Administration and Maintenance

When you plan your deployment of SharePoint Portal Server, it is recommended that you designate an administration team to perform important system administration and maintenance tasks as the system grows to meet your organization's needs. Depending on the size of your organization, the administration team may consist of one or more individuals. In smaller organizations, the server administrator and the coordinator on the top level of the workspace may be the same person.

Identifying Administrative Tasks

The administrator works with the users responsible for content to determine the number and type of SharePoint Portal Server computers required and the number of workspaces required on each server. For example, in a deployment in which SharePoint Portal Server primarily crawls content sources to make content available for search, you might configure a server that is dedicated to searching and a server that is dedicated to creating and updating indexes. In a deployment in which you use SharePoint Portal Server primarily for document management, you might configure only one server with up to 15 workspaces. When determining how many workspaces to place on each server, the administrator takes into consideration the number of users for each workspace and the quantity of documents stored in the workspace. In a larger deployment, you might configure multiple servers with multiple workspaces on each server. This type of planning is important to ensure that servers are capable of handling the load that users are likely to place on them.

You must use SharePoint Portal Server Administration in MMC to manage the SharePoint Portal Server computer. One administrator can perform tasks for both SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, or you can manage these resources separately.

The administrator determines how to best meet customer needs and balance the server load. Administrative tasks include:

• Attaching the server to an organization-wide security infrastructure and linking the server to an organization-wide directory.
• Configuring the server. In conjunction with the user responsible for the content found in the workspace, the administrator must determine the type of server configuration needed.
• Creating workspaces on the server. The administrator monitors disk space available and the number of workspaces per server to determine when additional servers are required for additional workspaces. Although a server can store multiple workspaces, the recommendation is to have no more than 15 workspaces per server.
• Configuring security on the top level of the workspace. You can do this by using SharePoint Portal Server Administration or by using Workspace Settings in the Management folder of the workspace. The administrator must identify one or more users who should have the coordinator role on the top level of the workspace. Coordinators configure security directly on folders and documents in the workspace. This decentralizes security configuration from a single administrator to one or more coordinators.
• Maintaining a list of index workspace names, the server on which they are stored, and the server and workspace to which they are propagated.
• Propagating an index from an index workspace to a workspace on another server, while ensuring that there is sufficient disk space on the destination server for propagated indexes.
• Managing servers by using SharePoint Portal Server Administration. During installation, SharePoint Portal Server automatically installs the console on the server.
• Manually performing full, incremental, or adaptive updates to an index, if required.
• Backing up and restoring the server.
• Duplicating a server.
• Installing and registering IFilters. If you want to crawl documents that have proprietary file extensions, you must register the IFilter for that file type. SharePoint Portal Server includes filters for Office documents, HTML files, Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) files, and text files. SharePoint Portal Server also supports third party and custom file types. The procedure you use to register an IFilter depends on the particular IFilter you are registering. See the documentation that accompanies the IFilter to learn the proper procedure for registering it.
• Modifying the noise word and thesaurus files and creating custom search queries. A noise word is a word, such as the or an, that is not useful for searches. The thesaurus is a query-expansion tool that allows the user to type one word in a search query and receive results on a similar word.
• Configuring the server to crawl Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 and Lotus Notes content sources.
• Maintaining the server and keeping it available for users, which includes monitoring usage levels of the server, disk space, and performance counters.

Planning for System Maintenance

Maintaining your system includes monitoring the performance of your servers. You can use performance counters to assist you in troubleshooting, capacity planning, and monitoring performance. Administrators can maintain and use historical copies of the gatherer log to collect statistics or perform trend analysis. Each time SharePoint Portal Server updates an index, it creates a gatherer log file for the workspace. This file contains data on the URLs that SharePoint Portal Server accesses while creating an index. You can specify that you want to log successful accesses, documents excluded by rules, and the number of days to keep log files by using SharePoint Portal Server Administration.

Preparing for Disaster Recovery and Server Propagation

This section discusses backing up, restoring, and duplicating the server running SharePoint Portal Server. The SharePoint Portal Server backup and restore process enables you to recover the entire server. The server duplication process enables you to create a copy of a master dashboard site on multiple computers distributed across the network.

The backup and restore process has the same operating system requirements as the server. All dashboard sites, document management, search, subscription, and discussion functionality is available during the backup process. However, you cannot add or remove workspaces or content sources during the backup process. You cannot perform the backup and restore process from any client computer, nor can you back up individual workspaces or documents.

You can create scripts to automate the backup and restore process of the server or to duplicate the server. SharePoint Portal Server installs the backup and restore script automatically.

Back up the Server

You can back up the server by running a script at the command prompt. You cannot back up individual workspaces or documents. You must have local administrator permissions to back up the server.

The backup process creates an image of the server. You can use this image to create a fully functioning instance of the server that is identical to the server at the time you created the backup image.

The image also includes any shortcuts or content sources that reference the local file system. However, these shortcuts and content sources do not work if the referenced content does not exist on the computer on which you perform the restore. In addition, you must restore any shortcuts to workspaces in My Network Places.

You can back up a server to another hard disk on the same server or to a share on a remote disk.

Restore the Server

You can restore a server by running a script at the command prompt. You cannot restore individual workspaces or documents. You must have local administrator permissions to restore the server. You can restore a server from a hard disk on the same server or from a remote file share. You can perform restorations on any computer, regardless of whether you used the computer to produce the backup image. If you used a utility to save the backup image to tape, you must restore the image from tape to disk by using that same utility before you can use the SharePoint Portal Server restore procedure. During the restore process, the server is offline.

Restoring a server destroys all SharePoint Portal Server data currently on that server. The server is unavailable during the restore process and may be unusable if the restore process fails.

Duplicate the Server

The server duplication process enables you to deploy multiple copies of a master SharePoint Portal Server computer across an organization's global network. You can use the SharePoint Portal Server backup and restore process to make multiple copies of the master server by restoring server backup images remotely to other servers in the same domain.

You can duplicate a server by using the backup and restore process as follows:

• Back up your server to a local or remote hard disk.
• Restore from the backup image to the remote server.

You can write scripts to automate the server backup process and create scheduled jobs to create a backup image of the master server for duplication. You can also configure a scheduled duplication process to restore the image on the target server.