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Sharepoint site templates include a Discussion Board option that users can use to share ideas and talk about projects, plans or any other topic they wish. There are some things you can configure with these discussion boards to make them more useful.

A server administrator can set the number of characters shown in a expanded discussion, control how the time limit on new message tag or change the order in which the discussion items are listed. Once you have the discussion board created, open it up and click the Modify Settings and Columns. The Change General Settings link will allow you to set content approval, attachments and item-level permissions.

To display more than the default of 400 Characters of Discussion Text you must edit a file called onet.xml and reprovision the server.

Warning: Editing the onet.xml file is not supported, do so with

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Administrators can give permissions to users to create their own sites for projects, groups or whatever other need they may require. A lot of times, these sites will be abandonned because the project is complete, the group has disbanded, or it was just never used. Windows Sharepoint Services allows you to automatically email site administrators to have them verify that the site is still in use.

Sharepoint sites will take up space on servers and it is a best practice to verify if all the sites are still being used or if they have become inactive. SharePoint Services allow you to automatically send a notice to a site owner asking them to confirm that the sites that they have created are in use. You can also delete unconfirmed sites automatically allowing you to control the unused sites on the Sharepoint server. When a site is created, it is added to

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Windows SharePoint Services allows you to back up and restore individual Sharepoint sites hosted on the server (or server farm). STSAdm.exe allows you to backup and restore a Sharepoint site.

STSAdmn.exe allows you to back up and/or restore a specific Sharepoint site using MSDE, in fact STSAdm.exe is your only backup and restore option for the free version which uses MSDE. When you create a back up of a Sharepoint site, you are backing up the content database for the site, including all the sites pages, document libraries and lists. It also backs up the security and features settings. STSAdm.exe will create a single file with all of the data. You can also use STSAdm.exe to restore your Sharepoint site to the same location or to a different location.

Note: If you wish to move a Sharepoint site to a new server, you must use the Sharepoint Migration Tool.

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SharePoint Configuration Analyzer is a free tool that you can download from the Microsoft Download Center which allows you to analyze and create reports on your SharePoint servers. The SharePoint Configuration Analyzer can report configuration errors and copy log files, configuration files, and other data to network share for further analysis.

You must install SharePoint Configuration Analyzer on the server running Sharepoint and in a server farm this must be installed on each front-end Web server. Once you have downloaded and installed the tool, run Sca.exe, in the Server address field enter the URL of the virtual server or the FQDN of the server that you wish to perform and analysis of.

You can analyze a single site, or all the sites on the Sharepoint server(s). There are a number of other options you can select including the option to package the results into a CAB

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