Use the SharePoint Central Administration utility to handle many of the back-end administrative tasks in both SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services.
Move the SQL database and transaction logs to separate physical drive-sets.
Verify that proper SMTP server settings have been configured for the server farm.
Ensure that metadata stored in document libraries is replicated on other document libraries if documents are transferred between them.
Verify that the SQL recovery model is set to Full to allow for full restores of SQL data.
Add or remove entries from SharePoint Search noise files so as to fine-tune the search results for an organization by removing words such as the organization name, which may just pollute the results.