I was recently catching up on some posts on the SharePoint Team Blog, and came across the announcement for the SharePoint Best Practices Series.It's hard to ignore the exploding popularity of SharePoint over the past few years. And regardless of whether or not you're a fan of Microsoft, most will admit that the Microsoft Developer's Network (MSDN) is a solid source for detailed documentation and best practices guidance. Its SharePoint resources are no exception.

Being that it's a Microsoft site, there's no getting past the fact it's going to have a SharePoint-centric point of view. However, the content here is universal enough that just about anyone working on the IT or content side of an enterprise content management system will find valuable information.

The best practices are organized into five categories: Operational Excellence, Team Collaboration Sites, Publishing Portals, Search, and My Sites. From there, the individual best practices include internal network topology recommendations, planning a deployment, teaching end-users how to get the most out of the tools provided, and information on setting a governance policy.

Although the SharePoint-specific entries are helpful, I found the most interesting to be the general best practices on managing a complex enterprise system, including advice on user group rights management and maintaining separate servers for content creation and publication.

Good advice isn't useful until you act upon it, just as best practices are theory until you build them into the policies and procedures of your organization. Although yours may not be a Microsoft or SharePoint IT shop, there's a lot of good advice to be found here, even if it's just some ideas to develop your organization's own best practices repository.