INTRODUCTION

This is a series. The previous article can be found at Series 1.

The next step that we have to be aware of after the hardware and topology configurations is the SharePoint Configuration itself. Please share your thoughts, too.

SHAREPOINT CONFIGURATION

Using different user accounts for different services

ALWAYS use different user account for each SharePoint service. The reason is not so much for improving the performance but it’s more for troubleshooting. If there are particular services that’re running slowly or down, you can easily identify them. While if every SharePoint service is configured using the same user account, you will not be able to distinguish them.

Also, SharePoint automatically grants a particular account specific access to DB, file system, etc. If you use the same account everywhere then that account is exposed to security risk because it suddenly has access to everything.

In SharePoint 2007 the following services need a dedicated user account (please add more in comments if I’m missing anything):

– Account installing SP;

– Account to run SP service (ie. the Farm account);

– WSS search and content access account;

– MOSS search;

– User profile sync;

– SSP service;

– Excel service;

– SSO;

– APP POOL for each of the website application you created.

In SharePoint 2010 there are more! You’ll need:

– AS ABOVE;

– APP POOL account for each service application you install;

– Service account for some of the additional services such as Lotus Note Connector, etc.

Please add to the list everyone.

Search crawl synchronization schedule configuration

Ensure that you specify “reasonable” sync search schedule. I’ve been to a client which search incremental crawl is specified to run every 5 mins and the full crawl is scheduled to run at 12pm every day. This causes bottleneck on the server especially the database server.

Define caching whenever possible

For content/pages that doesn’t change much, you can put caching on. This will improve user experience. I will talk about this later when we arrive at the programming section.

Adhere to Microsoft recommendations on limits

There are limits that MS has specified in terms of the number of items in a list, no of sub-sites, etc. Ensure that we adhere to these figures.

Ensure AD authentication instead of SQL authentication to the databases

Ensure that we use AD authentication instead of SQL authentication when we’re configuring SP (eg. creating sites, services, etc). Based on MS, AD authentication is faster and more secure.

For more information please go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/dd335963(office.12).aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263061(office.12).aspx.

Hope this helps and see you on the next article! 🙂

Tommy