Use the following PowerShell script to move a Site Collection to a different Content Database:

 Move-SPSite <http://ServerName/Sites/SiteName> -DestinationDatabase <DestinationContentDb> 

In order to remove/disable site templates so that they don’t show up in the list presented by the Create Site wizard follow these steps:

1. Open the following file:
   C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Template\1033\XML\webtemp*.xml
2. Find the template that you would like to hide and change the following line “Hidden” property of the <Configuration> element to “TRUE”.
3. You may have to do an IISReset in order for the changes to take effect.

Resources

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/hsalvi/archive/2010/07/03/farm-wide-hide-templates-sharepoint-2010.aspx
• http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0ce77946-1e45-4b43-8c74-21963e64d4e1&ID=34&Web=5170eb8a-912d-4024-814a-81e94b9d34ce
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms447717.aspx

The information below is found in Microsoft Technet:

Site names, subsite names, or site group names

• You cannot use the following characters anywhere in a site name, in a subsite name, or in a site or Active Directory group name:
• tilde (~)
• number sign (#)
• percent (%)
• ampersand (&)
• asterisk (*)
• braces ({ })
• backslash (\)
• colon (:)
• angle brackets (< >)
• question mark (?)
• slash (/)
• plus sign (+)
• pipe (|)
• quotation mark (")
• You cannot start a site name, subsite name, or a site group name with an underscore (_) character or with the period character.
• You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a site name, a subsite name, or a site group name.
• You cannot use the period character at the end of a site name, a subsite name, or a site group name.

Folder names

• You cannot use the following characters anywhere in a folder name or a server name:
• tilde
• number sign
• percent
• ampersand
• asterisk
• braces
• backslash
• colon
• angle brackets
• question mark
• slash
• pipe
• quotation mark
• You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a folder name.
• You cannot use the period character at the end of a folder name.
• You cannot start a folder name with the period character.

File names

• You cannot use the following characters anywhere in a file name:
• tilde
• number sign
• percent
• ampersand
• asterisk
• braces
• backslash
• colon
• angle brackets
• question mark
• slash
• pipe
• quotation mark
• You cannot use the period character consecutively in the middle of a file name.
• You cannot use the period character at the end of a file name.
• You cannot start a file name with the period character.
• In addition, file names and folder names may not end with:
• .files
• _files
• -Dateien
• _fichiers
• _bestanden
• _file
• _archivos
• -filer
• _tiedostot
• _pliki
• _soubory
• _elemei
• _ficheiros
• _arquivos
• _dosyalar
• _datoteke
• _fitxers
• _failid
• _fails
• _bylos
• _fajlovi
• _fitxategiak

There is a great article at LogicWorm.com that explains how to fix the slowness encountered when transferring files to/from SharePoint 2010 using Windows Explorer:

SharePoint users and likewise other application users that use WebDav Explorer mode on Windows 7 and Windows Vista PC’s may experience very slow file browsing, opening and modification (e.g. SharePoint Explorer View using WebDAV).

How simple would it be to just uncheck a certain option in IE and fix this brain busting issue, especially for Network Admins and SP Admins?

Solution

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Go to the Menu “Tools” > “Internet Options” then go to the “Connections” tab
3. Click on button “LAN Settings”
4. Uncheck the box “Automatically detect settings” (culprit)
5. Close and restart all running Internet Explorer processes
6. Restart the “Web Client” Service, if needed.
7. Start browsing again…!

Now for a bit of knowledge building

What is the “Automatically Detect Settings” option in IE?

The “Automatically detect settings” option is there to help the user in configuring a web proxy automatically. It actually makes use of the WPAD protocol to discover a web proxy.

1. If the PC is configured to do DHCP, then it will query the server. If the response includes a string with id 252, then it uses this to retrieve a configuration file.

2. If this fails, then the PC will attempt to resolve the name wpad. It will start in its current domain, and work back through. Eg, if the PC is called bob.cs.anu.edu.au, it will attempt to resolve wpad.cs.anu.edu.au, followed by wpad.anu.edu.au, etc. If this resolves the name wpad, then IE will attempt to retrieve wpad.dat via http from the root of the server. You should probably redirect this to the configuration file.

3. If this yields no success, then IE goes direct.

Now here is your delay, when Step 1 and Step 2 are running, time-out – finally deciding to open your WebDav folders directly. Phew!

Skip it… if you do not require the auto-discovery feature. Ask your network admin to push a GPO to turn-it-off or uncheck it by default!

The Scribble SharePoint Blog has a great explanation of the capabilities of each of the site templates shipped with SharePoint 2010:

Team site
This is the template that most users build sites from, and you will recognize it from the pictures of random office workers on the right hand side.

As with most SharePoint site templates it has two key elements:

• A number of predefined lists
• A number of predefined webparts on the page

A team site will give you the following lists to play with – Announcements, Calendar, Links, and Tasks. You also get the a number of libraries – Shared Documents, Site Assets, and Site Pages. Oh and their is a ‘Team Discussion’ board as well.

The main page of the team site is a wiki page, new to SharePoint 2010, which means you can edit directly onto the page. It is split into two columns (roughly 2/3 and 1/3) and contains some text and images and a document library webpart.

Blank site
A blank site is a team site (same two column layout) with all lists and webparts stripped out. Its blank. Hence the name.

Document workspace
This site is designed to make working with documents a little easier and more intuitive for groups of people.

The standard lists and libraries here are the same as a team site, minus the site asset and page libraries.

The page layout is a full width column at the top, with the familiar 2/3 1/3 column split below. You get the following webparts – Announcements, Shared Documents, Tasks, and Members.

The Members webpart shows people with permissions on this site, but it can be configured to show people in a particular SharePoint group.

Meeting workspace
The meeting workspace template stands out as it doesn’t use the popular ‘quicklaunch’ bar that most site templates uses. As a result the page content spans the full width of the screen. SharePoint is often trumpeted as a collaboration platform, and it is templates like this one that go some way to fulfilling this role.

Included are a single document library and the following lists – Agenda, Attendees, and Objectives. It is easy to see that these lists are designed to help run a meeting. The idea is the site can be used to prepare for, or during the running of, a meeting.

All the lists respective webparts are included on the page, which is split into three vertical columns.

There are a number of alternative versions of this site template:

• Decision meeting workspace – Adds Decision and Task lists
• Social meeting workspace – Adds a Picture Library, Directions list, Things to Bring list, and a discussion board. This site template is aimed at face to face meetings.
• Multipage meeting workspace – Same as the main meeting workspace template but this site supports multiple pages, and brings back the quicklaunch bar to help with navigation. 
• Blank meeting workspace – Same as the main meeting workspace, but no lists or webparts

Blog template
This is an improved version of the SharePoint 2007 blog template.

This template really shows off the power of what a SharePoint site template can do. Whilst there are lists for things like post, comments, and links, this site doesn’t really break down into our usual lists and webparts groups. Instead it feels very much like a custom site unlike any other. In this context it works well as a blog. If you are expecting Blogger or WordPress then you might want to think again. However if you are looking to give teams or individuals a voice on your SharePoint Intranet then you should find everything you want.

The following is taken from Configure Remote PowerShell in SharePoint 2010

Setup your Remote Server
There are a few steps you have to take on your server to initialize and set it up running for remoting. once.
First, you need to run the following command on your server — Enable-PSRemoting

Next you need to let powershell know that your server machine or remote machine will act as the server.

Enable-WSmanCredSSP -Role Server

Setup your Client Computer
There are also a few one time setup steps you need to take on your client computer. You only have to do this once. The first thing to do, if you are going to use the logged in user’s credentials to make a remote session in powershell, is to enable client credentials delegation. This can be achieved by changing the group policy.
First, edit group policy on your client computer to all credential delegation. Using gpedit.msc, enable both of the following (Under Local Computer Policy–> Computer Configuration–> Administrative Templates–> System–> Credentials Delegation):

• Allow Delegating Fresh Credentials
• Allow Delegating Fresh Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication

Note: In case you are going to explicitly specify the credentials, you can skip the above step.

Second, run the following command
Enable-PSRemoting

Third, enable WSMan CredSSP with the following command:
Enable-WSManCredSSP -Role Client –DelegateComputer “NameOfServer”

Once you have configured remote powershell, now you are all set to run remote commands.

Create and enter a remote session of Windows PowerShell
If your current user on client machine has permission to the SharePoint farm and Windows PowerShell on the remote box, you can use Enter-PSSession to create and enter the remote session.
For example, connecting to machine SpServer…

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName SPServer
If it works, the command prompt will be changed to [SPServer]: PS C:\Users\Administrator\>.
The session will be closed when you type exit or Exit-PSSession.

To connect to a machine with CredSSP and a different credential, you can use
Enter-PSSession -ComputerName SPServer -Authentication CredSSP –Credential domain\username
This will open up a dialogue for you to type in password. Type in the password and press enter and your remote session will be created.

Store and use credentials for scripting

First, use the following command to covert password from keyboard input to a secure string in a text file.

Read-Host -AsSecureString | ConvertFrom-SecureString | out-file C:\crd-sharepoint.txt

As soon as you type the command, start typing the password.

When you need to create a credential object, read this password (the secure string) from the file and create the credential with the following command:

$pwd = Get-Content C:\crd-sharepoint.txt | ConvertTo-SecureString

then create the credential (replace #### with your domain\username):

$crd = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList "####",$pwd

Then you will be able to use this credential in the command line without any dialogue.

$session = New-PSSession -computername "SPServer" -Authentication CredSSP -Credential $crd

Start Remoting on you Client Computer

Now your client computer is ready to actually create the session and import the SharePoint commands from the Server.

The next command adds the SharePoint PowerShell commands to your session.

Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock{Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell}

Note, that at this point, you can run whatever administrative PowerShell commands you need to run by using the Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock{} syntax.

Importing remote commands into local session

Let’s see how one can import a remote command into a local session. First – let’s ask Import-PSSession cmdlet to look in the remote session $s, take all the remote commands matching "*-SPFarm" wildcard, add a "Remote" prefix to their noun, and then present them to me as if they were local commands:

Import-PSSession -Session $session -CommandName *-SPFarm -Prefix Remote

So, now we can run Get-RemoteSPFarm

Thanks again Configure Remote PowerShell in SharePoint 2010

If using the “Open with Windows Explorer” option in SharePoint is slow use the following procedure to fix this and increase the performance:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Go to the Menu “Tools” > “Internet Options” then go to the “Connections” tab
3. Click on button “LAN Settings”
4. Uncheck the box “Automatically detect settings” (culprit)
5. Close and restart all running Internet Explorer processes
6. Restart the “Web Client” Service, if needed.
7. Try it again!

via Open with Windows Explorer in SharePoint (Fix Slow WebDAV Performance on Windows 7 / Vista)

The Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010 Products and Office 365 is a Silverlight application that enables IT pros and power users to visually assemble commands in the browser and then take those commands to their respective products.

Click to open the Windows PowerShell Command Builder in a new browser window.

For additional information, see the Getting Started Guide.

The SharePoint 2010 Auto Installer (AutoSPInstaller) has released a new version 2.5.

Automated SharePoint 2010 Powershell-based installation script.

AutoSPInstaller works with and now leverages enhancements in SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 (with or without the June 2011 CU)! It takes advantage of some of the cmdlet updates in SP1, while remaining backward-compatible with non-SP1 deployments.

Versions 2.5.x and up include several updates to the input file XML schema from version 2.0 so make sure you compare any of your existing XML files to the new AutoSPInstallerInput.XML. See below for highlights of changes in v 2.5.x.

I went through the process of enabling SSL on our SharePoint 2010 website.  However, whenever I tried to use it I would be presented with a login screen.  I was using the farm admin UserID so I knew it had authority.

I was able to find the following Microsoft document: You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or a later version
I already had the DisableLoopbackCheck registry entry, so I tried Method 1 and it worked great:

Method 1: Specify host names (Preferred method if NTLM authentication is desired)

To specify the host names that are mapped to the loopback address and can connect to Web sites on your computer, follow these steps:

1. Set the DisableStrictNameCheckingregistry entry to 1. For more information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
   281308  Connecting to SMB share on a Windows 2000-based computer or a Windows Server 2003-based computer may not work with an alias name
2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0
4. Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
5. Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
8. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service.