SharePoint Portal Server
Administration
T
hroughout this book, you have used the SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) Central Administra-
tion site to manage sites and users. However, administration and maintenance in SPS2003 goes
beyond simply setting up user accounts and team sites. Just like any other critical business
system in your organization, SPS requires a comprehensive maintenance plan to protect cor-
porate data and ensure optimal performance.
Because SPS acts as a repository for documents and information, you must ensure that
the system is backed up regularly. You must also ensure that unused sites are removed to free
system resources. Additionally, SPS services must be configured for performance. Beyond these
basic tasks, your installation may require the development of a disaster recovery plan or service-
level agreement. Although the intent of this chapter is not to act as a substitute for the
Administrator’s Guide, I will examine the major administrative tasks you must perform to keep
an SPS installation healthy.
Back Up and Restore
One of the first things that you will want to configure in a production environment is proper
backup of the SPS installation. SPS ships with a backup and restore tool that is accessible by
selecting Start
➤
All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Portal Server Data
Backup and Restore. Figure 11-1 shows the utility.
The backup and restore utility backs up every aspect of your SPS installation with the
exception of custom Web Parts. Therefore, you should back up the Windows 2003 system in
conjunction with the backup and restore utility. Additionally, several prerequisites must be
met before the utility can run correctly:
• SQL Server 2000 client tools must be installed on the server where the utility runs.

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Figure 11-1. The backup and restore utility
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8. In the Backup Comment field, type A test backup.
9. In the Available Components list, expand the tree and ensure that all of the components
are selected.
10. Click Backup to run the backup.
Site Usage Analysis
The distributed model of SPS potentially allows any user in the organization to create sites.
This is particularly true when you enable Self-Service Site Creation (SSSC) mode. The result of
this approach is that an organization can rapidly have hundreds of team sites created. This sit-
uation not only increases the complexity of site navigation for all users, but also increases the
resources required to maintain backups. Therefore, you will want to take steps to ensure that
the available sites are bringing significant value to end users.
Site usage analysis gives you a way to track the use of sites within SPS and to identify those
that are bringing the most value. Site usage analysis is not configured by default in SPS. You must
begin by configuring it at the server level.
To enable site usage analysis, follow these steps:
1. Log in to SPSPortal as a local administrator.
2. Select Start
➤
All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Central
Administration.
3. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page, select Component
Configuration

8. On the Site Usage Report page, view the statistics for this individual site.
Cleaning Up Unused Sites
Along with ensuring the quality of available sites, another problem with site proliferation
is that there is really no motivation for any user to delete a site after it has served its purpose.
If a user creates a site for the annual company sales meeting, they are unlikely to care about
the site after the meeting is over. In fact, this is just a larger version of the same issues that
affect all file systems. If you were to examine the file system backups at most organizations,
you would find that a significant number of the documents being backed up no longer have
any use.
The solution in SPS is to implement site use confirmation and deletion. This facility
allows SPS to query site owners and determine if a site is still in use. The owners confirm sites
that are still in use, whereas sites that are no longer useful may be deleted. If you want, you
can even set up SPS to automatically delete sites that have not been confirmed over a period
of time.
Site use and confirmation is configured to send e-mail notifications to the owner of a site
collection that has not been used for a specified period of time. When the e-mail is received,
the owner will have a set of hyperlinks in the e-mail that will allow the owner to confirm that
the site is in use or delete the site. If you have enabled automatic site deletion, then the site
will automatically be deleted if the site collection owner fails to respond to the request after
a configured number of notifications.
To enable site use confirmation and deletion, take these steps:
1. Log in to SPSPortal as a local administrator.
2. Select Start
➤
All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
Central Administration.

All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
Central Administration.
3. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page, select Portal Site and
Virtual Server Configuration
➤
Configure Virtual Server Settings from the Virtual
Server List.
4. On the Virtual Server List page, select Default Web Site.
5. On the Virtual Server Settings page, select Automated Web Site Collection Manage-
ment
➤
Configure Self-Service Site Creation.
6. On the Configure Self-Service Site Creation page, ensure that Self-Service Site Creation
mode is On.
7. Check the box labeled Require Secondary Contact.
8. Click OK.
The site use confirmation and deletion system uses two different message texts to send
notifications: one text is used when you enable site confirmation, while the other text is used
if you have also enabled automatic deletion. Administrators may customize these notices, which
are located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\
TEMPLATE\1033\XML\DeadWeb.xml. Listing 11-1 shows the contents of the notification file.
Listing 11-1. The Site Notification Message
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!-- _lcid="1033" _version="11.0.5510" _dal="1" -->
<!-- _LocalBinding -->
<Email>

"Delete this site".<br><br>
Please note - When a SharePoint Web site collection is deleted, all Web
sites, content and information which
were part of the site collection are completely erased. The site can
only be restored if a backup exists.]]>
</AutoDeleteBody>
</AutoDeleteWarning>
</Email>
Managing the Search Service
Although SPS provides several ways to locate information, such as area and personal links,
there is no substitute for a healthy search engine. The quality of searches performed within the
portal is dependent upon properly scheduling and building indexes of content on key sources.
Early in the book, I specified the account to use when crawling data sources, but it is important
to remember that the account used must have permission to access the data sources you want
to include in the index.
To change the access account, you need to follow this procedure:
1. Log in to SPSPortal as a local administrator.
2. Select Start
➤
All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
Central Administration.
3. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page, select Server Config-
uration
➤
Configure Server Farm Account Settings.
4. On the “Configure server farm account settings” page, locate the Default Content

Regardless of whether the content is a direct part of SPS or an external source, you will need
to schedule content crawls to make the source available in search results. SPS’s search service
supports Full, Incremental, and Adaptive updates of the content indexes.
A Full update crawls the entire content source and updates the search index for every
document. A Full update will add new information to the index, modify existing information,
and delete obsolete information. A Full update is an intensive operation that should be sched-
uled for off-peak hours and performed only occasionally. Generally, a Full update is warranted
under the following conditions:
• Whenever the index update rules are changed
• Whenever the server crashes
• When the portal structure changes significantly
• When the noise word file is changed
• When an index is manually reset
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An Incremental update, on the other hand, only indexes content that has changed since
the last crawl. This makes an Incremental update much more efficient. You can schedule such
updates daily during off-peak hours to ensure that the search results are always up to date.
An Adaptive update uses historical analysis to try and perform a more efficient update
than even that achieved with an Incremental update. The analysis uses information from pre-
vious updates to determine which documents are likely to have changed. The update then
focuses on this set of documents.
To create an update schedule, follow these steps:
1. Log in to SPS as a member of the Administrator site group.
2. From the portal home page, click the Site Settings link.
3. On the Site Settings page, select Search Settings and Indexed Content
➤
Configure

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Figure 11-2. Displaying Best Bets
Figure 11-3. Displaying presence information
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To enable online presence, follow these steps:
1. Log in to SPSPortal as a local administrator.
2. Select Start
➤
All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
Central Administration.
3. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page, select Portal Site and
Virtual Server Configuration
➤
Configure Virtual Server Settings from the Virtual Server
List Page.
4. On the Virtual Server List page, select Default Web Site.
5. On the Virtual Server Settings page, select Virtual Server Management
➤
Virtual Server
General Settings.
6. On the Virtual Server General Settings page, select Yes to “Enable person name Smart
Tag and online status for members.”
7. Click OK.
Managing Quotas and Locks
As an organization uses SPS, it will consume more and more resources. To ensure that the instal-

9. Select Manage Quotas
➤
Manage Site Collection Quota and Locks.
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10. On the “Manage site collection quotas and locks” page, type the URL of a top-level site
you have created.
11. Click View Data.
12. In the Current Quota Template list, select the Test Template.
13. Click OK.
Exercise 11-1: Establishing Secure Access
The work we have completed so far in this book has all been accomplished as if SPS was only
accessible from an internal server. Typically, we have used the machine name of the server
directly in the browser. If you want to include external access to SPS as part of your solution,
however, you will have to make some changes.
The first thing you’ll have to do is give your portal a name that’s accessible from outside
the firewall. Typically, you use portal or sharepoint as a prefix in the domain name (e.g.,
portal.datalan.com) and make a new entry in the Domain Name Service (DNS) for the enter-
prise. You’ll also have to ensure that the server running the portal has an Internet Protocol (IP)
address that can be exposed on the Internet, unlike the default setup this book uses.
Although these steps are enough to expose the portal externally, they are not enough to
guarantee security. At a minimum, you should enable Secure Socket Layers (SSL) for the por-
tal. You may also choose to implement a more significant authentication scheme such as the
use of tokens. In this exercise, you will give your portal an alias name and enable SSL.
Creating an Alias
Creating an alias for your web site is a simple matter of making a new record entry in the DNS
for the network. Creating an alias will allow you to use a name like sharepoint.sps.local when
accessing SPS instead of SPSPortal. Although you will create your alias solely for internal use,

2. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to sharepoint.sps.local.
3. When prompted, log in and verify the portal home page is visible.
Another problem with using alias names lies in the proper resolution of addresses. Hard-
coded addresses that reference internal resources can become unavailable when users access
SPS externally through the alias name. SPS helps somewhat in this regard by providing a place
for you to list alias names that are in use. When you list alias names for SharePoint, it will use
the alias with search results to ensure that the address links are always valid.
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Figure 11-4. Creating an alias
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Follow these steps to list the alias name with SharePoint Services:
1. Log in to SPSPortal as a portal administrator.
2. Select Start
➤
All Programs
➤
SharePoint Portal Server
➤
SharePoint Central
Administration.
3. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration page, select Portal Site and
Virtual Server Configuration
➤
Configure Alternate Portal Site URLs for Intranet,
Extranet, and Custom Access.
4. On the “Configure alternate portal access settings” page, select Edit from the drop-
down menu associated with the Default Web Site entry.
5. In the Intranet URL field, type http://sharepoint.sps.local.

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11. Click Next.
12. In the Certificate Database Settings step, accept the default values and click Next.
13. Click Finish to complete the operation.
Creating the New Certificate
You begin creating a certificate by preparing a request using the virtual server that you want
to secure. This server prepares a text file that may then be submitted to Certificate Services.
In this case, you will create a request for SPSPortal.
1. Log in to SPSPortal as a local administrator.
2. Open Windows Explorer.
3. Create a new directory at C:\certificates\spsportal.
4. Select the C:\certificates directory, right-click it, and select Sharing and Security
from the pop-up menu.
5. On the Sharing tab, select Share This Folder.
6. Click Permissions.
7. Grant everyone full control and click OK.
8. Click OK again.
9. Select Start
➤
Administrative Tools
➤
Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
10. Expand the SPSPortal node and open the Web Sites folder.
11. Right-click the Default Web Site node and select Properties from the pop-up menu.
12. On the Directory Security tab, click Server Certificate.
13. In the Web Server Certificate wizard, click Next.
14. In the Server Certificate step, select the Create a New Certificate option, and click Next.
15. In the Delayed or Immediate Request step, select the “Prepare the request now, but
send it later” option, and click Next.
16. In the Name and Security Settings step, leave the values as they are and click Next.

9. Select Start
➤
Administration Tools
➤
Certification Authority.
10. In the Certification Authority dialog, expand the tree and open the Pending Requests
folder.
11. Locate the pending request, right-click it, and select All Tasks
➤
Issue from the pop-up
menu.
12. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to spscontroller/certsrv/default.asp.
13. Click the “View the status of a pending certificate request” link.
14. Click the link for the pending certificate.
15. On the Certificate Issued page, click the Download Certificate link.
16. In the File Download dialog, click Save.
17. Save the file into the \\spsportal\certificates\spsportal directory.
18. On the Certificate Issued page, click the Download Certificate Chain link.
19. In the File Download dialog, click Save.
20. Save the file into the \\spsportal\certificates\spsportal directory.
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