I was visiting a customer last week that had recently deployed SharePoint within their enterprise. The good news was that it had caught on like wild fire within in a relatively short period of time. Users had created almost five thousand sites and the number was increasing. The main focus of our conversation was around how they could manage these. They certainly didn’t want to delete those sites that in use, but were afraid of large amounts of static data.

In order to implement this there are two important things to remember

Enabling Site Collection

Making sure that the virtual server is set up to allow the checking for sites activity.

1. From the Virtual Server List select the server to manager
2. Select the Configure site collection use confirmation and deletion

3. Complete the Configure Site Collection Tab

Notification Customization
After we spent some time working in their test area, we came up with a set of parameters that made sense for their enterprise. They then wanted to customize the email that users would receive for notification. This is done by modifying the Deadweb.xml file.

Example of the Standard Deadweb.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<!-- _lcid="1033" _version="11.0.5510" _dal="1" -->

<!-- _LocalBinding -->

<Email>

<Confirmation>

<ConfirmationSubject>

Confirm SharePoint Web site in use

</ConfirmationSubject>

<ConfirmationBody>

<![CDATA[Please follow the link below

to your SharePoint Web site to confirm that it is still in use.

<br><a href="|0">|0</a><br><br>

If the site is not being used, please go to <a href="|1">|1</a>,

and select "Delete This Site" to remove the Web site.

<br><br>

You will receive reminders of this until you confirm the site is in use, or delete it.]]>

</ConfirmationBody>

</Confirmation>

<AutoDeleteWarning>

<AutoDeleteSubject>

ACTION REQUIRED: Your SharePoint site collection is about to expire

</AutoDeleteSubject>

<AutoDeleteBody>

<![CDATA[To extend the expiration date for this site

collection, click the link below:<br><a href="|0">|0</a><br><br>

Otherwise this site collection, including all of its subsites, might be deleted.<br><br>

If this site collection is no longer needed, you can delete it by going to <a href="|1">|1</a>, and selecting

"Delete this site".<br><br>

Please note - When a SharePoint Web site collection is deleted, all Web sites, content and information which

were part of the site collection are completely erased. The site can only be restored if a backup exists.]]>

</AutoDeleteBody>

</AutoDeleteWarning>

</Email>

This file is located in the localProgram FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions60TEMPLATE directory. This is a Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) based file. This is an XML based language used in Windows SharePoint Services to define sites and lists. CAML is used extensively throughout WSS in both code as parameters and the SOAP messaging. Essentially CAML is used for two types of rendering. The first is to define the type of data rendering and to construct HTML.