The wide availability of Windows® SharePoint® Services (WSS) 3.0 and the explosive popularity of Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 in enterprise environments, combined with the widespread use of online collaboration tools, have resulted in a proliferation of SharePoint technologies that sometimes escape the notice of IT.

SharePoint servers that are not managed by IT often host business-critical Web sites, applications, documents, and processes. It is vital to the health of the organization that these servers are brought under corporate IT management and oversight.

The Solution Accelerator team has been hard at work, and just announced the beta release of the SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool.

The SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool allows IT professionals to inventory all of the computers in the network and identify servers that have SharePoint installed on them. The information gathered by the tool is used to generate reports that give IT the information it needs to bring the servers under its control. This allows the resources of the ever-changing SharePoint environment to be optimized and adjusted as needed.

The tool allows you to choose the method for specifying which computers to scan: the IP range method to scan selected computers or the Active Directory method to scan all computers. Once you identify the scanning method that best serves your needs, the tool prompts you to supply the credentials necessary for the scan to be successful.

The main purpose of the SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool is to give the IT administrator answers to a number of important questions through the generation of reports. These reports include information on:

• The servers running some version of SharePoint.
• The installed SharePoint features.
• The total number of SharePoint sites on each server.
• The total number of documents on each server.
• The total number of documents grouped by extension on each server.
• The time since the SharePoint assets in each server were last modified.
• The customized SharePoint sites and items on each server.
• The number of SharePoint lists on each server, grouped by the number of items on each list.

With this information, the IT administrator can determine which unmanaged servers have SharePoint assets on them and prioritize the order in which to bring them under IT management based on such factors as their frequency of use, the number of SharePoint sites on them, and the number of documents they contain. For existing managed SharePoint environments, running the tool periodically allows IT to detect changes in server usage that may warrant the addition of hardware or adjustments to configuration that will keep the SharePoint infrastructure working optimally.

Get the SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool, or read more about the functionality here.