Useful and Free SharePoint Tools (Part 3)

It has been a while since my previous "Useful and free SharePoint Tools" post. Over the past period I have ran into some more brilliant tools and didn't want to keep them from you, so here we go again! :-)

Just for reference:
Part 1: Useful and Free SharePoint Tools (Part 1)
Part 2: Useful and Free SharePoint Tools (Part 2)

SharePoint ULS Log Viewer
Do you know that feeling: You have to troubleshoot an issue and dive into the ULS log. Soon you find out how difficult it is to find what you are looking for in these logs. When using Notepad, you can try to search on time stamp or error message, but filtering is out of the question. Fortunately a guy at Microsoft created a great tool that offers searching and filtering capabilities. Just open a ULS log file and go crazy. Life suddenly becomes a lot easier :-)
Link: http://ulsviewer.codeplex.com/

Zevenseas SharePoint Search Coder
This tool is useful for developers and IT Pro's. Using this tool you can generate search queries, but also send them to SharePoint, using the object model or web services. I have used this tool often to troubleshoot some search issues I encountered. By entering the search query you can see exactly which data is returned and therefore determine if the search engine is the issue, or some code (web part for example) that processes the returned data.
Link: http://mosssearchcoder.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool
Ever seen the error "failed to determine definition for feature with id <GUID>" in your ULS log? This means that a feature is still registered as active somewhere in your environment, but is not installed anymore. Unfortunately there is no way using the GUI to fix this issue. The SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up tool has the answer for this issue. When you start this tool, it has a button "Find Faulty Feature" in the lower right part of the window. This functionality searches for feature registrations of features that do not exist anymore and if found, it can delete these references. The tool can do other stuff with features, which I didn't need to far but I thought the clean up functionality is brilliant!
Link: http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/

SPTraceView
SPTraceView is a tool that connects to the tracing service of SharePoint and shows you all logged messages in real time. You can set filtering so only certain messages are displayed. The tool has an icon in the system tray and pops up a balloon if a message comes in. By clicking the balloon, a window with all captured messages is displayed. Really useful when troubleshooting!
The tool only has one "issue": It cannot display any messages higher than configured in the SharePoint Central Admin. For example if you set messages for the General category to High, you won't see Medium or Verbose messages in SPTraceView (or the ULS log for that matter). This is inherent to the way the tracing log is built.
Link: http://sptraceview.codeplex.com/

SPSFarmReport
Ever wanted to know how your farm is configured in high level? This tool can create a very high level report of your farm configuration. I have been looking for such a tool for quite a long time now. Even though this tool creates a nice report, I would like to see a little more detail in a next version. But until then.....another useful and free tool :-)
Link: http://spsfarmreport.codeplex.com/

PowerShell
The last one of this post isn't a tool by itself, but I have to say PowerShell rules!! I am not a developer, so creating applications/webparts/etc is not for me, but which IT Pro isn't a bit lazy by nature :-) Why do something manual if you can script it? Using other scripting languages, you couldn't use .NET objects so were very limited when it comes to SharePoint. But with PowerShell you can use every .NET object you like, so also SharePoint .NET objects!! And with the addition of 650+ PowerShell commandlets in SharePoint 2010, PowerShell becomes more and more important for the IT Pro. So if you haven't done much with it yet, LEARN POWERSHELL!! You will love it and it will make your life a lot easier!
Link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/dd742419.aspx

[MOSS/WSSv3] Post Installation automation

Just ran into the following ver usefull tool on Codeplex: The Post Installation Tool or PIT. This tool automates various configuration changes after you have installed SharePoint. Via a config file you can customize some configuration tasks.

[MOSS/WSSv3] Feature cleanup

Have you ever seen the following error in one of your logs:

Failed to determine definition for Feature with ID '<guid>'. Skipping this feature for element querying consideration.

This message is caused by a feature that has been removed from the environment, without being properly deactivated before removal. SharePoint still has a reference to the feature, so it tires to activate the feature. But because it doesn't exist anymore, it will skip the feature.

Last week I ran into a tool which can scan your environment for such a "faulty feature". This tool is called the "SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool" and can be found on Codeplex.

When you have started the tool, it contains a button called "Find Faulty Feature in Farm", which starts the scan for faulty features.

Have fun with this great tool!

Usefull and Free SharePoint Tools (Part 2)

A while ago I posted a list of tools I ran into and found very usefull. Here is part 2: More usefull tools :-)

SharePoint Inspector
Using the SharePoint Inspector you can browse through the SharePoint object model, can see objects composing its structure, get their properties by reflection. This cool can be very useful when you want to check if your code does what it should do. You can use also some advanced features like activate/deactivate SharePoint features, add/remove event receivers, manage your recycle bin.

Link: SharePoint Inspector

SharePoint Manager
The SharePoint Manager 2007 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. It also enables you to change the properties (at your own risk). It is a very powerfull tool for developers that like to know what the SharePoint holds of secrets.

Link: SharePoint Manager

MS IT Site Delete Capture
Every had the unpleasant question of users if you could restore a site or site collection they accidentally deleted? The only way to do this by default is to perform a restore to a separate environment and use stsadm to extract the site and restore into your environment again. Even though SharePoint 2007 does have a recycle bin, this does not capture site or site collection deletions.

After you installed the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture Feature 1.0 SharePoint administrators can intercept both site/web delete requests and archive the site/web to a resource local to the web front-end computer or UNC path before the site/web is removed from the configuration and content databases.

The Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture Feature 1.0 also exposes functionality allowing SharePoint administrators to send e-mail messages to the end-user indicating the site has been archived and deleted, any failure in the event receiver will generate an e-mail message to the end-user indicating that the site/web has not been deleted. The message format, text, and language are stored in a flexible, culture-independent extensible markup language configuration file.

Link: MS IT Site Delete Capture

SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool
The SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool is a capacity planning and performance testing tool that populates data for testing SharePoint deployments. The SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool is available as a command-line executable program that extracts information about how to populate the server from an XML configuration file.

Use this tool to populate test data for SharePoint capacity planning. Also included are some sample test scripts that can be used for performance and load testing SharePoint and Excel Services with the test data. These tools are being provided as is and there is no ongoing support for these tools.

Link: SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool

SharePoint Logging Spy
A lot of SharePoint 2007 environments consist of multiple servers. Each server is producing logs and in case of issues you always have to dig through multiple server logs. The SharePoint Logging Spy allows you real time diagnostics of multiple servers in a SharePoint farm using a single console view.

SharePoint Logging Spy is a real time diagnostic application for MOSS 2007 which allows a SharePoint administrator to view (and save to disk) the ULS Log & Event log entries from multiple machines in a SharePoint farm through a single console. NOTE - There is a known issue with Event Log Entries not being displayed from remote machines. SharePoint Logging Spy also allows the administrator to view the historic ULS logs on the farm using the same interface.
SharePoint Logging Spy also has a treeview which allows a developer or administrator to view the state of the current SharePoint enviroment. The Plug-in architechture allows for extensibility of the core application.

The application also provides drill downs for information regarding the thread or process which generated the log entries which are reported in the main screen. The thread and process information is collected on demand (when you click the menu) and is NOT historical therefore it is feasable that the process/thread may no longer exist when you ask for the information and you will get an empty result set.
To easy configuration there is a discovery wizard which will discover on-line servers in the farm and allow selective monitoring to begin.

Link: SharePoint Logging Spy

SharePoint SUSHI
SUSHI is a powerful, user-friendly SharePoint application enabling you to accomplish common SharePoint administrative and development tasks. You can think of SUSHI as a Swiss army knife for SharePoint.

SUSHI = SharePoint Utility with a Smart, Helpful Interface

SUSHI Tools
Administration
Security Reports: View all sites and lists a user has access to (VERY USEFULL!!!)
Profile Images Import: Upload Profile Images and Apply them to User Profiles.
Backup: Backup a site. Restore: Restore site from backup.
Email Test: Send a test email to make sure outbound email is set up correctly.

Lists
Copy View: Copy a view from one SharePoint list to another. Meta Data: Get detailed information about metadata in a list. Move metadata from one column to another for all items in a list. And more.
Bulk List: Creation Create a large number of subsites based on a site template.
Bulk Site Columns: Create Site Columns. Import Documents: Upload entire file structures from a file share into a document library.

Sites
Bulk Site Creation: Create a large number of subsites based on a site template.
Themes: Apply a Theme to many sites at once.

Link: SharePoint SUSHI

Usefull and Free SharePoint Tools (Part 1)

Over the past few months I have been working with several tools for SharePoint. Some of these tools I find very usefull:

DAVCopy
When you need to copy a lot of data to SharePoint (for example from a file share), doing this manually is:

1. A lot of work
2. Not easy to do, especially when you need to upload a directory structure. You have to use the explorer view
3. Not really IT like (script what you can script, better lazy than tired :-)

Browsing through the Internet I ran into a tool called DAVCopy. This tool can upload files and directories to SharePoint, with the same functionality as XCopy. For example /E for subdirectories including empty ones.

The tool has some shortcomings though:

1. As most of you probably already know, SharePoint doesn't accept certain characters in filenames (http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/27/file-name-length-size-and-invalid-character-restrictions-and-recommendations.aspx). Just like copying with the Explorer view, DAVCopy just tries to upload the files without checking any illegal characters. A good thing is that DAVCopy logs the error and skips the illegal file.
   
   To get around this issue I created my own filename checker script, which corrects all illegal characters before running DAVCopy.
2. The logging of the tool is very limited. It can only write logging to the console. A nice logging to a text file and especially a good summary will be a great improvement!

Link: DAVCopy

SharePoint 2007 Shared Services Provider User Profile Property Replicator
On a lot of projects we are using a development/test/acceptance/production strategy. Each environment must have its own settings. When migrating a solution to a new environment, all required settings need to be migrated as well. One of these settings are the custom User Profile Properties. A solution I recently deployed required these properties to be present before it started to work.

Creating these properties manually is not only time consuming, but also susceptable to errors. The User Profile Property Replicator tool is able to export and import these properties using XML files. I created an export of all properties in my development environment, changed the XML file to just include my custom properties and used this file to create the properties on all other environments. Quick, easy and without errors!

The only thing that can be improved is changing properties. When importing a property that already exists, the tool skips this property. I would like to see that the tool would update the property instead of skipping it. This is especially usefull when using big choice lists!

Link: MOSS Profile Replicate

Sharepoint Shared Services Search Provider Property Creation
Just like the tool above, this tool is able to export and import properties to/from XML files. Only this tool can export and import crawled properties, managed properties, content sources and search scopes.

A solution I had to deploy was relying on crawled and managed properties. To be able to map crawled properties to managed properties, the indexer first needed to discover these crawled properties in documents or content types. Using this tool I was able to export all managed and crawled properties from my development environment, change the exported XML files and import these properties into other environment. Again quick, easy and without errors!

Link: MOSS Provider Property Creation

SharePoint 2007 Shared Services Provider User Profile Importer
SharePoint is able to import settings from a external source (Active Directory, BDC source, etc) and map these values to certain profile fields. The external source is then leading for that property. But for some fields, you might not have an external source available but do want the field populated. Using the Profile Importer you can. Just create a XML input file and a XML mapping file (map the used XML tags in the input file to User Profile Property field) and off you go.

After creating my own User Profile Property, I would like to have certain values populated for certain users. Unfortunately these values were not in the Active Directory, so I could not sync them from AD. Using the Profile Importer tool I am able to populate the values I want into the fields I want for the users I want. All and all a great tool!

Link: MOSS Profile Import

SharePoint Solution Installer
As of SharePoint 2007 all custom components can be deployed using the Solution Deployment framework. Developer just have to place their solutions into a wsp package, which can then be imported into SharePoint 2007 and deployed to all servers.

Importing and removing wsp files into SharePoint 2007 must be done using the stsadm command, after which the solutions can be deployed from the Central Admin. The steps become difficult when you try to deploy a new version of a wsp file:

1. Retract the old version from the Central Admin
2. Use stsadm to remove the old version from solution deployment
3. Use stsadm to add the new version to solution deployment
4. Deploy the new version from the Central Admin

In other words switching between tools a lot. There must be an easier way!

And with the SharePoint Solution Installer there is! The tool first checks if SharePoint is installed, then if you have sufficient permissions to perform a deployment, if the Administration and Timer services are running and if the solution is already installed. If this is not the case, you can choose the web application to which the solution must be deployed. If it is installed, you can select to remove or repair (!!!!) the solution. In case of a repair, the tool automatically performs the four steps above automatically.

Installing wsp files made easy!!

Link: Sharepoint Solution Installer