SharePoint Mentors

Previously a common question I would get from folks new to SharePoint would be “How do I recover the site I just deleted via the Recycle Bin?” to which unfortunately my reply would be “Umm you don’t.” This was a little scary for some situations since in many cases in SharePoint, we might use a site as a container for a group of documents rather than a folder and it can be a bit of a headache to do a site level restore from a larger backup. Plus let’s face it…If I accidentally delete something, I don’t necessarily want to run off to IT to confess to it.

With SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1, one of the new features that was introduced was a site and site collection level recycle bin.

Once Service Pack 1 has been installed within your SharePoint environment, deleted sites will appear in the Site Collection Recycle Bin ((Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Recycle Bin) under “Items Deleted From End User Recycle Bin”.

If you have a deleted Site Collection that you need to rescue, you can run a Powershell Command to get your site back.

First you must run the Get-SPDeletedSite command to retrieve information regarding deleted site collections that exist within the farm.

Then once you know the ID of the deleted site collection, you can run the following command.

Restore-SPDeletedSite -Identity ENTER ABOVE VALUE FOR SITEID

And just like that your site collection is restored!

After a busy few months of heavy duty writing, our latest book, Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint is now available!  This book is a continuation of the book we had written for 2007 with a few additional topics that were not included in the 2007 version such as Governance, Records Management, Social Networking, and Branding. We are also joined on this book by two great ladies in the SharePoint world, Jennifer Mason and Laura Rogers. These guys bring great insight to our book and we are thrilled to have them onboard for this project.

Is this a book on SharePoint Development or for End Users?

I get this question a lot. Officially we state that this book is ideal for anyone getting started with SharePoint as it will bring you end to end on the various features and functionilty that are available out of the box in SharePoint. Our goal is to teach the readers how to use and configure the various settings to build an environment that matches their business needs. So in my opinion if you have been given the keys to SharePoint in your organization and are responsible for configuring it to meet your needs, then our book will be perfect for you.

Now if you are developer, I still think you should read this book because its critical that you understand what SharePoint provides from a features and functionality point of view before you crack open Visual Studio and decide to build everything from scratch yourself. Having a solid understanding of what the platform provides is your first step to becoming a solid SharePoint developer as you need to understand where the logical points of extension are. Sadly I have come across too many situations in my consultant life where a developer or set of developers have custom built items that existed in SharePoint out of the box simply because they were not aware the feature even existed.

As always we look forward to your feedback and suggestions as we continue to produce new content of this nature.