Jun 06
Ever Want to Do Some Spring Cleaning to Your SharePoint Portal?
Susan Cotts
I started my career in 1990 and I've been with C/D/H for 16 years now.
Some of my most interesting projects include: SharePoint publishing portals, SharePoint extranet collaboration portals, and SharePoint executive dashboard portals.
When I'm not at work I care for my family, play with my kids, downhill ski, fish, run, vacation on the beach, summer BBQ with friends, volunteer at my church, etc.
I’m a pretty ordinary middle aged working mother, and I love it!
More about Susan
Articles by Susan Cotts
Well, I am a bit of neat freak so having old, inactive SharePoint sites lying around became a problem.
More importantly, they were taking up valuable real estate in the My SharePoint Sites list.
Wanna learn how to proceed? Well, I didn’t have an enterprise portal content lifecycle policy or set of tools to help me automatically clean things up (plus, these sites really shouldn’t be deleted). So, I needed to manually re-organize – that’s OK. Easily solved, right? Just move the sites around and you’re done. Not really. I found out that there are a few extra steps so I’ll share what I learned.
First, I created a new Site Directory in the Portal called “Reference Sites” to hold the sites I wanted to clean up, like “SharePoint Testing”.
The next step is pretty straight forward, using Manage Content and Structure (now available in MOSS 2007), from the Site Actions menu, I got to work moving the “reference sites”. Of course, this is best done after hours and requires user communication so that everyone understands how to get to these reference sites.
Once I tidied up the portal, I went back to the My SharePoint Sites list and found that my reference sites were still there. Not what I wanted, so I still had to address the My SharePoint Sites list. The My SharePoint Sites list is automatically generated based on a user’s membership in the Members group.
To clean up My SharePoint Sites, I had to remove the Members group and create a new Site Group with Read access, which meant breaking inheritance in some cases.
Finally, I needed to force the site synchronization tables to update so the My SharePoint Sites list would update the next time the Profile Synchronization timer job runs. Warning: when you run the following command the My SharePoint Sites list is empty until the re-sync occurs. If you are doing this work after hours though, no big deal.
stsadm -o sync -deleteolddatabases 0
The end result is the portal and the My SharePoint Sites list are tidy.
Okay, not quite done, one more spot to check, the My SharePoint Sites list that appears in the Office 2007 client. I had to force this list to be updated and cleaned as well; I needed to delete the registry entry.
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp
There are many architectural design issues around SharePoint site and content archival and lifecycle management. Traditional content management vendors like eDocs do have comprehensive solutions to keeping SharePoint portals relevant and compliant with information lifecycle policies! Here’s a quick demo of the eDocs integration. I have a proof of concept of this integration planned over the summer months with a client. I am certain I’ll have more to share once I dive in!