Last summer, I plugged an excellent (and free!) library of online tutorials at SharePoint-Screencasts which are produced by SharePoint MVP and MCP, Asif Rehmani, and MCP, Wendy Henry. At the time of my discovery of the site, I also signed up for regular email updates with tips and tricks from SharePoint e-Learning, of which SharePoint Screencasts is a division. I don't know about you, but I get a lot of email, so I take advantage of the folders functionality in Outlook to manage my inbox. One of the downsides of that folder functionality, however, is that if you're not seeing a new item appear in your Inbox proper, sometimes one can find oneself hopelessly behind on a certain segment of mail. I was recently both mortified and overjoyed to discover that such was the case with my SharePoint e-Learning newsletters. The funny thing is that I was mortified and overjoyed for essentially the same reason ... mortified because of all the SharePoint learning that had been pouring into my mailbox unseen, and overjoyed because I had a wealth of new SharePoint knowledge sitting right there in my mailbox.
I've written a couple of times before about the humble yet mighty SharePoint recycle bin and its related restore selection functionality, but thanks to SharePoint e-Learning, I just learned a couple of new things about the recycle bin that certainly warrant any additional exposure that I can help achieve with this blog. Since I don't think it had occurred (or been taught) to me before, the first thing I learned was that the recycle bin doesn't apply to entire sites that have been deleted, but only to items within those sites. That is, once you delete a site, it's irretrievable ... it doesn't pass go, it doesn't go to the recycle bin, it's just gone.
As it turns out, however, it needn't be so, which is the second thing I learned. A team of developers at Microsoft figured out a way to let you (essentially) create a recycle bin for a deleted SharePoint site by allowing you to automatically backup the site prior to its deletion. The best news? As with the SharePoint e-Learning newsletter which turned me on to the existence of this tool, it's completely free to users. If this is a tool that you think you might need one day, I'd strongly recommend having your Systems Administrator check it out ... call me crazy, but it seems that referring to this as a best practices tool wouldn't be out of line. The MSIT Site Delete Capture tool is available as a free download at CodePlex.
For more information, you may also wish to check out (and/or send along to your Administrator) the SharePoint e-Learning screencast which details the features of the tool. Tell 'em SharePoint Blank sent you!
Posted
Jan 12 2009, 07:57 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.