Getting started

Imagine you are the administrator of a SharePoint implementation for a large company that uses SharePoint for their corporate intranet, collaboration websites, enterprise search, and other mission-critical business processes. One day you are sitting at your desk and you get a call from a user saying that they are receiving an error when trying to access the intranet.

As you begin looking at this, you receive several more phone calls as well as e-mails from other users experiencing the same problem. You attempt to remotely log in to the SharePoint Central Administration server to check on the server logs and Unified Logging System (ULS) logs. However, there is no response from the server. What do you do now?

You begin with basic troubleshooting to see if you can determine what the issue is and to see if you can get it corrected in a timely manner. However, in this particular case you discover that your server, which runs Central Administration and several key SharePoint services, has died.

This would be the time to refer to your DR plan (ideally not saved in SharePoint) to see what to do next assuming you had a plan. Even if you had a plan, are you sure it will work? Has it been tested? These are the kind of questions that need to be answered before a disaster occurs, not after you are in the midst of one.

So how do you start with a SharePoint DR plan? There are some preliminary steps you should take as part of developing your SharePoint DR plan. These steps include identifying each component of your SharePoint environment and the threats to each component that could cause a disaster.