Manage quotas and unused Web sites

  • Article

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2009-12-11

In this article:

  • Determine quota template settings

  • Determine Recycle Bin settings

  • Automatically delete sites that are not used

There are several settings on the Web Application General Settings page of the SharePoint Central Administration Web site that can help to manage the growth of data and how the current content is organized in team sites within your environment. These settings are applied to all the sites within a Web application. At a minimum level, plan to implement the following settings, each of which is discussed later in this article:

  • Define and apply the default quota template to limit the maximum size of the team sites.

  • Turn on the site's Recycle Bins and use the second-stage Recycle Bin.

  • Automatically delete sites that are not in use.

Determine quota template settings

There is no default quota template for team sites in an Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. However, we recommend the following settings as a starting point:

  • Automated e-mail is sent to a site administrator when the size of the site reaches 450 megabytes (MB).

  • Users are prevented from uploading additional documents when the size of a site reaches 500 MB.

These settings might work well for your organization, but you need to evaluate the size and number of items that you expect users to store in the team sites. You also need to adjust these settings appropriately to ensure that the team sites are used in accordance with the requirements of your organization.

If a particular team or group in your organization has a business need to store a greater volume of content on its team site, you can adjust the quota limits for an individual site collection. To adjust quota limits, on the Site Collection Quotas and Locks page, select the site collection that corresponds to the team or group. Change the current quota template to Individual Quota, and then specify the appropriate limits.

While planning for quota templates, choose the limits that work for most of your organization's team sites. To enhance manageability, adjust quotas on a per-site collection basis when it is necessary to meet a business need.

Determine Recycle Bin settings

A simple way to enhance manageability of team sites is to turn on the Recycle Bin. The Recycle Bin enables site owners to retrieve items that they have deleted without requiring administrative intervention (that is, restoring from backup tapes).

The second-stage Recycle Bin stores items that users have deleted from their Recycle Bins. Only site collection administrators can restore items from the second-stage Recycle Bin. The size that is specified for the second-stage Recycle Bin increases the total size of the team site. For example, if the team site limit is 500 MB and the second-stage Recycle Bin is set to 50 percent, the total amount that can be used by the site is 750 MB. Therefore, plan your database capacity accordingly.

Just as with the Recycle Bin, items in the second-stage Recycle Bin are automatically deleted when the time period specified for the deleted items expires (by default, 30 days). However, when the size limit of the second-stage Recycle Bin is reached, items are automatically deleted from the second-stage Recycle Bin starting with the oldest items. Site collection administrators can also empty the second-stage Recycle Bin manually.

Key considerations when you use the Recycle Bin feature include whether to use the second-stage Recycle Bin and how much space to allocate. Consider allocating at least a small amount of space (such as 10 percent) to the second-stage Recycle Bin to accommodate cases in which a user mistakenly deletes an important document, a folder in a document library, or a column in a list.

Automatically delete sites that are not used

You can increase the value of the content in the team sites by automatically deleting the sites that are not used. This can also help you control the overall growth of team sites. If team sites are hosted in a separate Web application, you can manage unused team sites separately than personal sites by providing the team sites a longer life span before you start to query for the unused Web sites.

You can specify settings that are appropriate for your organization. This is because this feature works by way of confirmations and not by tracking the actual usage of the site. You need to plan for unexpected absence of site owners and not set the expiration and deletion times for sites for short durations. Also, make sure that you always have multiple site collection administrators so that you have a backup administrator to confirm the site usage if the primary site collection administrator is unavailable for an extended period of time.

Automatic site deletion can help you control the Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment at the risk of losing the business-critical data that might be stored in a site, which was deleted automatically. To lessen this risk, we recommend that you:

  • Require a secondary contact for all sites. By doing this, if the site owner is not available or leaves your organization, there is still a contact available to confirm the usage of a site. If you do not have a secondary contact and you shorten the number of days or number of notices given before you delete an unused site, you run the risk of accidentally deleting a site that is required. To implement this recommendation, turn on Self-Service Site Management, or as a business process for creating site collections by using Central Administration.

  • Archive sites before they are deleted automatically. Many organizations that implement automatic deletion of unused sites also invest in developing a tool that archives all the sites before they are deleted automatically. This helps them to easily restore the sites if they contain some business-critical information or plan to store the content databases for a longer duration, so that a site that has been deleted can be restored in the future.

To manage quotas and unused Web sites, you can perform any of the following procedures in this chapter:

See Also

Concepts

Create, delete, and view site collections and subsites
Manage site collection ownership
Analyze site usage
Configure settings for sites
Manage site collection administrators (Office SharePoint Server 2007)