5 SharePoint Mistakes You're Probably Making

SharePoint is a wonderfully open-ended system, and that means you have plenty of room to mess yourself up, trip yourself over, and otherwise fail. While there are hundreds of ways to make mistakes in SharePoint, there are a few pitfalls that are both devastating and shockingly common.

So, without further adieu, here are 5 SharePoint mistakes you're probably making:

1: Not clearing your recycling bin.


It may not seem like it matters, but the recycling bin can easily get out of hand. If you leave too many items, it's almost impossible to keep them straight – and they can be a huge sink on your total site quota for storage. No one wants a gigabyte of their quota to go to trash, so be sure to keep these files trimmed down and tossed out. A once-a-week or once-a-month clearance is advisable.

2: Not putting quotas on collections.

Site collections do a great job of tallying the inventory for your various SharePoint-based projects, but it's easy for site collections to become graveyards for long-since-dead projects. If you put some simple quotas on the size of site collections, you can easily prompt all responsible parties to keep their web-space clean.

3: Not taking advantage of business intelligence.


The reporting capabilities of SharePoint are some of the most impressive we've ever seen, but somehow C-level employees seem to think the reports are only helpful to them. The reality is that employees at every level can receive immense benefit from business intelligence reports – so throw some basic visuals on performance / key metric on the dash of every staff-member.

4: Not planning effectively.

Any SharePoint expert can tell you that Microsoft didn't build us the most simple, straightforward project. For every bit of helpful complexity, though, there's an additional way your project can tie in around itself. Make sure you plan in advance to avoid messing with the internals of your project halfway through. You don't want to break your own progress.

5: Not using effective capacity need calculations.

How much space do you really need for content? Unless you've done the critical thinking necessary to find your totals, you probably don't know. As you go through the calculations for necessary storage, be sure to set aside a few gigs for external applications (5 to 6gb is typically enough) for every gig of content you plan on having.

Be sure to watch out for these easy-to-make foibles, and you'll be that much further ahead of the game. Want to learn more simple tips and tricky mistakes? Stay tuned on Twitter and Facebook.