Questions[sharepoint](server)

We have an Apache Subversion server that we store (amongst other things) all of our documentation on. We have a lot of Word, Excel, PDF etc. documents in svn, and all of our users use TortoiseSVN as their client interface. A lot of those users will also browse the repo through a web browser, which (unfortunately) is often Internet Explorer.

Recently we started trialling Office 2010 (coming from 2003) and found that documents from the repo are opened differently when browsing with IE. Rather than IE downloading the file and then sending it to the appropriate app (after which it should just be a temporary copy stored locally), it sends the URL for the document to the app. The doc is downloaded by the app and then treated it as if it came from a Sharepoint server, i.e. the app tries to lock it and then upload any saved changes back to the server automatically.

From Googling, it appears that many people want this behaviour. However, we want to disable it - it doesn't fit with our existing processes. How can I go about doing this?

I don't have a lot of control over client machines, so solutions that involve disabling all Office document collaboration features like this for each client are not what I'm looking for. Besides, I couldn't find much that I could do other than disable the Office Document Cache Handler add-on in IE. The only client-side options that may be feasible are those that specifically disable this feature for our named server but leave it on for others.

So that leaves server-side solutions. I'm guessing that Office sees that the svn server has WebDAV support and therefore moves into a Sharepoint-like document management workflow. Is there any way to stop this kind of integration without disabling all WebDAV support on the server (assuming we could even do that)? We actually use svn's autoversioning a bit for other purposes so it's a required feature. I've found discussion of disabling the feature if it's actually a Sharepoint server, but it's not! My understanding of how this kind of thing works (i.e. Office client identifying WebDAV support on the server) is pretty limited, so please explain further if you can.

In case it matters, the server setup is:

Apache v2.2.8 and Subversion v1.4.6 on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.

how can I tell what version of SharePoint a site is using, without being able to see the admin panel?

Is there anything, perhaps in the source of the pages, that would give me a clue?

How/where can I find the template used for a SharePoint site or page.

I have a page I want to resemble, but I don't know where to find the template for that page and site?

There are many SQL Server options that can be enabled for databases, and one of the most misunderstood ones is auto-shrink. Is it safe? If not, why not?

This isn't a how-should-I-do-this question, just to set the stage. It's a what has your experience been? Please read through the whole question before quickly replying.

I spent the day yesterday teaching the current round of SharePoint MCM (Microsoft Certified Masters - see here) students all about high-availability technologies in SQL Server, plus how the SQL log/recovery/backup/restore work. This is really important as under every Enterprise-class MOSS installation is an Entreprise-class SQL Server hidden away, usually without a DBA. Kimberly teaches them a day of database maintenance on Friday (a kind of narrowed down version of the first week of the SQL MCM which we teach).

We were discussing the possibilities around using database mirroring to provide high-availability to SharePoint databases, and the relative pros and cons. Now, I know database mirroring to it's lowest internal depths, as I used to own it while at Microsoft, so no need to point out behaviors and idiosyncracies in your replies. I also know the various caveats and guidelines in the mirroring whitepaper from the SharePoint folks, and yes, they are just generalized guidelines not hard-and-fast rules.

My question is this: I'd like to hear from anyone who's implemented database mirroring for SharePoint and whether you found it worked for you, or you crashed and burned. In particular, how did you find the failover behavior worked for you? Did you end up with some database principals on one server and some on the other, effectively splitting your farm and making it unusable until manual intervention failed everything over to one server? Did you use it for local or remote HA? And so on.

Any replies will be gratefully received and will help broaden the knowledge base around marrying these two technologies, and I'll feed stories back into the SharePoint product group, and the future MCM rotations I teach as well.

Thanks!

[Edit: PS I'll put together a blog post about experiences and guidelines to this over the weekend too]