We have shipped the SPDocKit 5.0.1. This is a major release with a number of new features and improvements. With the new shorter name comes a new era for the SPDocKit. Permission management and other great features make this release one of the most important ones in Acceleratio history.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 5.0.1
Build number: 15955
Release date: Dec 3, 2014

Features

• Live Permissions Explorer
• Permission Management:
  • Break and restore permission inheritance.
  • Grant SharePoint principal permissions.
  • Create SharePoint groups.
  • Edit SharePoint principal permissions.
  • Clone SharePoint users and AD groups permissions.
  • Transfer SharePoint users and AD groups permissions.
  • Remove SharePoint principal permissions.
  • Move and copy users to SharePoint group.
  • Delete users from your SharePoint farm.
  • Delete SharePoint group.
  • Remove users from SharePoint group.
  • Manage permission levels.
  • Manage Site Collection Administrators.
• Permissions Wizards:
  • Break/Restore permission inheritance.
  • Manage Groups – create, delete or rename SharePoint groups.
  • Group Membership – add or remove users from SharePoint groups or even from the entire site collection.
  • Clone Permission – copy source principal’s permissions to a target principal.
  • Transfer Permissions – transfer source principal’s permissions to a target principal (source principal will lose currently assigned permissions).
  • Manage Permissions- assign desired permissions to a specific principal on a selected SharePoint site or list.
  • Clean Site Collection – delete unnecessary users and groups from your SharePoint farm.
  • Permission Levels – add, remove , edit or delete permission levels.
  • Site Collection Administrators – add or remove site collection administrators across your farm.
• Allow AD Access – turning this option off will result in SPDocKit not gathering AD groups information and generating your reports faster.
• Context menu actions – right click on Permissions Explorer report grid and explore permission management options.
• Rules and Queries – automatic or manual procedures that allow you to manage content settings or create custom reports about your SharePoint objects.
• Check supported rule types  
• Check supported query properties 
• Rules and queries history change log – track all the changes made by rules and queries.
• Query and rules sample reports.
• Send query results to email.
• Content Usage Reports Read more
• Cleanup Reports Read more
• Web.config files compare.
• Site Collections compare.
• Advance farm compare host name mappings added.
• SPDocPerm custom security log for tracing all the permission changes made by SPDocKit.
• New report subscription delivery methods – save reports to File share or SharePoint document library.
• Send SharePoint farm and best practices report documentation, like any other SPDocKit report, using scheduled reports delivery methods.

Improvements

• New shorter application name.
• Searchable Best Practices reports tree.
• Job Definitions report has new ‘Enable’ property – check if the job is enabled or not.
• Scheduled reports by the default  have a date as a suffix to their name.
• Permission reports can now be sent without previously created farm snapshot.
• Unmodified content report can be filtered by the content type.
• Optimized farm compare.
• Improved export of the Best Practices reports with 10 and more columns.

UX Improvements

• New application icon set and skin colors.
• Redesigned backstage Actions screen.
• Check mark at the end of each successfully finished step in configuration wizard.
• Legend for icons in Rules and Queries tree.
• Export design improvements and optimization.
• Vertical resize added to the left navigation bar.

Licensing Changes

• Consultant License restrictions
  • Consultant License Call Home – license will have to be re-activated every 30 days.
  • License file generated for the offline activation is valid for only 24 hours i.e. if you try to activate SPDocKit with a license file generated 25 hours ago, activation process will fail.
  • SPDocKit Service is no longer available within the Consultant License. The following features will be unavailable due to these restrictions: automatic farm snapshots, automatic scheduled reports sending, automatic data retention and automatic execution of queries and rules.
    Compare features by the license type
  • When your current Consultant subscription expires SPDocKit will warn you that re-activation is needed in case you renewed it.
• Software Assurance changes – Software Assurance now grants a separate license key. In order to use the additional activation granted due to the purchase of software assurance, please use the software assurance key that will be visible in your profile on our Customers Portal.

SPDocKit Edition Changes

• SPDocKit Starter has been upgraded to SPDocKit Pro edition. SPDocKit Pro has now all the premium features previously contained in SPDocKit premium. Compare farm license feature changes by SPDocKit version
• SPDocKit Premium has been upgraded to SPDocKit Ultimate edition and has all the premium features he had in SPDocKit version 4 along with new permission management features added in SPDocKit version 5. Compare consultant license feature changes by SPDocKit version

Retired Features

• Sync to Cloud, Dropbox or OneDrive, feature is no longer available from version 5. We are introducing Save scheduled reports to File share or SharePoint library feature as a more requested option by our customers.

Click here to download new release.

The last 365 days have been a great journey for the Acceleratio team. Our extended family got even bigger, we moved to a new office and we celebrated our fifth birthday! Between of all these celebrations and mouthfuls of cake, we still found time to make SPDocKit even more awesome than before.

Even now, there is no time to rest – while the current version is being released, our developers are already planning the next milestones in SPDocKit history. A little bird told me something yesterday about content type management, workflows and SQL Server settings documentation.

The official release notes have a detailed summary of the new features and improvements, but here are a few highlights what’s new in SPDocKit 5.

New Name and Appearance

We decided to abbreviate the Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint to our well-known nickname SPDocKit. With a shorter name came a new backstage design and a brand new icon set.

Live Permissions Explorer

You no longer have to configure SPDocKit database and load SharePoint permissions to explore them, just install SPDocKit and enjoy the ride. The Live Permission Explorer option is available on all supported SharePoint versions: SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, and SharePoint 2013.

Permission Management

Manage permissions using SPDocKit 5’s user-friendly interface. Keep your SharePoint permissions under control: grant, edit, remove, copy, transfer and much more in just couple of clicks. Use either action buttons or permission wizards depending on the desired SharePoint permission management scope.

Queries and Rules

Create automatic or manual procedures that will allow you to manage content settings or create custom reports about your SharePoint objects. The Wizard History provides an easy overview of previously executed actions.

Cleanup Reports

Make sure that under your watch your SharePoint farm is free of unnecessary users and groups. This group of reports will tell you which users and groups no longer have any permissions granted but are still a part of your SharePoint farm.

Content Usage Reports

Predict your future database growth, detect unmodified content and deserted projects, and easily check your whole SharePoint occupancy using storage metrics.

SPDocKit Edition Changes

SPDocKit editions have new names and feature collections. Please check the official release notes for further details regarding these changes.

Click here to download new release.

As December passes, the countdown to 2015 begins. We are fortunate that we can look back at this past year and see the many great events and accomplishments. We have launched the biggest release so far – SPDocKit 5! As our tool evolves, our customer base keeps on growing too, which makes us proud. From small to global companies, from business services to the health sector, they come from all over the world.

The State of SharePoint – Statistics on SPDocKit’s customers SharePoint environments

We send a huge “thank you” to all SPDocKit customers who responded to our surveys during the year and decided to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program. It truly helps us to get an overview of the most used features and your SharePoint environments. We are already using that info to plan future improvements and cool new features. Check out the interesting facts and stats on the infographic below.

It’s been a while since we launched new and upgraded SPDocKit 5 – the documentation and management tool for SharePoint! We received some very positive feedback regarding new features which makes us very happy.

We decided to make this introduction video (we recommend to watch full-screen HD version) to show you what it can do for you through five common permissions management scenarios. Take a look and read transcription in which we added some useful links for you to learn even more.

Table of contents:
0:22 Day 1: Site Collection Administrators
2:21 Day 2: Clone Permissions
3:49 Day 3: Grant Permissions
5:27 Day 4: Group Management
6:38 Day 5: Break and Restore Permissions

Video transcription

Hello! Today we are going to explain how you can use mighty wizards from SPDocKit 5 to easily manage permissions for users in a SharePoint farm.
In today’s video we’re going to follow Garth. Garth is a SharePoint admin at Contoso Inc. We are going to show you how Garth can utilize SPDocKit for his daily tasks through five common scenarios. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Day 1: Site Collection Administrators

At Contoso, Garth is in charge of the entire farm, with 27 different site collections, and today he was tasked with adding Mary as site collection admin for 25 different site collections. Yeah, we know, that’s a lot of clicking, right?

Here is how you can achieve that goal with minimal effort using our tool:

• Start SPDocKit, navigate to the Permissions Explorer, and click on the Wizards ribbon.
• Choose the Site Collection Administrators icon and the wizard will start.
• First, choose the action you wish to perform — we will choose “Set secondary administrator” for this example. Click Next.
• Now, we need to specify the target — the entire web application in which changes will be made, or just specific site collections within a desired web application. We need to assign Mary to all site collections except “edicovery” and “ContosoPharm,” so we deselected these two.
• Set who will be your secondary administrator, choosing from the list. Just as in SharePoint, you may specify one user or none, in which case, the secondary administrators of the selected site collections will be removed. Start typing the name (we wanted to find Mary), and choose the person you want. Click Next.
• The wizard will show you a preview of the changes. For example, here we can see that Mary will replace Brian in some site collections. If everything is ok and you are satisfied with your new settings, click Next and wait for your changes to be applied.
• That’s it!

Day 2: Clone Permissions

A new employee, Katie, has been hired at Contoso. Garth has been tasked with giving her proper privileges for the Finance Team Sites. The only input Garth received was: “she needs to have the same privileges as Chris.”

• Navigate to the Permissions Explorer and click on the Wizards ribbon.
• This time we will click on the Clone icon to start the wizard.
• First, we need to define which site collection will be a wizard scope. Principal’s permissions will be cloned only within this site collection. Click Next.
• Now we need to select the source principal — we have chosen Chris Johnson, whose permissions and group memberships we wish to clone. The destination principal is Katie Jordan. Be careful because this process will delete the existing permissions for the destination principals you have selected.
• The wizard will now show you a preview of the changes to be made. This also allows you to modify any settings you might not like. Click Next to apply and finish.

Please note — except for the cloning, you can do something similar using the Transfer option. It is important to note that if you use the Transfer option to accomplish this, the selected source principal will lose all its directly given permissions and SharePoint group memberships in this process, as they will be copied to destination principals.

Day 3: Grant Permissions

Granting permissions can be easily done via SharePoint UI, but what should one do when a user needs to be granted very granular permissions? In our example, a user, Shannon, needs to be granted Full Control permissions in all the Finance Reports document libraries in two site collections called Controlling and Finance.

• Navigate to Permissions Explorer, choose the Wizards ribbon and then click on the Manage icon.
• In the first step, we need to choose the option “Grant permissions.”
• The next step allows you to specify the entire web application in which changes will be made or specific site collections or subsites within a desired Web Application. We needed only two specific site collections — Controlling and Finance.
• The third step allows you to select principals and objects you wish to change. We wanted to apply this change to all lists that matched the name “Finance Reports” in all the Site Collections that we selected in the previous step. Select users to whom you wish to grant the permissions. In our example, we wanted to grant permissions to Shannon.
• Now we need to select the permission levels that we have to grant to Shannon. Permission levels listed in this step depend on the selected site collection template. Click Next.
• In the Preview step, make sure that the pending changes will do exactly what you wanted.
• Apply the changes and voilà!

Day 4: Group Management

Garth has been tasked with removing Katie from a number of groups in three site collections. Here is how one of the built-in wizards can help him achieve this task.

• Start the wizard by clicking on the Membership icon on the Wizards ribbon.
• Choose the action — in this case, we need to choose “Remove user from all groups.”
• In the second step, we will specify site collections within the desired web application— IT, Finance and Controlling.
• Now we need to choose Katie Jordan, a user who we wish to remove from all SharePoint groups within the selected scope in the previous step. Click Next.
• Now we carefully check the preview of pending changes. If everything is ok, click Next to apply.
• The last step shows the changes that we made. If any errors have occurred, they will be displayed here. It is possible to save this log to disk as a .txt file using the Save Log button.

Day 5: Break and Restore Permissions

SharePoint permissions can be broken and restored on individual items such as Sites, Lists, and List Items. To save time doing that item by item, Garth is going to use our built in wizard to restore permission inheritance on all the document libraries named Sales and break permission inheritance for all the Lists names Finance Tasks.

• Let’s start the Break/Restore Permissions Inheritance wizard from the Wizards ribbon.
• In this example, we need to restore permissions, so the first thing we should choose in step 1 is “Restore permission inheritance.”
• Now we will choose the site collections to which we will apply this action — Controlling and Finance.
• In the configuration step, you can specify which objects this wizard will affect. We wanted to apply this change to all Lists matched by name Sales in all the Site Collections that we chose in the step before.
• Preview the changes and click Next to apply if everything is okay.
• Now we will start the wizard again and choose another option, “Break permission inheritance,“ to perform another action.
• In the target step, we will choose the whole web application. Note that all the subsites that match the specified criteria on the selected web application will be affected.
• We wish to apply this change on all lists matched by name that contain the term Finance Tasks. So we added this to our configuration options. Click Next.
• Finally, we check the pending changes and click Next to apply them.

Please check out our other SPDocKit videos! We hope you like what we showed you today. If you need help with the application, feel free to contact us.

We have shipped the SPDocKit 5.0.2. This is a minor release with some bug fixes and couple of improvements.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 5.0.2
Build number: 17444
Release date: Jan 28, 2015

Improvements

• Distributed Cache best practices report improvements.
• Content Usage reports scheduling and export enabled.
• Manual adjustment of the query results limit.

Bug fixes

• Advanced farm compare server mapping problems.
• Some of the wizard controls crashing due to a third party control issues.
• Compare web.config XML problems.
• Generating Best Practices documentation with a custom template.
• Storage metrics refresh logic.
• Upload SPDocKit subscriptions to a SharePoint document library problems.
• Server name resolving issues during the loading process.
• Word documentation title missing name spaces when generated in the Run mode.
• User permission requirements issues while loading the farm.
• Compare permissions problems.
• Software Assurance license going stale after a 30 day period.

Click here to download new release.

SPDocKit’s team lead DEV Matija recently prepared a detailed white paper on the topic of SharePoint permissions management, role assignments and content security. The following post provides a short recap of the mentioned topics, and for more info download the white paper on the link below.

Download the White Paper – PDF

• Who needs permissions?
• For which content does a principal need permissions?
• What should a user be able to do with the content he or she has permissions for?

In SharePoint, permissions are assigned to principals; these are known as SharePoint users.
A SP user is an individual user or a group of users.
A user in SP is a person with a user account from any authentication provider supported by the web application. This means that both AD users and AD groups are considered SP users. Besides regular users, users can also have privileged access. These users are mainly farm and site collection admins. Managing users and their permissions while keeping an eye on group memberships can be a daunting task though.

Luckily, SPDocKit’s permissions management is here to help!

Objects that users have permissions for are called securable objects. These objects include SharePoint sites, lists, libraries, folders, documents, or items. It is clear that objects are determined by hierarchy. Permissions for securable objects are passed from the parent object to the child object by default. For example, everything from the site collection will be inherited on the SharePoint lists, and so on. By breaking the inheritance, you can secure your object; however, you should be careful because breaking the inheritance increases the need for further updates if the permissions policy is changed. SPDocKit allows you to keep track of permission inheritance and easily break or restore wanted permissions at any time.

What are permissions? They are so-called performance permits that control the access levels a user has to certain content. To perform a certain task in SharePoint, a principal needs a set of permissions. SharePoint 2013 comes with 33 built-in permissions categorized as list, site, and personal permissions depending on the object they are applied to. The link between all the securable elements is called the role assignment. This term explains the relationship between the SP principal, securable objects, and SP permissions. Because of the large number permissions, they are are never assigned directly to a user. You should use permission levels (roles) and permission policies. Using permissions through AD groups rather than individual users is also recommended. For more about these and other SharePoint permissions best practices, read our detailed white paper.

We have shipped the SPDocKit 5.1.0. This is a minor release which includes content types and workflows documentation, as well as some new features for SharePoint solutions backup and assembly deployment validation.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 5.1.0
Build number: 19104
Release date: Mar 19, 2015

What’s new?

• SPDocKit’s Site Explorer will never be the same again! You will now require a database to collect and explore Site Explorer reports, but we think that it is a fair trade when you consider the new reports we’ve added: Workflow Templates, Workflow Associations, Content Type Usage and Content Type Hierarchy.
• Use the Workflow Templates report to check which workflow templates are used on a specific site. You can check the workflow type, deployment scope as well as associations and instance count.
• Workflow Associations provides an overview of your SharePoint’s workflow associations. You can explore the workflow platform, the workflow target object, whether this workflow is configured to be started manually or automatically as well as easily access the workflow history and tasks list.
• The freshly implemented Content Type Usage report was created to help you detect which content types and on which lists are used within the selected SharePoint site.
• There is also a Content Type Usage report under the Content Usage section of the Reports tab, which shows all lists that contain the selected content type within the specified site collection. This report has a wider scope and you can use it to detect where a specific content type is actually used.
• Content Type Hierarchy is an awesome interactive graphical representation of the Content Types hierarchy across the selected site collection and from this SPDocKit version it is available as a part of the Site Explorer.
• Tracking down installed or deployed SharePoint solutions can sometimes turn into a mission impossible, but not anymore. Use the Extract WSP button or Backup and Analyze Solution Files load option during a load to save your WSP files. Navigate to the Farm Explorer Solutions report to try out this feature.
• The Validate Assembly Deployment tool lets you determine if all the deployed DLLs from a SharePoint solution file are the same across all deployed locations (GAC, IIS web application bin folders). You will no longer have rogue DLL versions roaming around your farm. Combine this wizard with a Solution Assembly Deployment Valid best practices report to tie up all the loose ends.
• To get the best possible performance from your SQL servers, use the Model DB and Temp DB best practices reports we are introducing in this version.
  Each new database will have its settings inherited from the Model DB upon creation. These settings should be changed from their default values so they are suitable for your environment. SPDocKit Model DB best practices will warn you if your autogrowth, initial size and recovery model settings are not in compliance with the Microsoft recommendations.
• Find out if the Temp DB is slowing down your SharePoint using five new best practices reports that check the read and write response times, Temp DB size, model and other configuration options.
• There are also two new best practices reports – SharePoint Upgrade Required and Windows Updates – under the reorganized Updates best practices folder.
• Track when SPDocKit service is active and what actions it is currently performing using the System Jobs Log. This feature is under the backstage Help section as an additional SPDocKit tool.

Improvements

• There are new Load Wizard design and configuration options – select the load depth, the SharePoint settings you wish to load and the load target. The load target option allows you to select the items to be loaded down to the subsite level, so you can decrease loading times.
• We have implemented an option to let you choose which farm settings should be compared in the Compare Farm Wizard. You can adjust them in the Options Wizard as a default option or each time you run the Compare Farm Wizard.
• Farm Load optimizations.
• The Database Files best practices report now checks both if files are on the system drive and if the logs are on the same drive as those files.

Bugs Fixed

• Web Application Name Check best practices report not checking all required URLs.
• Crawl Account Search Permissions issues.
• Disk Allocation Size and Database Files exceptions.
• Issues while loading list permissions.
• Access Services information load not working properly for SP2013.
• Acceleratio Collector service generating errors in the event log.
• Distributed Cache wrong dashboard error count.
• App Services not running and causing errors during the farm load.
• Language Packs Up to Date best practices report not detecting all application language packs.
• Live Permission Explorer slow performance issue due to a large number of folders.

Click here to download new release.

We have shipped the SPDocKit 5.2.0. This is a minor release which includes IIS and SQL documentation, SharePoint Online permissions management directly from your workstation as well as some bug fixes.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 5.2.0
Build number: 21807
Release date: Jul 18, 2015

What’s new?

• SPDocKit permissions management is no longer reserved just for the SharePoint On-Premises sites. Manage your permissions for both SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online sites from a single interface. Install SPDocKit on your workstation, add sites for which you wish to manage the permissions and you are good to go! Check this feature availability per SPDocKit edition
• SPDocKit Farm Explorer got even more informative. Farm documentation now includes Internet Information Services and SQL Server settings. Explore Application Pools, Site Settings, SQL General Settings, Database Settings, and much more with just one SPDocKit farm load.
• SPDocKit report subscriptions can now be uploaded to a SharePoint Online document library also. Report subscriptions can be uploaded to a desired SharePoint On-Premises or SharePoint Online document library using integrated or custom credentials, which can differ from the one provided for the SPDocKit service or the one running the console.
• Number of Unique Visitors is a new usage report that provides the number of unique visitors across the SharePoint farm—for each site collection—and also a farm summary.
• If you drill down to the desired site collection, SPDocKit takes you to the List of Site Visitors report where the actual list of the SharePoint visitors for the selected site is provided. Visitors are represented by user name and display name.
• All Farm Users report lists all the SharePoint users with any type of permissions, whether or not they have visited the farm. This report can be found under the Security Audit permissions reports and it displays each user’s domain and whether his/her account has been enabled or disabled.
• Number of Users per Site is also a Security Audit permissions report that provides you with an overview of the number of users per site collection. Expore how many users have been granted any permissions for a specific site collection and how many are actually active or disabled in your Active Directory.
• Search Content Sources is a new best practices report that checks whether the Content Source Start Address is in the default zone of a particular web application. If it is in any other zone, the contextual scopes (‘This Site’ and ‘This List’) will not work.
• Option to create a custom Farm Compare template lets you choose which Farm Explorer reports will be included in the farm comparison. This template also affects the Differences report sent by the SPDocKit Service following the automatic snapshot and manual Farm Compare results in the SPDocKit console. The template can be modified each time the Compare Wizard is used. These settings can be adjusted in the Compare section of the Options Wizard.
• New timesaving buttons, View in SharePoint and Manage in SharePoint, allow you to navigate to the exact place in the Central Administration or SharePoint site directly from the related SPDocKit report. These buttons can be found in Farm Explorer, Site Explorer and Permission Explorer reports. Use them to skip the Central Administration quest for the SharePoint settings you wish to explore or change.

Improvements

• Since the number of SPDocKit reports grows with every new release, we decided to divide them into two categories: Permissions Reports and Content&Usage Reports. While we were at it, the Permissions Reports section got refreshed. Apart from new usage reports, previously mentioned in the Features category, we have new organizational categories and report names.
• The Scheduled Tasks tab can now be found under the Farm Explorer tab as a single report.
• The Manage License button is now visible on the Home ribbon for all Feature Usage by Edition and by Scope reports.
• The Test Proxy Server settings button has been added to SPDocKit General Options. Now you can check whether the provided proxy server address, port and authentication credentials work correctly before saving them.
• The Best Practices Dashboard now properly displays numbers of more than four digits.
• Reports in the Servers in Farms section have now been reorganized.
• The SPDocKit database no longer has to be on the same SQL server as the Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application database in order for the Feature Usage by Edition and Feature Usage by Scope reports to work.
• The User Permissions reports now have a principal selection limit in order to improve SPDocKit performance. If you select ‘All’ principals in the User Permissions Overview and User Permissions Details reports, SPDocKit will use only the first 100 principals to generate the report. This number can be changed under the General section of the Options Wizard.
• We optimized the time and resource usage for the farm loading process.
• SPDocKit farm snapshots are now being stored in the SPDocKit database, if the database exists. This allows you to connect to a SPDocKit database and explore farm settings and reports from your workstation without having to copy them from your SharePoint farm.
• It is now possible to adjust the Load Performance level for both the farm load and the monitoring load. Select if you prefer “low resource usage” or “faster performance.” Change these settings using Default Load Settings and the Monitoring Load section of the Options Wizard, or every time you use the ‘Custom’ option in the Load Wizard.
• The Storage Metrics report shows more accurate data. The size of the database logs have been excluded from the overall database size, and we added the ‘System Data’ to make the report more understandable. The ‘System Data’ node now contains SharePoint overhead data and unused database space.
• Export report buttons are now visible on the Home ribbon.

Bugs Fixed

• Resolved problem with the grid filtering option not working properly for the Subsite Permissions report.
• Resolved problem with the Scheduled reports not updating view changes properly.
• Fixed error relating to reading saved Best Practices reports.
• The Property Store database is now being disregarded in the SharePoint Database Autogrowth best practices report for SharePoint 2010.
• Resolved issues with generating the Farm and Best Practices Documentation using custom template.
• Resolved issues with generating the Farm Documentation due to some special characters in the username.
• Compare Web.config files Wizard issues resolved.
• Recycle Bin properties—wrong information issues resolved.
• Resolved Web Application URL Check best practices report not working properly with the FQDN in the Web application name.
• Resolved problems with the Loopback Disabled best practices report not working properly when both disabling methods are used and report description not being sufficiently informative.
• Resolved issues with the Validate Assembly Deployment not checking all possible locations.
• Resolved problems with the target adjustment in the Permissions Management wizards.
• Fixed problem with the missing Backup History information.
• Resolved problems regarding the people picker not working properly with special characters.

Known Issues

See the list of the currently known issues in the latest version of SPDocKit.

Click here to download new release.

Even though advanced permissions options were a key reason for SharePoint’s success, centralized, automatized permission management in SharePoint is virtually non-existent. Experienced software architect Adis Jugo has written a white paper to discuss how SPDocKit resolves this in the best possible way. Download the white paper at the link below to read more about cases he was confronted with during his career as a SharePoint consultant.

Download the PDF White Paper

Adis Jugo is a software architect with 20 years of professional experience in creating software solutions. He is also a certified Professional Scrum Master (PSM), with extensive experience in agile project management. He is currently working as a Director of Advisory for deroso Solutions in Germany. Read more about his experiences and best practices at his blog.

Manage permissions with SPDocKit

One of the strengths of SharePoint and one of the main reasons why the platform became so popular in the first place is permissions. It doesn’t matter whether permissions are governed centrally or site owners can grant permissions themselves – the power and granularity of permissions management in SharePoint helped the platform’s popularity skyrocket. Everyone could set up permissions in his or her own way but that’s the problem. SharePoint has never been good at centralized permissions management. When an IT Administrator needs to add/delete/change users on several hundred, or even several thousand site collections things get interesting. In addition, it can be a challenging to trace the history of permission changes in SharePoint environments that are not tightly governed.

SPDocKit includes a wizard-like centralized permissions management tool that makes day-to-day permissions management much less painful. It offers batch permissions management across site collections, simplified permissions management inside a single-site collection with powerful cleanup and forensic, reporting options. SPDocKIt is a lightweight Windows Forms tool that does not tamper with SharePoint installations in any way.

For more information about SPDocKit permissions and reports, read the full white paper.

Summer has already arrived but our SPDocKit team is constantly working on product improvements. Two minor releases are already behind us and many new features are ahead. It comes as no surprise that our customer base keeps on growing and keeping our dear customers happy is our top priority. It’s always nice and helpful to hear about experiences with our product and that’s why we developed the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Every year more and more customers decide to participate and we are grateful to all who responded to our surveys. It truly helps us to make our tool even better.

Statistics on SharePoint environment and SPDocKit feature usage

We collected data about the hardware and software used in our customers’ SharePoint environment. Many of our customers still use SharePoint 2010 but 59% of them have the latest SharePoint version installed, which is good to know since support for SharePoint 2010 will end in October 2015. Most use Windows Server 2008R2 on a 4 core CPU, with 8 GB of memory and two servers in a farm.

As well as learning about the SharePoint environment, it’s always interesting to see and analyze the usage of SPDocKit features. We are delighted that 90% of our customers are using the new version of SPDocKit. The most used feature is Farm Explorer, which allows system administrators to explore SharePoint configuration settings. Besides this they use the Best practices and Permissions reports the most. They manage, grant and remove permissions most often. To keep their SharePoint farm permissions healthy, 27% of users likes to use Clean site collection and 17% likes to Manage site administrators.

Check out more interesting stats on the infographic below. We’re already using all this info to plan cool new features and we’re looking forward to the new releases.

Still not using SPDocKit? Download free trial and try it out!

For a long time, our customers have wanted the ability to connect to SharePoint Online. In the new version of SPDocKit our users finally have this option. We made a video to demonstrate this exciting new functionality. In the video, we explain how you can connect to SharePoint Online and manage permissions, move users in and out of groups, break/restore permission inheritance, clone permissions, and much more. Watch the video or read the transcript to learn more.

Table of contents:
0:26 Connect to SharePoint Online.
1:13 Task 1: Clean-up all users that were given permissions directly and move these users into groups.
2:35 Task 2: Give a new employee exactly the same permissions as those of his or her team members.
3:12 Task 3: Modify permissions for a departmental site.
3:48 Task 4: Create unique permissions on the Facilities site.
4:20 Task 5: Create a new group and assign users.

Video transcription

Hello! Today I am going to show you the exciting new functionalities of the SPDocKit from our 5.2 release. For a long time, our customers wanted to have the ability to connect to SharePoint Online, and it’s finally here. With SPDockit you can now easily manage your SharePoint sites, manage permissions, move users in and out of groups, break/restore permission inheritance, clone permissions and much more. Let’s see how that works.

Connect to SharePoint Online

• In the Permissions Explorer you now have the ability to connect to both On Premises and SharePoint Online Sites. We recommend using Site Collection admin account to do so.
• On the ribbon click on the Connect Button.
• In the newly opened dialog box choose SharePoint Online.
• Enter the site URL.
• Enter the site name.
• Enter the credentials used to connect to your SharePoint Online and click ok.
• Once connected SPDocKit will show you the contents of the site collection you have chosen.
• As you can see this is a fairly simple site collection with just one site and a couple of libraries.
• On the main screen you can see all the users and groups that have permissions to the root of this site collection.

Manage Permissions

Task 1: Clean-up all users that were given permissions directly and move these users into groups

• On the main part of the screen, I am going to select a couple of users. All these users have Full Control permissions and I am going to drag them to the Team Site Owners group.
• Choose whether you want to Copy or Move users to this group. In this case we are going to choose Move.
• We are going to repeat this procedure for all the remaining users in this site.
• If I want to view users that are members of a group I can select to view all.
• In the main panel I can now easily expand each group and see its members.
• As you can see, the Team Site Visitors group has no members, so I can remove it from the site using the Delete Group button on the ribbon.
• The Grant Permissions button on the ribbon allows me to add permissions to users for this site.
• Click on the Grant Permissions button.
• Using the people picker option, search for the user to whom you want to give permissions.
• You can assign permissions by adding a user to a group that already exists on this site, or by assigning permissions directly. In this case we are going to add Zrinka to the Team Site Visitors groups that has Read permission on this site.
• As you can see Zrinka is now a member of the Team Site Visitors Group.

Task 2: Give a new employee exactly the same permissions as those of his or her team members

• In many companies when a new employee is hired you want to give him or her exactly the same permissions as those of his or her team members.
• SPDocKit helps you greatly with this task. Simply choose a user whose permissions you want to clone and then click on the Clone button on the ribbon.
• Type in the name of the new user and select it from the drop down menu.
• Click “Next” and verify the changes on the preview step.
• The system is going to give the new users the same permissions as the original user.

Task 3: Modify permissions for a departmental site

• Imagine you want to modify permissions for a departmental site. To demonstrate this we are going to connect to a different site collection, because in SPDocKit you can connect to an unlimited number of SharePoint Online site collections.
• Type in all the details just as before.
• The new site collection “Contoso” will be displayed in the navigation menu.
• Expand the Contoso node and then expand the Home node.
• As you can see, a couple of sites and document libraries are listed under the Home node.
• The “Departments” and “Employee” sites are sites with unique permissions (i.e. they don’t have the same permissions as their parent site).
• The objects with unique permissions have a small red square next to their icon.

Task 4: Create unique permissions on the Facilities site

• For the purpose of this demo, let’s say you were given a tasks to create unique permissions on the Facilities site.
• To do that, select “Facilities” in the left hand navigation panel.
• Click on the ribbon button “Break Permission Inheritance”.
• Confirm that you want to proceed with the operation.
• Your site now has unique permissions. The permissions from the parent site were copied.
• If you want to start with a clean slate, just select all and then remove all these entries.
• Now if your site does not have permissions, you are ready to start over.

Task 5: Create a new group and assign users

• Click on the Create Group button on the ribbon.
• Type in the name of your group and choose the owner.
• On the next screen choose the permission level you want to assign.
• In this case we are going to give Full Control to this group.
• The new group is now available on your site.
• Let’s add some users by assigning them to this group.
• Type the names of your users and choose them from the drop down menu.
• Choose the group to which you want to add users. In this case we are going to select the Facilities Managers group.
• Click Ok to add users to the group.

That’s it. Your users have all the permissions they need, and you are ready for some margaritas!

Please check out our other SPDocKit videos! We hope you like what we showed you today. If you need help, feel free to contact us.

We have shipped the SPDocKit 5.3.0. This is a minor release which supports SP2016 Preview and includes a wizard for generating an XML configuration file for AutoSPInstaller and as well there are some permissions management improvements and new useful reports, as well as some bug fixes.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 5.3.0
Build number: 25767
Release date: Oct 15, 2015

Features

• AutoSPInstaller Support
• Live Permissions Compare
• Create Group improvements
• Show All Groups Live Permissions Explorer option.
• New Clean Site Collection Wizard’s option – Replace group owners disabled in AD.
• A new membership report called Member of provides an overview of groups that the selected principals are members of.
• SharePoint groups without users is a new cleanup permissions report that will help you discover all SharePoint groups that have been created but do not have any members assigned.
• New best practices report, Number of Application Pools, which will tell you if the recommended number of application pools for your WFE servers has been exceeded.
• To help you remember which SPDocKit snapshot reflected your farm’s best state, we’ve implemented a Mark as good configuration option on the Change History tab. Use this snapshot to run a comparison with any other snapshot and find out if there are any changes that require your attention.
• You can now crawl your farm for all the lists that have more than the defined number of list items using Item Count list’s query property. See if someone has been piling up unnecessary items or which list is the most popular in your company.
• Configure or modify the contact person for allow permission requests using a new SPDocKit rule intuitively called “Allow permission request”. If you would like to change the current contact person, just provide the new contact details and SPDocKit’s rule will make the change in just a couple of seconds.
• SPDocKit Extensions
• We’ve added a couple of new farm explorer reports, Connection Containers and Connection Filters, to provide an even more detailed overview of your UPA settings.
• Support for the SharePoint 2016 Preview.

Improvements

• An option to skip the loading of installed programs and updates during a farm load has been added.
• SPDocKit report filters have been refactored and improved.
• Mapped Attribute properties are now loaded in the User Profile Properties report.
• You can now rename farms from the SPDocKit database using the Rename Farm option in the Change History tab or under the Configuration section of the backstage.
• Couple of UI changes to the Permission Levels wizard.
• The Servers List report is grouped by server name.
• A horizontal scroll bar has been added to the permissions wizards to give a better overview of the information.
• More details about the selected objects have been added to the Permission Compare Differences report. The generated report provides information about the selected source and target down to the list item level.
• The System Settings folder has been reordered in the farm explorer tree.
• Better validation of the location path for uploading the subscriptions to SharePoint or the fileshare.
• SQL Service Accounts and Product Keys reports are now grouped by server name.
• A column for the server name has been added to the Monitoring log.
• A warning is given in the Unmodified Content report when the latest available loading info is older than x days.
• Paging has been added to the folder details grid (when clicking on the folder, if there are too many items, now there is a paging to help you navigate through them).
• The Site Collection reports are now grouped by web application.
• The Manual Snapshot column on the Change History tab has a new name – Mode. Its value is either automatic or manual.
• The Orphaned Users report now shows two types of orphaned users: those who have been disabled and those who have been deleted in the Active Directory.
• By clicking the View in SharePoint button when a web application is selected, you can manage the SharePoint user policies for that web application.
• A Verbose Logging option has been added to the general section of the Options wizard. If you would like to receive detailed Windows event log information about SPDocKit performance, keep this option turned on.
• An option to open the generated or exported file after the generation of all exports and documentation has been added.
• In the Live Permissions Explorer, if you are on an object that inherits permissions from its parent, there is a warning telling you to go to the parent to manage permissions by using the Go to parent button.
• The User Properties button has been added to the Live Permissions Explorer’s context menu. Select the desired principal and use the right mouse button click to choose this option.

Bugs Fixed

• Folders and list items were not sorted properly in the permissions reports.
• Generated table of contents in the documentation was showing incorrect page numbers.
• Sorting of the Site Collection List by the primary admin was wrong.
• An issue with the manual saving template for the documentation style in the installation folder.
• The application crashes if a license goes stale during use.
• Live Permissions Explorer issues due to a connection timeout (if the content database was not accessible the Live Permissions Explorer misbehaved).
• Search Index Path not being populated correctly.
• The app crashed when connecting with a different resolution during an export.
• Data retention not working properly when workflows had been loaded previously.
• The Excel Service application report was not being exported properly, especially if the Trusted Locations report had more than one value.
• Farm files were being duplicated in the Compare Wizard if they were copied to a saved farms folder from multiple farms.
• Content Usage reports were visible for SharePoint 2007 farms though they are not supported for that SharePoint version.
• The Options wizard section for Subscription Settings was missing information, causing the application to crash.
• Empty Backup and Analyze location tooltip was causing issues.
• False detection of a snapshot differences
• The move to group/copy to group action was creating an infinite group listing if there were no groups to select.
• The mapping details of the UPA profile properties were not being displayed properly.
• The IIS and SQL Differences report was missing details about the objects being compared.
• Loading issues caused by the diagnostic provider.
• IIS load was not working when a server has more than one IP address.
• Farm Account is not Local Admin best practices issues caused by case sensitivity.
• Web.config data not being loaded when an SPDocKit database hasn’t been configured.

Click here to download new release.

Three months have passed and it’s new SPDocKit version time again. SPDocKit 5.3 is a minor release that supports SP2016 Preview and includes a wizard for generating an XML configuration file for AutoSPInstaller and as well there are some permissions management improvements and new useful reports.

Click here to download new release.

You can check out a more detailed summary of the new features and improvements in our official release note, but here are a few highlights what’s new in SPDocKit 5.3.

AutoSPInstaller XML File Generator

If you have ever wanted to generate an AutoSPInstaller XML configuration file based on your favorite farm settings, SPDocKit, your personal SharePoint genie, can now fulfill your wish. In combination with AutoSPInstaller Online, it quickly generates an XML file to save time when installing SharePoint on other machines.

Real-time Permissions Compare

The live permissions comparison is another champion of this release. You no longer have to load SharePoint permissions to compare them. This feature allows you not only to run a live comparison, but you can also compare the current state of permissions with any previously loaded snapshot. Customers using an SPDocKit client installation can also compare SharePoint Online sites without loading them.

Permissions Management Miscellaneous

As we mentioned, there are some new permissions management features:

• The create SharePoint group action supports adding group members during creation of a group, as well as creating SharePoint groups without granting them any permissions.
• To see all the available SharePoint groups for a selected object, turn on the Show All Groups option. This will include all SharePoint groups that do not have any permissions granted for the selected object but are defined somewhere on the site collection. These groups will have a grey group icon and will be classified as “No Permissions” objects in the live Permissions Explorer overview.
• The Clean Site Collection Wizard has a new power – transferring ownership from the current owner that has been disabled in the Active Directory to any desired user or a SharePoint group.
• The scope of the Clone and Transfer Wizard can now be the entire web application.

SPDocKit Extensions

We get a lot of user suggestions, and we are very grateful for them, but unfortunately sometimes some of them do not get included in the official SPDocKit release. We decided it was time to change this, so we have implemented a feature called SPDocKit Extensions.

Our developers will create custom reports that have been suggested or requested by our customers, and they will be accessible as a plugin for the current SPDocKit version. The Extension Manager can be found under the Help section.

Support for SharePoint 2016 Preview

Last but definitely not least, SPDocKit 5.3 supports SharePoint 2016 Preview. All the current SPDocKit reports and wizards will work with this new SharePoint release.

Best Practices Library

In the end, we’ve decided to create a SharePoint Best Practices Library. It is a place for SharePoint admins and enthusiasts or any other SPDocKit user fascinated with SharePoint best practices.

You will notice that all our best practices reports now have a link to a related article in that library, explaining the issue as well as recommending the solution to make SPDocKit’s dashboard all green. We hope you’ll like it and we will be more than happy to hear all your comments and improvement suggestions.

We would also like to thank our SharePoint MVPs who worked really hard to make this happen – Aleksandar Drašković and Toni Frankola.

Read more about other changes and bug fixes

We have shipped SPDocKit 5.3.1. This is a minor release with an improvement that allows users to choose where the farm snapshots will be saved as well as some bug fixes.

Click here to download new release.

Product version: 5.3.1
Build number: 26642
Release date: Nov 19, 2015

Improvements

• Option to choose whether to save farm snapshots to the SPDocKit database or to the desired disk location.
• Farm product key is now optional in the AutoSPInstaller XML configuration file generator.

Bugs Fixed

• Resolved problem with “String was not recognized as a valid Boolean” exception on the Changes History tab.
• Resolved problem with “Specified cast is not valid“ exception appearing after navigating from the Cache Size best practices report to the Changes History screen.
• Resolved problem with “Unable to cast object of type ‘System.Int32’ to type ‘System.String’” exception appearing due to an edited report layout and URL formatting encompassing the wrong column.
• Resolved problem with “Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute” exception while trying to log the AD resolving exceptions.
• Resolved problem with duplicates on database and account mappings in the AutoSPInstaller XML configuration file generator which caused the wizard to malfunction.
• Resolved problem with “Sequence contains no matching element” exception caused by Search Index Path report detecting the wrong location.
• Resolved problem with “Sequence contains more than one matching element” exception appearing when user tries to save previously loaded farm settings.
• Resolved problem with load wizard reporting issues due to a removed content type trying to be loaded by SPDocKit.
• Resolved problem with missing information related to UPA in the farm explorer reports on SharePoint 2010 because the app.config file contained unnecessary restrictions.
• Resolved problem with some content database files missing on the Database Files report.
• Resolved problem with SPDocKit incorrectly reporting AD users’ state as disabled.

Click here to download new release.

After introducing to you our proud creation, the ultimate SharePoint admin tool – SPDocKit, we would now like to present to you our server monitoring tool, SysKit! In this post we discuss some of the common tasks that can be accomplished with SysKit.

Have you ever wondered how to turn your SharePoint server monitoring nightmare into a user-friendly experience? Worry not – SysKit’s here.

What does SysKit do, you might ask?  Good question, and you’re in just the right place to find out.

It serves as an easy-to-use tool with a solution for Windows Server environments such as SharePoint, SQL, Exchange, etc. With SysKit, you can add servers and computers, and monitor all of them from a central dashboard in real-time. Isn’t that just awesome?

Here is a list of SysKit’s most important features:

• monitors Windows servers and applications performance
• monitors and restarts stopped Windows services
• enables real-time alerting
• monitors user activities and application usage
• monitors RD Gateway connections
• reports on computer inventory

Apart from supporting Windows Servers, SysKit also supports Remote Desktop Services, Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop, Remote Desktop Gateway and workstations.

And that’s not even the half of it! Curious to find out more? SysKit is here to help you detect various issues in the following cases:

• if Bad AppPools cause too high CPU usage
• if IIS is using too many CPU resources and if you need another WFE server
• resource usage of SharePoint services
• stopped SharePoint services or ISS server, and then let’s you auto-start it
• detect users connecting to SharePoint or SQL servers console

To find out what other valuable features SysKit has to offer you and to download your 30-day free trial visit www.syskit.com.

We are proud to announce that Toni Frankola, Acceleratio co-founder and team member, has been awarded Most Valuable Professional for the sixth time for exceptional contributions to the Microsoft Community and outstanding achievement in the field of SharePoint Server.

The annual MVP Global Summit 2015 took place in the Bellevue and Redmond area, USA, with special attention to giving back to the tech community surrounding Microsoft, using lectures, presentations and updates on the latest technologies. The MVP award itself stands for Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, acknowledging the recipient’s tremendous contribution, technical expertise and knowledge regarding various products and solutions that Microsoft has to offer.

Toni has once again proved his value and dedication to the technical community and Microsoft, as well. Given his latest research, advancements and achievements in SharePoint that led Microsoft to present him with the MVP award for the sixth time, the Acceleratio team achieved great success in accumulating valuable insights and prospects. The community also benefits from Toni’s meticulous involvement in SharePoint Server development.

The MVP Global Summit 2015 once more gave its tech community the chance to thrive and share the latest Microsoft interest fields and topics. The Summit also supports its community in social events and networking, giving its community members knowledge and a good time while attending seminars, lectures and after-seminar events hosted by Microsoft.

Our dear friend, Adis Jugo, a software architect and Microsoft MVP, prepared an interesting and very useful video about his favorite SharePoint admin tool – SPDocKit. In the video, he discusses some of the major issues in SharePoint Governance: Permissions Governance and Permissions Management, outlining key permissions management tasks and explaining how SPDocKit can be used to automate these tasks almost completely. A few of his points include:

• adding a new audience to existing SharePoint content,
• breaking permissions inheritance,
• creating SharePoint groups in all the site collections,
• managing groups and permissions,
• reporting on permissions, and much more.

Watch the video to see these and other great permission features in SPDocKit. You can also download and read white paper on this subject written by Adis.

Table of contents

00:31 Permission management in SharePoint
04:17 Batch permissions management with SPDocKit
13:07 Checking and setting site collection admins
16:40 On-the-fly permissions management
21:04 Permissions reporting and forensics
30:18 Exporting reports

SPDocKit makes day-to-day permissions management easier

Essentialy, whenever there is a huge set of lookalike SharePoint site collections and sites, and a need for permission changes on some or all of them, SPDocKit’s permissions wizards are your best friend.

Besides dealing with a large number of site collections, SPDocKit is also the best solution for administrators dealing with permissions inside a one site collection. The Permissions Explorer enables you to quickly and efficiently manage SharePoint permissions on a daily basis. SPDocKit also can perform full permissions forensics, which helps keep your SharePoint clean by removing unused users and groups. As you would expect from this amazing tool, you can create customized permissions reports, and all generated reports can be exported as PDF, Word, or Excel documents. In short, it makes a SharePoint admin’s life much easier.

We hope this video was helpful to you. You can check out our other SPDocKit videos here. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to contact us.

Still haven’t tried SPDocKit? Free trial is available for download.

Over the years, we’ve worked hard on SPDocKit in the hope of keeping our customers happy and satisfied. When developing new features, we haven’t forgotten our customers who use SharePoint 2007, either.

We’ve always tried to develop all of our features to be compatible with SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013 and now for 2016. Please note that there are certain differences among those features depending on which SP version you use.

We would like to inform you that all upcoming SPDocKit versions from version 6 onward, will no longer be compatible with SharePoint 2007. SPDocKit’s newly developed features will only work with SharePoint 2010, 2013 and 2016.

However, we will still offer full support for SharePoint 2007 through SPDocKit 5 with new releases in order to fix any features that might be causing issues. So don’t hesitate to contact us at any time!

This blog post explains what happens if you decide skip the SPDocKit database configuration step. Certain reports will unfortunately not be functional without a database.

SPDocKit uses the database for storing data gathered from your SharePoint farm. If you choose not to use this database, keep in mind that some SPDocKit features will not be available.

If you are not sure whether to use a database when installing SPDocKit, here is a list of unavailable features:

• Permissions Explorer historical records
• Permissions reports
• Content and Usage reports
• Report Subscriptions
• Monitoring reports (Windows event and ULS event gathering)
• License Management
• Site Explorer reports
• Queries and Rules

When configuring SPDocKit database, this database should be a SPDocKit dedicated database so make sure you don’t provide a SharePoint database for this purpose.

We hope this post helped resolve any doubts you might have had. If you have any additional questions regarding unavailable features, don’t hesitate to contact us at any time

In this blog post, we will discuss how to locate and manage lists with a certain number of items on your SharePoint farm with the help of SPDocKit.

In your time as a SharePoint administrator, you have probably encountered the infamous error message: “This view cannot be displayed because it exceeds the list view threshold (5,000 items) enforced by the administrator.”

The list view threshold was introduced back in SharePoint 2010. The default limit in a SharePoint list and document libraries is 5,000 items per view. Anything beyond that will not be rendered. If you are running SharePoint on-premises, this limit can be adjusted via Central Administration > Web Applications > Resource Throttling settings. However, please consult this guide before you change anything.

SPDocKit cannot help you work around this problem, but we can help you find all the lists that are over or close to the threshold. Once you have that info, you can contact the owners of these lists and help them clear or better organize them.

With SPDocKit’s Query Wizard, you can create custom reports that will help you determine if all your governance policies have been properly enforced across your SharePoint farm.

To find all lists with more than 4,500 items, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Queries & Rules.

   Image 1 – Queries and Rules

2. Click New Query to create a new query to run on your farm.

   Image 2 – Click New Query to start the Query Wizard.

3. Name your search query so you can find it more easily later in the wizard run history. Description is optional.

   Image 3 – Use this wizard to define your query.

4. Under Location, select Queries. Click OK.

   Image 4 – Query Location

5. In Query scope list, click Lists. Click Next to continue.

   Image 5 – Choose Lists.

6. Select Title, Url, and Item Count check box. Click Next to continue.

   Image 6 – Select what your report will consist of. Don’t forget to click Item Count.

7. To define filed ordering and sorting for your report, for each field in the Sorting list choose between Ascending, Descending, or None. Click Next to continue.

   Image 7 – You select sorting for each field you have chosen in the previous step.

8. Choose Manual Only.
   Send To is an optional feature.

   Image 8 – To manually execute the rule, you will have to run this query from the home ribbon using Run every time you want to check if there are any changes.

9. Select Item Count with a specific value check box.

   Image 9 – Select Item Count.

10. Click the underlined blue link titled “specific” and set the Condition list to Is greater than.
    For the preferred value, type in 4500.
    Click OK, and then click Next to proceed.
    

    Image 10 – The Query Wizard will find all lists with more than 4500 items.

11. Under Scope and Target, clcik Web Application.

    Image 11 – If you tick “Skip target selection; ask me on execution.”, you will be asked to define these options later. 

12. Click Finish. Your query is ready for execution.
13. Click Run to execute your query.

    Image 12 – Click Run to execute your Query.

14. View your results.

    Image 13 – Each time you or SPDocKit service executes a query, a history record is created.

    To explore query results by date and time, click on the desired record. You can see them under the queries folder structure under each query definition, marked with an orange arrow.