To the SharePoint : Stsadm

SharePoint Administration Toolkit version 4.0

Kelley Vice — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:49:00 GMT

We're sure you've installed SharePoint Administration Toolkit version 4.0 by now, but just in case you haven't ...

With this release, we added functionality to address various difficult administrative tasks. These include the following:

SharePoint Diagnostics Tool (SPDiag) improvements

SPDiag version 2 contains several important updates and new features that increase its effectiveness as a troubleshooting tool, such as a new Diagnostics tab which allows SharePoint administrators to execute predefined rules designed to discover and report against some of the most common SharePoint issues, and command-line functionality for collecting farm data with no tool installation.

Permissions Reporting tool

The Permissions Reporting tool makes it easy to detect where permission inheritance has been broken in a site collection. You can compare an object, such as a list or a site, against its parent to see where inheritance was broken, and run reports to collect more information about such objects. You can also check effective permissions for a user or a group in a particular site, Web, or list in a site collection.

The associated Stsadm unlockfgpreport operation assists an administrator in tracking and controlling permissions for report generation on lists with a certain number of items within an entire farm. An administrator can unlock or lock permissions for a site collection, list, or a Web application. If a Web application is specified, then all libraries or lists are unlocked.

The updatequota Stsadm operation

This operation allows an administrator to change a quota template in bulk. Before this operation was available, the only way to change a quota template across multiple site collections was to manually update the quota template for every site collection or write custom code.

Security Configuration Wizard manifests

SCW manifests for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are included the SharePoint Administration Toolkit version 4. These manifests add the SCW roles for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to Windows Server 2003, providing a simple method of reducing the attack surface for farm servers.

For more detailed information about the SharePoint Administration Toolkit v4, see the following TechNet articles:

SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Office SharePoint Server) (http://technet.microsoft.com/library/cc508851.aspx)
SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Windows SharePoint Services) (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508986.aspx)

The download links for the SharePoint Administration Toolkit version 4:

x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=665e98ea-5318-486d-aba2-2bfe46254357 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=142035)
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd2d09a7-1159-4d40-be1c-8efab1345381 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141504)

By the way, this is our last planned offering of new features and functionality for this toolkit, which provides additional administration tools and solutions for both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0.

Stsadm Silverlight interactive application

Kirk — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:08:00 GMT

Hello, I am a technical writer for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services. I would like to announce that an Stsadm Silverlight interactive application is now available on the following TechNet Web sites:

Ø Stsadm Technical Reference for SharePoint Server 2007:

o http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/cc948709.aspx

Ø Stsadm Technical Reference for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0:

o http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/dd418924.aspx

You can use the following new features that are included with this application:

1. Click an Stsadm operation to retrieve its description, as well as a link to the full article on TechNet.

2. Benefit from full-text search, which filters out operations that do not match your search criteria.

3. Select either Operations or Properties to filter your display.

4. Display or hide a category by clicking the column heading.

Regards,

Kirk Stark, MCSE, MCSA, MCDBA, MCTS

Big farm deployment? No problem

oscarblog — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:15:00 GMT

If you’re faced with doing a large SharePoint deployment, you’re probably feeling dizzy and lightheaded at the prospect of prepping, installing, and configuring SharePoint on 40 … 50 … or even more individual servers. It’s a big, complex, and repetitive job that requires a high degree of precision. Fortunately, with the right set of instructions, this is just the sort of job computers can do for themselves.

If you do a lot of SharePoint installations, you probably have discovered already that installation and configuration using the command line is much faster and more efficient than using the UI. And if you’ve performed a command-line installation, you must also know that it’s important to have the installation files, language packs, and option settings all positioned, prepped, and ready ahead of time. From there, creating a scripted SharePoint installation on any number of machines is a relatively straightforward proposition.

The advantages of a scripted vs. manual installation in a large farm deployment should be obvious. The results are consistent and less prone to error. A scripted installation is also less labor intensive and therefore fewer people are needed to perform the job quickly. Best of all, once your scripts have been written and tested, they require only minor modification to be used in a wide variety of installation scenarios.

To help you get your own scripted SharePoint installation efforts off the ground, we’ve published a new white paper that pulls the whole process together and provides lots of examples, sample code, and reference material: Using scripts to automate SharePoint Server 2007 installation. There are sections on planning and preparing for a scripted deployment, scripting the installation of your prerequisites, scripting the creation and joining of the farm, and scripting the set up of various sites and services. To cap it off, there’s also a section on ways to optimize your scripts to make your installations even more autonomous and able to handle a wider range of configurations.

How well does scripting work in the real world? It helps to be compulsively thorough in your planning and machine prep. You also can expect to spend a lot of time testing and revising your scripts before unleashing them on your next deployment. Scripting really shines when you use it to set up large farms, but as you perfect your scripts, you’ll use them even on medium and small deployments. Think of scripting as having a very eager and conscientious intern at your disposal who’ll work quickly and without complaint as long as your instructions are very, very detailed and explicit.

Learn how to script your SharePoint installations here.

As always, we appreciate your feedback.

-- Chris Smith
IT Pro Writer

The Infrastructure Update

Douglas Goodwin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:22:00 GMT

The Infrastructure Update is a set of product improvements and prescriptive guidance for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Our favorite features (and the ones we’ve written the most about) include federated search,...(read more)