to track all actions of a user, but
auditing also results in significant storage growth. The second issue can be managed by
using functionality introduced with SharePoint 2010 called “Audit Trim Logging,” which
trims the audit log to a more manageable size.

Provisioning and Self Service Site Creation
Self-service site creation is a powerful feature that makes it easy for users to create
their own SharePoint sites without involving a SharePoint administrator. The feature is
enabled on a per Web application basis, and once turned on, can be accessed by end-
users via a URL (_layouts/scsignup.aspx).

Secondary Owner
When enabling self-service site creation you have the option to require a secondary
owner. This option can make it easy to manage sites if employees leave an organization,



in the process potentially leaving sites they own without a site administrator. An
assigned secondary owner is someone who can reassign those permissions.

Managed Paths
You can use managed paths to create a logical distinction between site collections within
a single Web application. By default SharePoint Server places all team sites under a
Managed Path named “sites”, for example:

http://webapplication/sites/sitecollection

You can create a small number of managed paths. For example, if your organization
wanted to create a number of employee blogs, it could create the “Blogs” managed path
like so:

http://webapplication/blogs/sitecollection

Multi-Tenancy
SharePoint Server 2010 introduces a significant new set of capabilities that are designed
to make it easier for organizations to partition and manage any number of customers on
a single, common, SharePoint infrastructure. This is called “multi-tenancy”, which
traditionally has been most commonly required by hosters, organizations that provide
SharePoint as a service.

An expectation is that the new functionality in SharePoint Server 2010 might encourage
more enterprise customers to utilize these capabilities to meet their business
requirements and centralize IT costs. For example, it's easier to bill divisions within an
organization based on their usage, offer new SharePoint properties faster, and manage
fewer resources for offerings.

A full discussion of governance as it relates to multi-tenancy is outside the scope of this
document. For more information, see Hosting Environments for SharePoint 2010
Products.

Conclusion
SharePoint Server 2010 provides a robust collection of capabilities that are designed to
help meet an organization’s governance plans and features to support to its
implementation. This document provides an overview of the capabilities that relate to
governance and manageability. However, governance is an on-going process and should
be a critical component of the overall lifecycle of a solution.

Track or block SharePoint Server 2010 Installations



About the Author
Robin Meuré is a SharePoint Services MVP who works as a technical SharePoint
consultant for Rapid Circle, the Dutch representative of zevenseas. He’s spent the last
six years translating business requirements into SharePoint solutions across a broad
range of industries. He is at his best brainstorming and implementing solutions that take
a pragmatic approach to the cost effective delivery of SharePoint applications. Visit
Robin’s blog at http://community.zevenseas.com/blogs/robin.

Daniel McPherson has been involved in SharePoint since attending the first public
announcement of project “Tahoe” at the Microsoft Technical Briefing in January 1999. It
has had a profound impact on his career, taking him to the doorstep of hundreds of
companies, of all shapes and sizes, in a range of industries and in over 25 different
countries. He’s worked on projects that create solutions, evaluate possibilities, deploy to
tens of thousands of users, and had to fix problems when the sirens are sounding. After
10 years at Microsoft, spent mostly in Microsoft Consulting Services, he co-founded
zevenseas (www.zevenseas.com), a boutique consultancy focused solely on the
SharePoint platform, and is having more fun than ever before. He blogs at:
http://community.zevenseas.com/blogs/daniel.

Bill Baer is a Technical Product Manager and Microsoft Certified Master for Office
SharePoint Server 2007 in the SharePoint product group in Redmond, Washington. Bill
was previously a Hewlett-Packard Technology Solutions Group MVP with a background in
infrastructure engineering and enterprise deployments of SharePoint Products and
Technologies. Bill Baer is active in the SharePoint community through evangelism
(http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer), fellowship engagements, and events such as TechEd,
TechReady, and SharePoint & Office Developer Conferences.


Robin Meure Daniel McPherson - zevenseas - rapid circle - implementing governance in sharepoint 2010

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