Catch my Point

I have been asked by many about the differences between Backup/Restore vs. Import/Export operations, they both really serve very different purpose.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, the naming conventions are very different

SharePoint Naming Conventions (source)

Site Names

In WSS Site Names may not contain the following characters: \ / : * ? ” < > | # { } % & ” ~ +
You cannot start a site name, subsite name, or a site group name with an underscore (_) character or with the period character
You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a site name, a subsite name, or a site group name
You cannot use the period character at the end of a site name, a subsite name, or a site group name

File Names

Invalid characters: ” # % & * : < > ? \ / { | } ~ 
Cannot be longer than 128 characters
You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a file name
You cannot use the period character at the end of a file name
You cannot start a file name with the period character

Folder Names

You cannot use the following characters anywhere in a folder name or a server name: ~ # % & * { } \ : < > ? / | ”
Cannot be longer than 128 characters
You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a folder name
You cannot use the period character at the end of a folder name
You cannot start a folder name with the period character

Miscellaneous

The complete URL for the file or folder cannot be longer than 260 characters. Note that this includes the server, site and library name.

NTFS file system (source)

Use a period (.) to separate the base file name from the extension in a directory name or file name.
Use a backslash (\) to separate components in paths, which divides the file name from the path to it, or one directory from one another in a path. You cannot use a backslash in file or directory names. However, they can be required as part of volume names, for example, “C:\”. UNC names must have the following format:

\\<server>\<share>.

Use any character in the current code page for a name, including Unicode characters, except characters in the range of zero (0) through 31, or any character that the file system does not allow. A name can contain characters in the extended character set (128–255). However, it cannot contain the following reserved characters:
< > : ” / \ | ? *

Use a period (.) as a directory component in a path to represent the current directory.
Use two consecutive periods (..) as a directory component in a path to represent the parent of the current directory.
Do not use the following reserved device names for the name of a file: CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9. Also avoid these names followed by an extension, for example, NUL.tx7.
Do not assume case sensitivity. Consider names such as OSCAR, Oscar, and oscar to be the same.
Do not end a file or directory name with a trailing space or a period. Although the underlying file system may support such names, the operating system does not. You can start a name with a period (.).
Maximum Path Length
In the Windows API, the maximum length for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters. A path is structured in the following order: drive letter, colon, backslash, components separated by backslashes, and a null-terminating character, for example, the maximum path on the D drive is “D:\<256 chars>NUL”.

Note Functions in the Windows API convert “/” to “\” as part of converting the name to an NT style name.
The Unicode versions of several functions permit a maximum path length of approximately 32,000 characters composed of components up to 255 characters in length. To specify that kind of path, use the “\\?\” prefix.

Note The maximum path of 32,000 characters is approximate, because the “\\?\” prefix can be expanded to a longer string, and the expansion applies to the total length.

After building our QA Server Farm Environment, we installed thrid party Server Hardening software on our web front end servers, that totally knocked out our servers, Web Aplications Created using Central Admin server were not able to Propogate to Web Front end servers, all the SharePoint solutions deployed failed. Luckily we had VMWare backups we were able to restore but there is not much documentation out there about server hardening on SharePoint farm.

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog entry has nice collection of links for different security topics on Office SharePoint Server and WSS v3, though some of the MSDN Links are broken. Below are updated links

Securing Your Web Server
Securing Your Database Server
Securing Your Network
Securing Your Application Server

Recently I had an opportunity to deploy Microsoft CRM with Selentica add on to integrate with SharePoint, which created thousands of Site Collections. Initially I was little hesitant to create so many Site Collections especially after reading Microsoft Guidelines for Performance (image below).

There was really no Performance change after this deployment (We have been checking performance for a month now) may be because of my 5 Server farm, but Site Collections do give more flexibility managing content databases and security compared to sites.