Yesterday was a day at school. Not actually school but a full day at the IT-Talks user group session “Installing, administering and working with SharePoint 2007”.

It was a one hour drive from where I live, and it was on a Saturday, but there I went. A one-hour drive here in Belgium means I’m almost on the other side of the country :-)
Upon arrival at the location most people were already there so I had to search for a free spot. We were about 25 people assisting to the session, that’s not bad if I may say so.

The idea was to go over a few slides and do all the labs ourselves. However there were some infrastructure problems and the labs weren’t possible. So we mainly watched over on the projector.

The session was presented by Tom Vandaele and Bart Bultink.

Here are a few notes I made during the event, some of them are tips given by Tom, and some I write here as well more as a note for myself:

Installation of MOSS and domain accounts permissions
More a note for myself, but the basic permissions you need when installing MOSS 2007 are:

• The SharePoint service account (farm account): needs to be a domain user and needs to be added on the SQL server with ‘dbcreator’ and ‘securityadmin’ permissions settings. Nothing more. Tip: also checkout Spencer Harbar's post on this.
• The SharePoint seach account: needs to be a domain account, nothing more. Extra permissions to the database will be given to this account by the setup program itself.
• The user account with which you log on to install must be a local Administrator’s member on the server. I guess this one is rather obvious.

Forcing the creation of a new database for each site collection
There is no setting that allows you to say “force creation of new database per site collection”, however there is a very simple way to enforce this. In Central Administration you can set the state of a database to Offline. This does not mean the database itself is stopped or inaccessible, just that it may no longer be used for a new site collection. By setting your databases to offline you force the Administrator to create a new database for each new Site Collection.
Note: just leave one database online for creation of mysites.
Also check out Tom’s post on this. 

Active directory profile import
A good base design of your AD OU structure is very important. For example you cannot import several organization units from a single AD.
Make sure your system accounts are on a separate OU that does not get imported otherwise those accounts will also end up in the search results. And you don’t want that to happen.

Backup/restore
There are two options available for backup/restore of SharePoint sites: SQL Server database backup and WSS backup functionality. None of these do a backup of your custom code so make sure all your custom solution files, web.config changes and the like are also backed up via the hard drive.
SQL database backup: very efficient backup, this is especially a good solution for backup/restore if you store each site collection in a separate database.
WSS backup/restore: takes more time and therefore probably less efficient than SQL database backup. This can be used to transfer a site collection from a staging environment to another.
Using import/export
This is not a backup functionality but may be somewhat linked: using the export/import functionality you can import a site collection as a sub-site of another site collection. This can be a helper if you need to restructure your site content.

Thanks to the organizers!