My next two best practices that are a part of my 10 part series, are going to be combined in one post because they are closely related. What's more is that I've already blogged about them, so it doesn't make sense to labor over something twice.

These two best practices are detailed out in my post titled:

How to Effectively Manage your "12 Hive" SharePoint Customizations and Deployments (Part 1 of 2): Keeping your Developers Honest and your Investment Secure with Source Safe

In that post, I discuss the prevalent bad practice of editing SharePoint's files directly within the 12 Hive. Bad! Bad! Bad! Don't do it! If you do, you'll run into all kinds of issues like your customizations don't get backed up regularly, your developer's are overwriting each other's changes, and inconsistency and incomplete deployments across your web front ends. These issues are especially significant if you have a large team.

If you read through that post, you're certain identify two best practices therein. One, never make changes directly to the 12 Hive on the file system, and two, make sure all 12 Hive customizations are in source control in a way that requires developers to use it.

Thanks! And stay tuned, we're only half way through my top 10 list!