To the SharePoint : Toolkit

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.

SharePoint Diagnostics (SPDiag) Tool for SharePoint Products and Technologies

Kelley Vice — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:08:00 GMT

The real power of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is that they can be endlessly customized to meet a wide variety of business needs. The Protean nature of SharePoint is at once its most powerful feature and its most formidable; the complexity of your SharePoint environment can increase by orders of magnitude when you begin to shape it to suit your needs. This complexity can make troubleshooting SharePoint issues a daunting task, as many different data points from different sources must be correlated and analyzed.

The SharePoint Diagnostics (SPDiag) tool greatly simplifies the process of gathering and analyzing troubleshooting data, and can significantly reduce the time needed to diagnose issues. SPDiag provides administrators with a unified interface for troubleshooting SharePoint performance issues, and saves collected data and reports to a SQL Server database.

With SPDiag, you can:

Collect IIS and ULS log files, performance counter data, event logs, and WMI instrumentation data from a SharePoint farm.
Filter data to show granular information related to specific servers, Web applications, HTTP requests, event IDs, URI queries, and almost any other data points captured through supported channels.
Create custom reports that can help reveal performance trends over time.
Create snapshots of your SharePoint farm that include detailed information about your farm’s hardware, installed software and logical topology.
Export collected data and reports that can be sent to Microsoft support personnel.

SPDiag is included in the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v3.0, available for download at the following locations:

Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v3.0 x86: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141504
Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v3.0 x64: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142035

Documentation for SPDiag is available from those download pages as well.

User Profile Replication Engine examples

oscarblog — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Hi. I'm Kirk Stark, a writer on the SharePoint IT Pro UA team.

A new tool that was released with version 2.0 of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit for Office SharePoint 2007 is the User Profile Replication Engine (RE), which permits a Shared Services Provider administrator the ability to replicate user profile data between Shared Services Providers (SSP).

While the basic functionality has been documented on TechNet, we wanted to include an example of how a company might implement the RE specifically. The following is a case study on how a fictional company, Contoso, might implement the User Profile Replication Engine in its corporate environment.

Let’s say Contoso has offices in New York, Hong Kong, and London. In geographically dispersed deployment scenarios, Shared Services Provider (SSP) services isolations become a deterrent to personalization and using such associated services as User Profiles and Audiences to their full potential. The User Profile Replication Engine solves these problems by maintaining consistent user profile data throughout the complete SharePoint ecosystem, including geo deployments. The Replication Engine does multi-master data replication from one source to multiple destinations in the form of a full or incremental synchronization using MOSS Web services for the User Profile and User Profile Change services.

The Web services are used to pull the data (all profile data or just the changes) from a source SSP and immediately push/write the data to other SSPs on behalf of the user or User Profile service. This data includes profile property data, user colleague data, site membership data, user links data, and the associated privacy policy attached to the data. The Replication Engine can synchronize data as a scheduled service or through manual initiation. Data can be pulled and pushed for all users or just a subset of users, as well as all data or a subset of data. The data is then used to keep the User Profile, Audiences, and People Search services accurate and up-to-date.

Using this solution an organization can host the user’s My Site environment in the geographical region of the user (such as New York), allowing the user to profile himself or herself locally and have that data replicated to all other regions (London and Hong Kong). This allows services in those regions to use a local copy of that data for their services. Particular service consumption is People Search, which needs a local copy for indexing. With this solution, an organization can host People Search in the main region (New York) while serving up data from all regions, creating a seamless user experience including accurate social distance grouping. This same seamless user experience also transfers to other services, such as My Sites and Audiences.

This solution can also be used to assist with centralized user profile data management, managing user data across a multi-division organization, or as a deployment or test tool used to populate data from a production environment to a test/development or backup environment for data recovery.

Profile Feed Management and Geo Replication: Overview

Purpose:

· Extend the reach of enterprise people data.

· Keep Office SharePoint 2007 profile data across three worldwide regions consistent for People Search and Audiences targeting.

· One location (New York) has a feedstore that is not available in the other two regions.

Profile Feed Management

The following diagram explains how a user would import and configure Business Data Catalog (BDC) profiles.

Details:

· A system hosting external user related data is at the backend.

· Fed into Office SharePoint Server profile database using the BDC with Application Definition files.

· Feed data complements User-entered data and Active Directory data.

Best practices for feed management:

· Optimize the data retrieval, such as SQL queries, in your Application Definition file.

Geo Replication

· The job of the Replication Engine is to replicate from one source to one or more destinations. Geo replication keeps Office SharePoint Server People Search and Audiences consistent across regions.

· The RE keeps profile database in synch so all users have a consistent people search experience and consistent data are available to regional admins for content targeting.

· Enable global deployment under My Site settings in the SSP.

· New York RE is configured to replicate Feed and User supplied data for all users.

· Hong Kong RE is configured to replicate User supplied data from Hong Kong users.

· London RE is configured to replicate User supplied data from London users.

In the following diagram, the Contoso solution has the Trusted My Sites Host Locations lists in each SSP configured and has the current SSP in the first position because the lists are interrogated from the top down, with each being asked, “Does this user belong to you?”

Best practices for geo replication:

· Robust error logging to be trapped by Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

· Implement Instrumentation.

Overall benefits:

· Centralized People Search experience.

· Reduced WAN traffic over the ocean for BDC imports.

· Seamless My Site experience for users.

Thanks to PM Greg Mattox for his help with this post, and as always, we welcome your comments and suggestions, especially if such examples as this are helpful.