Intro

Best practices are, and rightfully so, always a much sought-after topic. There are various kinds of best practices:

• Microsoft best practices. In real life, these are the most important ones to know, as most companies implementing SharePoint best practices have a tendency to follow as much of these as possibly can. Independent consultants doing architecture and code reviews will certainly take a look at these as well. In general, you can safely say that best practices endorsed by Microsoft have an added bonus and it will be mentioned whenever this is the case.
• Best practices. These practices are patterns that have proven themselves over and over again as a way to achieve a high quality of your solutions, and it's completely irrelevant who proposed them. Often MS best practices will also fall in this category. In real life, these practices should be the most important ones to follow.
• Practices. These are just approaches that are reused over and over again, but not necessarily the best ones. Wiki's are a great way to discern best practices from practices. It's certainly possible that this page refers to these "Practices of the 3rd kind", but hopefully, the SharePoint community will eventually filter them out. Therefore, everybody is invited and encouraged to actively participate in the various best practices discussions.

This Wiki page contains an overview of SharePoint 2010 Best Practices of all kinds, divided by categories.

Please note: At this point it's to early for this page to have any actual content. This is the framework, content will follow later...

Performance

When implementing IT solutions, everybody will face the day where a customer isn't happy with the way an application is performing. Because of the complex infrastructure and vast amount of features of SharePoint, there are many ways to approach these issues. Because of that and the importance of the topic, our first category outlines best practices to tackling performance problems.

Planning

Every SharePoint undertaking will at one point face the following questions: how long will it take, how much will it cost to implement, and how will we use it?   

Installation, Removal, Configuration, and Operation

This section deals with best practices regarding the following questions: How to install SharePoint? How to configure it? How to keep it operating? All best practices are targeted towards the IT Pro.

Deployment

Deployment of software artifacts is important. This section discusses best practices.

Virtualization

It's very common that SharePoint farms use virtualization techniques. This section is dedicated to best practices concerning virtualization.

Real Life Usage

Once you have SharePoint deployed, it's up to the end users, power users, and IT Pros to make the best of it. This section discusses best practices targeted towards this audience.

Backup and Recovery

This section deals with best practices about the back up and restore of SharePoint environments.

Development

This section covers best practices targeted towards software developers.

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Upgrade and Migration

If a product is successful, it has to be upgraded at some point.

Extranet Environments

This section provides an overview of planning and design considerations for SharePoint Extranet Environments.

Farms

This section discusses best practices regarding SharePoint 2012 farm topologies.

Top 10 Blogs to Follow

It's certainly a best practice to keep up to date with the latest SharePoint news. Therefore, a top 10 of blog suggestions to follow is included.

Top 5 SharePoint Books

Books remain the most important resource for learning a new topic. Here's a suggestion of the best SharePoint 2012 books out there.

Top 10 SharePoint Tools

What to put in your bag of tools?

Top 10 SharePoint CodePlex Tools

Some important no cost platform extensions can be sourced for free on CodePlex.