Avoid Speeding Tickets in SharePoint

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Last evening I drove to Asheville, NC to present at a SharePoint User Group meeting.  It’s about 2.5 hours from Charlotte (where I’m located).  On my way back to Charlotte I was heading down a mountain road enjoying the curvy road in my Mazda.  Well, I got pulled over by a State Trooper (in a Charger) who gave me a ticket for speeding.  I even tweeted it on twitter: https://twitter.com/danlewisnet/status/1281445656. (don’t ask… I was cold and bored waiting on the ticket)

3923-Copy_of_trooper-220x165 Well, the rest of my drive home I thought about the ticket.  I was grumpy and mad of course – but really I had no reason the more I thought about it.  How many times have I sped… more than once.  It’s just a fact – if you speed, you will eventually get a ticket, and that’s just the way it is.  The only way you can avoid a speeding ticket, is to not speed.

Let’s translate this to SharePoint.  There are some really silly and bad things you can do in SharePoint.  Things that you know you shouldn’t, but occasionally you do anyway.  Well if you keep on doing it, you are eventually going to get ‘a ticket’ for it.

Let’s look at some examples:

1.  Have you ever tested your backup-recovery?  Sure, you tell everyone that you are backing up your data – but have you ever actually tried to restore/recover from that backup?  You know you should, but most people don’t for some reason.  What happens if you do go down and fail to restore?  The result?  A ticket for a bad disaster recovery policy.

2.  Do you send warning emails when site storage reaches a certain limit?   I know, it’s kind of a pain to monitor your data growth overall, but the last thing you want is for a site collection to be locked because it’s maxed out – and you happen to be unavailable.   The result?  A ticket for poor monitoring.

3.  What if you are monitoring, but you don’t really know what is being stored in SharePoint.  Yikes, who on earth is storing Virtual Hard Drives in SharePoint?  Perhaps you should have payed better attention to your Blocked File Types (see a post on this: Blocked File Types).  The result?  A ticket for lack of planning.

4. Are you using one service account to run all services in your SharePoint environment?  What happens if that account is compromised or decides to go whacky on you.  Or someone accidently reset the password.  The result?  A ticket for being short-sighted.

5. When was the last time you checked the Event Viewer on your servers to make sure that everything was humming along with no hiccups?  What if there was a tell-tale error that was appearing letting you know that an issue had poked its head into your environment, and you didn’t catch it before it impacted your users?  The result?  A ticket for lack of due-diligence.

Those are just a few examples… the point is this:  There are many things that you probably know you should be doing in your environment to keep it running efficiently and smoothly.  Take the time to slow down and address them before they become an issue.  If you don’t take the time to slow down, you may end up getting a ticket.  And when you do, you’ll have no one else to blame but yourself.  :)  It’s just the way it is.