If it were up to Microsoft, farm solutions would be long forgotten, and not without a good reason.

Farm solutions are extremely invasive, they are not subject to any monitoring or resource allocation throttling, and they can create memory leaks and unexpected behaviors. Without any effort, they can bring down an entire SharePoint farm.

However, they are also the most powerful way to customize SharePoint. Although this saying is definitely overused, with great power comes great responsibility.

But as we know, despite the sandboxed solutions, the SharePoint Add-In model legacy code is still around, and for on-premise, farm solutions are still a fact of life. So how can SPDocKit help you deal with these troublemakers?

Back up current farm solutions

Using snapshots you take manually or the SPDocKit service takes, current farm solutions can be backed up in a location of your choosing. To back up your current farm solutions, follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to the Backstage Actions Screen and click Load Farm Settings.

   Image 1 – Backstage Actions Screen

2. Under Mode, click Custom load mode. Click Next to continue.

   Image 2 – Select Custom load mode.

3. Under Options, select the Features and Solutions check box.

   Image 3 – WSP Back up options

4. Select the Back up and Analyze Solution Files check box and choose a back-up location. Click Next to continue.
5. Under Target, select your preferred scope. Click Next to continue and start your loading process.

   Image 4 – Select objects to load.

Please note that these settings do not apply to sandboxed solutions.

If you do not want to set this option every time you perform a load, you can set the default load options in Options dialog to apply your settings to the SPDocKit service and the default manual load.

To apply the default load settings, follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to the Backstage Configuration Screen, then click Options.

   Image 5 – Backstage Configuration Screen

2. In the SPDocKit Options dialog, select Default Load Options.
3. Select Back up and Analyze Solution Files check box and select a location for your solution files. Click Save.

   Image 6 – Default Load Options

4. After configuring these settings, your backed-up solutions will appear in the backup folder listed by date and time.

Image 7 – View your backed-up solutions.

Please note that redeploying an older version of a SharePoint WSP is not recommended if significant changes were made. On the other hand, having farm solutions provides us with some options when trying to deal with specific issues.

Analyze DLLs contained within the WSP

SPDocKit can inspect the DLLs contained within the WSP. There are two ways to access this functionality:

• The Solution Assembly Deployment Validation Tool
• The Best Practices report, which is available if the Backup & Analyze Option was selected.

Solution Assembly Deployment Validation Tool

The Solution Assembly Deployment Validation tool is used to find DLLs on your servers that differ from the DLL contained within the WSP. The compare process for a DLL within the WSP is repeated for each server if the DLL is deployed to GAC or for each Web Application zone (for each server, each deployed web app) if it is deployed to the web application.

The validator tool works on live data; however, you have open the Settings file to access the tool.

1. Navigate to Farm Explorer > Farm > System Settings > Farm Management > Solutions on the Home ribbon.

   Image 8 – Click the Validate Assembly Deployment button.

2. To extract the selected WSP in the grid from the SharePoint farm, click the Extract WSP button.This will work directly with the SharePoint farm and not the backed-up version.You can also do this in PowerShell:
   

   $farm = Get-SPFarm

   $file = $farm.Solutions.Item(“yoursolution.wsp”).SolutionFile

   $file.SaveAs(“c:\temp\yoursolution.wsp”)

3. After you open the Solution Assembly Deployment Validation tool, you can see your current solutions on the SharePoint farm.

   Image 9 – Select a solution to determine whether the DLLs deployed on your servers are the same as the ones in the WSP.

Troubleshooting

In the preceding image, you can see that somebody messed with the DLL for the SharePoint Learning Kit on the SP2013-WFE1 server, replacing it directly in GAC.

Having a different DLL version on a single server can cause difficulties. If that happens, you should find the person responsible and determine the correct course of action. You can copy the DLL to all the servers to redeploy the solution if you can do so without repercussions. However, the SharePoint state could be incompatible with the old binaries and deployed artifacts. Whatever action you take, at least you know you might have a problem.

Sometimes an Error or Missing value can appear in the State column. In most situations, this means SPDocKit could not access the location where the DLL should be. To resolve this issue, please ensure that the user account running the tool has the necessary permissions to read from the file system for the servers in the farm. In cases such as this, you might find this article useful.

Best Practice

Manually checking every farm solution in the Solution Assembly Deployment Validation tool is not how you want to spend your day. Instead, you can use the Best Practices report.

Image 10 – Solution Assembly Deployment Valid errors

As with every best practice, Solution Assembly Deployment Valid errors will show up on the Best Practices Dashboard once you have loaded your farm or opened a previous snapshot.

As in the Solution Assembly Validation tool, click the item to see the Best Practices report and find out exactly what kind of problem you have.

Image 11 – Solution Assembly Deployment Valid

The only difference is that in the report, all the solutions are shown in a single grid and the results apply to the time at which the snapshot was taken.

Again, we can see that SP2013-WFE1 has a different DLL than what was supplied in the WSP.

The future of farm solutions does not seem bright. But even as they fade away, we still have to deal with them. SPDocKit is here to help.

If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact our support.

Our loyal partner and a senior SharePoint consultant and instructor with the consulting company Summit 7 Systems, Jay Simcox, decided to make a webinar on SPDocKit and how he uses our tool for SharePoint farm assessments. He started using SPDocKit five years ago and this has become standard practice for each Summit 7 Systems client.

In the video below, he provides best practices and recommends steps for proper farm assessments that ease farm administrator stress levels. Although the focus of the webinar is on the assessment process, Jay talks about other benefits of SPDocKit relating to configuration management, change management, SharePoint migrations and others. Watch the video to learn more.

Table of contents

00:32 Introduction: Jay Simcox
05:06 Webinar Agenda
07:10 The Assessment Process
22:59 Configuration Management
24:44 Change Management
28:33 Migrations with SPDocKit
31:50 SPDocKit Demo
58:44 Ten Takeaways

Video Transcript Summary

SharePoint Farm Assessment and Configuration Management

I first found out about SPDocKit back in 2009, when my first assignment was to do an assessment of a farm for one customer. I asked about what were we assessing and why. The customer wanted to know what they had in the farm and that’s how our assessment process was born. We started outlining what we wanted to capture and then we realized that this would be a really manual process, so we started looking for a tool to address that. Then we discovered SPDocKit.

From a consulting perspective, we do assessments generally for three reasons:

1. Regular farm check-ups – Assess farm health.
2. Discovering farm contents – We have customers who are not always aware of everything that is in their SharePoint farm.
3. Pre-migration farm assessment – We need to know exactly what we are migrating.

One of the other things we look at with SPDocKit, besides assessments, is configuration management and change management. Why is configuration management important? Primarily, because I want visibility, consistency, stability, auditability and predictability in a farm. SPDocKit will actually run the configuration report to a schedule and then it will email me the results of that report when it’s complete. I can take a snapshot of a farm once a week and then I can compare the snapshots so that they tell me what’s changed.

There’s a little bit of a difference between configuration and change management. Change management is really a part of configuration management. We want to manage the configuration of a farm. We want to know what has been installed, what permissions have been set, what groups exist and whether we have orphan users. We want to monitor farm health, track changes and compare configurations. With SPDocKit we can report on site contents, its configuration and usage. Of course, we want to work in a proactive state, and SPDocKit allow us to do so.

From the migration viewpoint, SPDocKit helps you to:

• Identify and clean up stale, outdated or dead documents.
• Identify and locate third-party and custom solutions and features.
• Review features, web parts and custom templates for compatibility.
• Involve site owners and administrators in the upgrade and migration process and communication plans.

To see these and other SPDocKit’s great features in action, watch the video.

Thanks to Jay Simcox and Summit 7 Systems for making this webinar and using SPDocKit. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Still not using SPDocKit? Start your free trial now.

Did you already notice our new logo? Let me introduce you to SPDocKit 6, still the ultimate administrator’s tool for SharePoint, rebranded and refreshed.

Click here to download new release

As you may already know, Acceleratio is from Croatia, and in Croatian “kit” means whale. This year we decided to change our icon to a little orange whale that we hope will soon become an immediately recognizable representative of SPDocKit.

New Appearance

SPDocKit 6 has gone to the dark side You can enjoy the new SPDocKit appearance by switching to the dark skin using general application options.

Snapshot or Snapshot?

There is no longer a difference between taking a snapshot and loading farm settings. Each time farm settings and permissions are loaded, a new snapshot file will be created. A list of all previously created snapshots can be found in the Snapshots tab, previously known as the Change History tab.

We also added the option to import snapshots (or old farm files) from any location, after which they will be available from the Snapshots tab regardless of their original location.

What’s more, you can export snapshots and use them as you did with farm files, transferring and exploring them in any other SPDocKit application instance.

Compare Wizard

The look and feel of the Compare Wizard has been raised to a new level. You no longer have to map your farm settings every time you want to see the difference between two farms. Compare Wizard will remember them each time a comparison is made. Also, we added service application mapping, application pool identity mapping, and host name mapping to improve the accuracy of the results. In addition, there are other details which will make Compare Wizard easier to use.

Best Practices Customization

The Customize Best Practices wizard allows you to modify each numerical value in best practices reports to better suit your environment’s needs. If a best practices report’s default values have been modified, you will receive a warning to make sure you are aware of the changes.

AutoSPInstaller Improvements

AutoSPInstaller feature has been widely accepted, so we’ve added a couple of more miscellaneous options such as installation directory, data directory, loopback check disable option, search on object selections, auto completion of required accounts and passwords, and so on. There is also a useful new option to clone or remove servers of the original farm in the server mappings step.

Application Settings Configuration

The Application Settings Management feature will export your SPDocKit settings, and create a settings file that you can import to any number of application instances across other farms. In addition to the documentation template, this file includes best practices and report customizations, service settings, email settings, data retention, and compare settings.

Licensing and Editions Changes

Another change is that SPDocKit will no longer have editions. From now on you’ll just choose the preferred license type – Farm, Site, Consultant, Team or Workstation – and you’ll be equipped with everything you need.

Workstation license is a new license type that we are introducing with this release. Whether you are a SharePoint admin who has a number of farms to manage and wishes to control them from one centralized location or a manager who wants to distribute reports to analysts, this is the way to go. The workstation license will not only give you an overview of the SharePoint farm reports, but it will also include management of SharePoint Online permissions.

Read more about other improvements and bug fixes.

Give it a try and send us your suggestions!

We have shipped SPDocKit 6.0.0. This is a major release with improved Compare Wizard, application settings management, refreshed and rebranded dark appearance, best practices customization and other enhancements. Read more about these new features.

Product version: 6.0.0
Build number: 29324
Release date: Feb 24, 2016

Click here to download new release.

Improvements

• A new built-in query will help you detect all lists with more than 5,000 items.
• Extra details regarding errors that appear during load.
• A new message box warning showing the user that the report currently being exported contains a large amount of data, and that this may influence both the memory usage and amount of time needed to finish the process.
• Actions screen now has new buttons for easier application navigation – View Snapshots, Options, SharePoint Online Management, and Permissions Wizards overview.
• Report grid messages are more detailed and directive about the missing data and exceptions that may occur.
• Features Usage reports now have a warning regarding missing license details.
• The Groups without Permissions report has been optimized.
• The Job Definitions report has been included in the farm documentation.
• The Job Definitions report now shows name of the job if the display name is missing.
• Advanced Compare ignores the installation date on the Programs List report.
• SPDocKit Extensions now support offline installation.
• Farm overview reports can be excluded from the generated documentation.
• The Snapshots tab is always visible when SPDocKit is installed on a workstation.
• The Configuration Wizard will grant a role containing all of the required permissions to a specified service account. You can find this role under the name SPDocKit_service_role.
• SPDocKit subscriptions will now automatically check to see if the checkout is required in the document library.
• Advanced Compare ignores rule number and last changed date on the managed accounts report.
• The Create Group Wizard allows you to add a group owner when creating a group.
• New query properties: Allow Designer, Sandbox Solutions Enabled, Anonymous Access Enabled, Resource Quota Exceeded, Detaching Pages Enabled, Customizing Pages Enabled, Managing URL Structure Enabled.
• The Load Wizard shows the full object URL and more detailed exception logging.
• A warning will appear if verbose logging has been turned on for SPDocKit events.

Bugs Fixed

• Resolved problem with “System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): Invalid object name ‘Options’.” exception when using a pre-created database.
• Resolved problem with “System.ArgumentException: Log entry string is too long. A string written to the event log cannot exceed 32766 characters.” exception appearing when trying to write exceptions to the event log.
• Resolved issue with List Hierarchy report duplicating list items.
• Resolved issue with user display names not being properly resolved on workstation SPDocKit version.
• Resolved problem with “Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceInCompilationException” exception appearing when trying to load farm settings when Audience Compilation is running.
• Best Practices Dashboard was missing proper column names when exported.
• SQL alias not being detected when named same as the SQL Server instance.
• If a “child” checkbox is unselected in the Best Practices dashboard, the “parent” checkbox was still shown as fully selected.
• Resolved issue with Windows Updates report not working.
• Loopback check validation was case sensitive.
• The Temp Db file path check was case sensitive.
• Resolved issue with “System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed” exception appearing when trying to generate documentation.
• Services on Server report couldn’t be sent via subscriptions.
• Resolved issues when documentation template is missing on server.
• ULS logs loading didn’t work when servers had a fully qualified domain name.
• Storage Metrics report displayed only the site collection level in the exported report version.
• Resolved issue with “System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined” exception appearing on the Search Content Sources best practices report.

Retired Features

SPDocKit 6 no longer supports SharePoint 2007 and SQL 2005. If you are a customer that uses any of these configurations, please use SPDocKit 5 to continue documenting your farms.

Click here to download new release.

For a long time, SPDocKit has allowed farm configuration to be documented and exported in a Word document. But our customers wanted a little bit more. They wanted to know whether they can provision a new farm based on an existing farm. We thought about how to make this possible, then realized that there was no need for further consideration because an ultimate tool for farm provision already exists: AutoSPInstaller.

We added support for AutoSPinstaller in SPDocKit version 5.3, and our customers were really enthusiastic about it. This made us very happy so we decided to prepare a webinar to explain how to generate an XML configuration file in SPDocKit that you can use along with AutoSPInstaller to create a new SharePoint farm that is the same as or similar to your current farm environment.

Watch the video or read the video transcript summary to learn more.

Table of contents

00:36 Introduction: Toni Frankola
01:34 SPDocKit quick overview
04:38 AutoSPInstaller overview
08:58 Use case: Copy a configuration between farms
10:15 Demo: Generate an XML file in SPDocKit
18:00 Validate the XML file with AutoSPInstaller Online
20:02 Copy the XML file to the destination farm

Video Transcript Summary

In the video, Toni will show you how to easily provision farms using the awesome community tool AutoSPInstaller and how to create templates in SPDocKit for AutoSPInstaller to create a new farm.

What is AutoSPInstaller?

AutoSPInstaller is a community project created by Brian Lalancette and the team. It’s an open-source project that helps SharePoint administrators to automatically provision SharePoint farms. AutoSPInstaller is a set up of PowerShell scripts that you can use to install and configure your SharePoint farm. When you download AutoSPInstaller you’ll see so many options and realize that it’s one of the best things in the SharePoint community.

This is how your database looks with and without AutoSPInstaller.

How does it work?

You prepare an XML file that contains all the desired services and web applications, and anything related to SharePoint that you want to provision and configure. Than you start a PowerShell script that reads all the settings from the XML file and provisions these components in your system.

Use case: Copy a configuration between SharePoint farms

Imagine a situation where developer A has a SharePoint farm (farm A) with an SQL server and two SharePoint servers. As SharePoint system administrator, you have been given the task of creating another two farms with exactly the same configuration as farm A.

In order to do that, you need to provision two new farms: farm B for developer B and farm C for developer C. Using SPDocKit and AutoSPInstaller, the configuration of SharePoint farm A can easily be copied and deployed to farms B and C.

Generate an XML file using the SPDocKit AutoSPInstaller Wizard

We wanted to provide you with a tool that can help you to generate an input XML for the AutoSPInstaller based on your existing farm file.

Start SPDocKit on SharePoint farm A, load an existing farm, and create a snapshot that contains the entire documentation of the farm. Open the snapshot and fire up the AutoSPInstaller Configuration File Wizard. Run all the required steps to create an XML file.

Webinar Wednesday is starting to look like a tradition in Acceleratio, even though our webinars are mostly held on Thursdays. The last one was no exception. Our MVP Toni Frankola hosted a session on AutoSPInstaller and SPDocKit integration, which turned out to be quite popular. Of course, with many guests attending, there were some questions. We were more than happy to answer them all, but nevertheless, here is a small recap.

Since in the webinar we talked about using SPDocKit and AutoSPInstaller as a way of creating new farms in an environment, the following questions will be in line with this topic. If you didn’t get the chance to see the webinar, navigate to this blog to see what was going on.

Questions & Answers

Q: How do you build a snapshot as presented at the beginning of the webinar? The presenter did not show this.

A: A snapshot is created when you load a farm into SPDocKit. More information about how to load a farm and the loading options can be found in this article. Based on this snapshot and the settings contained in it, the SPDocKit AutoSPInstaller wizard creates an XML input file, which is used in the actual AutoSPInstaller tool.

Q: What about SSL certificates and permissions for service applications? Is the SSL certificate configuration fully supported in AutoSPInstaller?

A: AutoSPInstaller provides some of the initial permission configuration but not custom permissions. If you need to do something like that, you have to create your own script to copy the permissions.

Q: Can it copy the content? Does it copy the content databases to the new farm?

A: AutoSPInstaller performs a base configuration, based on the source farm’s setup. It doesn’t copy the actual SP content from farm A to farm B. To copy the content, you should restore or use your existing database to restore the content database.

Q: How does this AutoSPInstaller process work on a site collection with custom workflows and solutions, if the solutions and workflows are already globally deployed on the destination farm?

A: It doesn’t. The script provisions new web apps and site collections. If you need to provision your existing custom solutions, you would need to restore your DB or provision the solutions from scratch.

Q: Will it copy over master files and other scripts or can I avoid those altogether?

A: The master files are not copied by AutoSPInstaller.

Q: Can it copy branding?

A: The branding and the master files are in the database, so unfortunately AutoSPInstaller cannot copy them automatically.

Q: Can AutoSPInstaller create a PowerPivot service application?

A: It can create a lot of applications, but unfortunately PowerPivot is not one of them.

Q: Does AutoSPInstaller allow installation of third-party solutions?

A: Not that we are aware of, but since it uses a PowerShell script, it’s easily manipulated and extended to install your custom solutions.

Q: Are AutoSPInstaller and SPDocKit viable tools for building disaster recovery environments?

A: You can use a combination of the two tools to provision a recovery farm, or do so using just the AutoSPInstaller tool.

Q: Does SPDocKit support the transition from multi-tier to a single tier?

A: The SPDocKit wizard will allow you easily to transition from multi-tier to a single-server environment and vice versa. In the webinar use case, we had two servers for farm A that could easily be mapped and transformed into the single server for farm B.

Q: Is AutoSPInstaller ready for SP 2016? What’s the ETA for SP 2016 support?

A: AutoSPInstaller is definitely up to speed with SP 2016.

Q: Can SPDocKit create an AutoSPInstaller XML file automatically or to a schedule?

A: Currently, this option is not available, since the SPDocKit wizard needs you to provide a lot of information, such as server mappings and stuff, but perhaps this will be available in a future release.

Thanks to all of you who attended, and we hope you’ll support us in our future sessions as well. If you wish to know more about AutoSPInstaller, please feel free to contact the man behind the tool, Brian Lalancette, who was among our attendees as well. Contact Brian via Twitter at @brianlala. If you think of any other questions related to SPDocKit, feel free to contact us.

In this article we discuss how to generate SharePoint documentation as well as audit farm configuration using the SPDocKit workstation license.

If you have multiple farms that you want to monitor, do it the easy way without having to use a remote connection to check out your SPDocKit reports – connect directly to the SPDocKit database from your PC workstation. The advantage of this is that you can have multiple farms connected to one SPDocKit SQL database, which you can monitor from your PC workstation. That saves you time and the inconvenience of remotely connecting to each server separately to view SharePoint configuration.

In this image you can see the SPDocKit installed on two farms (NY & DC). SPDocKit is installed on server SP1 and gathers farm snapshots. These snapshots are then consumed from the SPDocKit installed on a workstation.

With the workstation license you can:

• Manage permissions
• View reports
• Compare Farm settings and track changes
• Support one SharePoint Online tenant

Please note that the workstation instance of SPDocKit requires connection to an existing server-side SPDocKit database in order to explore reports.

SPDocKit workstation license – features and benefits

Manage permissions

Manage SharePoint permissions instantly from SPDocKit. It is not necessary to be connected to the database to manage permissions: you need to do is to add the site collections you wish to manage and to have all the required permissions.

View and inspect reports

Let’s say you needed to view certain SPDocKit reports without having been granted administrator privileges. Use your workstation license to connect from your workstation and view SharePoint farm snapshots. In order to be viewed, those snapshots need to be available in the SPDocKit SQL database or in a location that is reachable over the workstation and server. You can browse Farm Explorer reports, Permissions reports, Site Explorer reports, Best Practices, and other SPDocKit reports from your workstation by connecting directly to the SPDocKit SQL database. You can find more about features by license type here.

Farm settings comparison

Having multiple SharePoint farms for various purposes, for example DEV, production, or staging farms, can make it difficult to monitor and keep track of everything, making sure it is all set just right. To compare farms and track changes, take configuration snapshots of your farms and simply compare. To learn more about farm comparison, click here.

Connect to SharePoint Online

A workstation license not only provides a centralized way of keeping your SharePoint On-premise farms under control, but also supports SharePoint Online permissions management. Install SPDocKit on your workstation, connect to a SharePoint Online site, and modify user permissions using SPDocKit permissions wizards.

For additional information, visit our pricing page or contact the SPDocKit support team. If you wish to go into more detail with SharePoint Online permissions or Office 365 settings, we suggest you try yet another Acceleratio product – CloudKit 365.

Acceleratio Ltd. has been known for rewarding consultant expertise. Therefore, we would like to remind you that, in accordance with our regular practice, we are rewarding MVPs and RDs with a free subscription for SPDocKit – Consultant Subscription.

SPDocKit is the ultimate SharePoint management and administration tool designed for generating SharePoint farm documentation. SPDocKit helps you set up a farm based on best practices, manage permissions, track configurations, compare farms, and monitor farm health.

The aforementioned subscription covers the annual subscription for unlimited farms. To collect your free SPDocKit subscription and receive the download instructions and additional information, contact us.

Last but not least, through our Microsoft Employee Partner Program we offer the same free SPDocKit license to all Microsoft employees who have completed a valid registration via our Microsoft partner sign-up form.

In this article, we will be discussing the benefits of using SPDocKit combined with a workstation license to manage SharePoint permissions as a site collection administrator.

Managing SharePoint permissions and site collections can be more than overwhelming. First of all, it takes a lot of skill in order to manage a company’s site collections, let alone an entire SharePoint environment. And when you think about it, it takes even more time to do it manually. That’s the reason we’ve created SPDocKit.

SPDocKit is a management and administration tool designed for generating SharePoint farm documentation. SPDocKit helps you set up a farm based on best practices, manage permissions, track configurations, compare farms, and monitor farm health.

Manage SharePoint permissions like a pro

With SPDocKit, site collection management takes only a few clicks. This means that the site administrator doesn’t have to spend hours on end poking around on SharePoint. Add to that the SPDocKit workstation license, and you can do permission management wonders from your PC workstation.

Install SPDocKit on your workstation to view your site collections and modify user permissions with SPDocKit permissions wizards.

Our new workstation license allows site collection admins to avoid having to connect to the SPDocKit server in order to manage site collections and permissions. Whether you have SharePoint on-premise, SharePoint Online or a hybrid, you can view your site collections directly from your PC workstation. Keep in mind that you have to have site collection administrator permissions for this.

You can manage permissions, move users in and out of groups, break or restore permission inheritance, clone or transfer permissions, and much more. Here’s a list of things you can successfully manage from your SPDocKit PC workstation:

• Permission inheritance
• SharePoint groups
• Transfer and clone
• Site collections
• SharePoint Online permissions

SPDocKit and its multiple features make SharePoint and SharePoint clean up sound like an easy task. It gives you a better overview of your site hierarchy.

Imagine you have been assigned to set up permissions for a new employee. Then of course comes a time when once-given permissions must be moved, cloned, transferred or even removed—instance, when an employee gets transferred to a different department.

Or imagine you needed to grant an employee the exact same permissions as those of his or her team members. You can also modify permissions for a department site and create new groups and assign users to those different groups. SPDocKit wizards help you deal with these everyday SharePoint management situations and much more.

Download SPDocKit right away and see for yourself how our tool can save you the most important resources: time.

Microsoft surprised us yesterday with the announcement of SharePoint Server 2016 RTM, and we’re happy to inform you that SPDocKit welcomes it, ready to support this eagerly awaited SharePoint version.

You can try it out, or, if you still don’t use SPDocKit, download a 30-day trial here and start exploring it now.

Since we announced support for the SharePoint 2016 Preview with the SPDocKit 5.3 release, we’ve been working hard to make further improvements to be ready for this significant and valuable SharePoint release. Don’t miss the new version of SPDocKit that will be released this spring and comes with the improved MinRole support and other new functionalities.

Besides the official SharePoint 2016 release celebration in May, you’ll have the opportunity to try out the new version of your favorite SharePoint tool, and all improvements that will come along with it.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. Our support team is always ready to help.

Since our top priority is to keep our customers happy, we decided that the beginning of the year was the right time to conduct our famous SPDocKit annual satisfaction survey to find out what users think about our tool. The primary goal of this survey is to find out how satisfied our customers are with current features and other aspects of our product and which features you would like to see in future releases. In general, we wanted to get a better perspective on how well our product is performing so we can make it even better for our customers.

We are grateful to everyone for taking the time to complete the survey. We will carefully consider all responses, comments, and suggestions that we received so we can improve our product with the aim of giving you, our customers, an even better product experience.

Upon completion of the survey, everybody was automatically entered into a drawing for a chance to win an Amazon gift card. Winners will be notified via email. Congratulations to all!

Now let’s see what we found out from the surveys.

Who completed the SPDocKit survey?

The survey was completed by current SPDocKit customers, SharePoint consultants, and users who are using a trial version of the tool. After analyzing survey results and responses, we were happy to see that our long-term users gave us great feedback and suggestions. Most of them (30%) have used SPDocKit for more than one year; it’s also great to hear that users who are currently evaluating SPDocKit by using a trial version have nice comments about our tool and its features. We hope they’ll find it useful and join the other SPDocKit fans after their trial expires.

How do our respondents use SharePoint?

We were interested in knowing which version of SharePoint our respondents use. Although SharePoint Online is used by 18% of respondents, and probably that percentage will rise in the future, SharePoint 2013 is still the most popular (39%). Yet, SharePoint 2010 is pretty close (27%), and 10% of our respondents still use SharePoint 2007.

We were curious about SharePoint deployment, also. While data that we received shows that the slight majority have on-premises deployment (54%), the percentage of cloud and hybrid deployments is getting pretty close. Of course, with the growth of the cloud that’s not too surprising.

SharePoint 2013 is the most popular version (39%), and the majority have on-premises SharePoint deployment (54%).

We were wondering about future plans to invest in more SharePoint infrastructure, as well. We found that 32% of respondents are planning to invest in more on-premises farms and servers, 28% in rolling out hybrid environments, and 20% in moving everything to SharePoint Online.

SPDocKit feature usage

Now let’s get back to the SPDocKit. We’re always interested in analyzing the usage of SPDocKit features. Our team is constantly working on product improvements and your responses gave us a better picture of which features you’re satisfied or dissatisfied with, and which features we should include in our upcoming releases to make our product even better for you.

We found that the most commonly used feature of SPDocKit is SharePoint farm documentation. That alone isn’t surprising, since SPDocKit allows you to automatically create professional-looking documentation containing all the farm configuration settings. This feature is followed in popularity by the ability to generate SharePoint Best Practices and SharePoint Permissions reports. SPDocKit’s other great features, such as SharePoint farm comparison and Permissions Management, are not far behind. Speaking of Permissions Management, our respondents told us they use the SPDocKit permissions wizard mostly to manage site collections, permissions inheritance, and SharePoint groups.

One thing we really wanted to learn from this survey was which features our users would like to see in future versions of SPDocKit. We read all your suggestions and we are already working on some, such as code analysis of deployed SharePoint solutions and a new alerting engine, and planning others. Keep any eye out for future releases to see what will be improved and added.

Now that we’ve seen all the data gathered from our respondents and analyzed their issues, we’ve taken all the suggestions into consideration and have gotten back to work making SPDocKit even better. Thanks again to all our customers and SPDocKit users for completing the survey and giving us all that great feedback. We promise that we’ll use it wisely.

Check out interesting stats in the infographic below:

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

This blog post focuses on preventing encryption of your document library by ransomware such as CryptLocker.

CryptoLocker is an encrypting ransomware trojan that re-emerged in 2013. The cryptovirus operates via infected mail attachments, pop-ups and various add-ons with shady content. It encrypts all the files on the local drive after which you can no longer use them and are forced to pay a certain amount of money to the anonymous attacker in the hope of retrieving your lost data. Usually you are given 72 hours to pay the ransom in exchange for the encryption keys but have in mind that this usually turns out to be a fraud and your data is inaccessible forever.

Here’s how, as a SharePoint admin, you can avoid such notorious file-encrypting ransomware infecting your SharePoint.

If you’re worried about the virus attacking your SharePoint data, there is no reason for concern. Data stored on SharePoint is actually stored in a content database and out of reach of CryptoLocker unless the database is exposed to it. However, CryptoLocker can tend to get ugly if you store your data locally on a hard drive.

SharePoint is generally secure, but just in case you should take certain precautionary steps. There are two ways you can get attacked by such a malware: when using OneDrive for Business or when you map document libraries as network drives. To make sure you stay safe, protect your computers, don’t open suspicious mail attachments and regularly install updates.

SPDocKit cannot bulwark you from the malicious ransomware lurking about in the cyber world, but it can help you to enforce versioning on all document libraries. This way, if CryptoLocker does get through to your SharePoint, you can use the version history of the affected files on SharePoint to return to the unlocked state.

Microsoft keeps 14 days of SharePoint backups if you’re using SharePoint Online, however, you must restore the entire site collection. If you’re using SharePoint on-premise, you have to do your own backups unless you have a third-party tool that takes a backup of the entire site collection.

To enable versioning on SharePoint using SPDocKit, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Queries & Rules and then click the New Rule button in the Home ribbon.

2. For the rule type select Document Version History. Click Next to continue.

3. In the Versioning Configuration section, select Create major and minor (draft) versions. Then choose additional configuration options depending on your needs. Click Next to continue.

4. Define how your rule will be executed and select Automatic. Then set up a schedule for automatic rule execution, such as the recurrence type, start time and how often you want the rule to be executed. Click Next to continue.

5. If you wish to refine your rule, select the conditions you want to apply and click Next to continue.

6. Define how widely across your SharePoint farm this rule should be enforced. To enable versioning across your whole SharePoint farm, select Web Application for both the Scope and the Target. When done, click Finish.

Each time the SPDocKit services execute a rule, a history record is created which you can explore.

If versioning is not turned on and CryptoLocker gets hold of your files, they will be lost forever. SPDocKit helps you by making sure that versioning is set up on all document libraries at all times.

Download SPDocKit and discover new, stress-free ways to manage your SharePoint environment. Start you free 30-day trial right now! Don’t bargain for a cheap solution, choose SPDocKit.

When managing multiple environments like DEV, UAT, QA, Staging and Production we have to make sure these environments are as similar as possible. However, when it comes to managing SharePoint, each farm has hundreds of different settings that can easily diverge between farms. In this article, we are going to explain how you can use SPDocKit to compare configuration settings between farms.

Let’s get started with SPDocKit and the features that can help you compare your SharePoint farm settings!

SPDocKit offers the ability to create configuration snapshots of each farm (manually or on a predefined schedule). This is useful since multiple farms often have different software configurations that you need to adjust to be as similar as possible. For example, you need to make sure your QA, Staging and Production farms have all been configured in the same way before you begin a rollout and start testing a new feature in your farm (see figure below).

This is an example of a deployment environment. This environment usually includes stages such as development, staging and production.

To get accurate comparison results, SPDocKit supports mapping of servers, service applications, host names and farm account names. The Compare feature we offer covers all the settings from SharePoint Central Administration but also gives you the ability to compare settings on a Web application and at the Site Collection levels, as well as compare web.config files. The SPDocKit Compare Wizard not only provides a comparison between two different farms, it also offers you the ability to track changes on a single farm in different time ranges.

To find out more about how to spot differences in your farm configurations and compare farm settings with the Compare Wizard, visit our Compare SharePoint Farms help page. Experience the latest SPDocKit improvements for SharePoint administration. Download SPDocKit and start managing your SharePoint farms like a true SharePoint savvy.

Having to manage SharePoint farms tends to get difficult and you might get lost among all the data and settings. Environments may vary in performance and configuration, which is why farm comparison comes in handy. SPDocKit does that for you. And on top of the Compare SharePoint Farms feature, in SPDocKit you can compare web applications, site collections, permissions, and web.config files.

In this webinar, we show how you can compare different SharePoint farms with the ultimate SharePoint reporting tool – SPDocKit. In the video, you can find out how to utilize SPDocKit to better manage your farms, compare different snapshots, and compare permissions and web.configs.

To learn more about how you can compare different SharePoint environments, watch our SPDocKit webinar.

Table of contents

01:59 Agenda
02:47 SPDocKit Quick Overview
05:59 SPDocKit Compare Wizard Quick Overview
08:21 Demo 1: Compare different farms
19:52 Demo 2: Compare single farm over time
24:40 Demo 3: Compare Site Collections and Web Applications
28:07 Demo 4: Compare SharePoint Permissions
33:51 Demo 5: Compare Web.config files
39:02 Key Takeaways

Video transcript summary

Toni, co-founder of Acceleratio and product owner of SPDocKit, will guide you through this video presentation. Here, at Acceleratio, we make it our priority to make all sorts of system tools for SharePoint admins, as well as Windows and Office 365 admins. In this webinar you will be able to see how you can better manage your SharePoint environment, and a lot of what we have prepared for you today is based on our experience with helping different customers manage their SharePoint infrastructure and SharePoint farms.

Apart from SPDocKit, we created and offer other tools such as SysKit and CloudKit 365. SysKit is a Windows monitoring tool that helps you monitor and manage your Windows environment, servers, virtual machines, and workstations. With CloudKit 365 is our brand-new reporting tool that helps Office 365 admins gather documentation and monitor the Office 365 installation.

SPDocKit Quick Overview

SPDocKit is a tool that can save a lot of time in terms of generating documentation. It gathers all the settings from a central administration, all the web applications, service applications, and servers, so you can have an overall inventory of your entire farm. The tool, of course, has a lot more to offer than just simple farm documentation. SPDocKit can go through and document all your site collections, sites, document libraries, lists, and anything that you have in your SharePoint.

SPDocKit creates a comprehensive documentation of your permissions. You can also create different reports that help you learn how permissions are distributed to your SharePoint objects, lists, documents, folders – you name it. And we can also help you to provide different views to your permissions. We have introduced a number of new features so if you manage a SharePoint farm and you want to streamline and speed up some operations you need to perform, like granting permissions or cloning permissions from one individual to another, we have a lot of features in SPDocKit that help you achieve these things very quickly.

Along with the gathered settings from your SharePoint environment, SPDocKit can check your configuration best practices and determine if something was misconfigured. This is especially helpful if you’re managing a large farm, or if you have an outside vendor helping you configure your SharePoint farm. You can use the tool to verify that the project that was delivered to you was delivered in the proper way. Also, you have the option of changing the values of the best practices to match whatever operational best practices you have in your company.

Compare SharePoint farm settings

SPDocKit has five compare options that give you the ability to compare different, as well as the same, farms over different time periods. Additionally, you can compare all the individual elements in SharePoint to track changes and see if there are some changes that shouldn’t be there. This is especially helpful if you’re managing a larger SharePoint environment where you have multiple farms.

For example, we work with a lot of customers who have a number of farms like development, production, QA, and staging farms. SPDocKit can then compare farms to make sure that these environments are as similar as possible – that they are configured in the same way.

Use snapshots and track changes

SPDocKit can be configured to run snapshots on a scheduled basis. For most customers, we recommend running them at least once a day to have a history of all the settings and all configurations over time. You can mark some configurations as good and, at some point, when you are sure that this farm is properly configured, you can easily go back and see what has changed. Configure these comparisons to be delivered to you via email to receive notifications if something has changed. The system can run pretty much on its own without you intervening on a daily basis.

Compare different SharePoint farms

In SPDocKit you can compare different SharePoint farms, which comes in handy if you have production, staging, and development farms. Sometimes it’s very challenging to ensure that these farms are identical. They are not identical in the terms of number of servers. Many customers want to ensure that farms are as similar as possible to one another in terms of settings, features they use and features they deliver to their end users.

Typically, for many customers, development and staging farms are not in the same domain as the main production farm. This means you are using different accounts, that you have something different in terms of where you back up your databases, etc. With SPDocKit, you can map different servers. You can even map different URLs.

Configure single farms

Another typical scenario is when you want to track changes over time in a single farm. SPDocKit can create a snapshot for you on a scheduled basis. You can have a database of snapshots and then go through the snapshots to make comparisons of your farm during the course of time.

For example, you can compare two snapshots and see that someone had, at some point, upgraded a farm to a different cumulative update and the versions don’t match. Then, if you are having problems, you will know it is because that farm was patched with a different patch level. It can be very helpful to detect when some particular change has been performed.

Compare Site Collections and Web Applications

You can compare settings on an individual web application or site collection. This can be useful because you can compare not just site collections or web applications from a single farm, but also two different applications from two different farms. In every SPDocKit Compare Wizard you have the option to select only differences, show objects that are different, or objects that are equal, and save the report you are seeing on the screen in a PDF format and easily distribute it to members of your team who are interested in this particular comparison.

Compare SharePoint permissions

SPDocKit can also create a snapshot of all your SharePoint permissions and show you when permissions change.

For example, in a situation where somebody contacts you from your end-users or power users and says: “Ok, Toni, yesterday I was able to access the project site, but today when I went to the Project site, it says I don’t have permissions.” Use SPDocKit to dig deeper and see how these two sites changed over time by comparing snapshots.

You can even compare different sites. This can be very helpful if you’re trying to troubleshoot something and trying to find out how two sites or anything in SharePoint are different, and how the changes have been implemented. Especially if you have a larger organization, you can easily drill down to individual objects.

Compare Web.config files

This is more in the area of farm configuration and it’s especially useful in two scenarios: when you have multiple web front ends that might potentially have different web.configs or when you have a farm where you have developers deploying custom solutions that require some changes to be made to web.config.

To ensure that you have web.config for a particular web application and particular zone configured in the exactly the same way, SPDocKit helps track the differences between different web.config files. During our snapshot-taking process, SPDocKit takes your web.config files and analyzes them to show you the potential differences between the two snapshots.

On top of our compare wizard for web.configs, we can do one additional thing for you. SPDocKit comes with the Best Practices analyzer, which analyzes all the settings according to Microsoft operational best practices, but we also have one best practice that does comparison of web files. After every snapshot, we compare all the web.configs and see if there are any differences in web.configs where somebody was deploying some solution and the web.config update might not work.

For Q&A and webinar recap, check our blog post.

Let managing your SharePoint farms be a pleasant experience – download SPDocKit!

Because of your growing interest in SPDocKit and SharePoint related topics, our webinars have become a regular thing here at Acceleratio. And so, our MVP Toni Frankola held a SPDocKit webinar on the subject of SharePoint farm comparisons.

Just in case you missed it, check out our previous blog post to catch up! In this webinar, Toni provides a step-by-step understanding of some of the key benefits of SPDocKit and how the tool can help you administer your SharePoint environment better. After the webinar, our webinar attendees were quite inquisitive, so we’ve gathered all of their questions and concerns in an effort give additional information and advice. However, if you have any more questions or you would like a demo, contact us.

Questions & Answers

Q: Do you install the tool on just one node for each farm?
A: Yes, this is correct. You just need to install it on one server, ideally one of the servers that runs background processing jobs like the one that hosts Central Administration or one of your app servers.

Q: Do I have to install SPDocKit in the development or in production environment?
A: SPDocKit needs to be installed on a SharePoint server in each of the two farms mentioned above. You can connect both instances to the same SPDocKit database and then you will easily be able to compare farms and snapshots. Learn more.

Q: We’re using four different environments: development, test, staging and production. Is it possible to get three licenses for the non-production environments?
A: Yes, it is. We offer non-prod licenses. In your case, you would have to purchase a single farm license with software assurance for your production environment and staging environment, and two non-production licenses for your dev and test farms.

Q: Our DEV/PROD environments use exactly the same DB / user accounts. So how does it discover both farms?
A: You would have to install SPDocKit in both farms in order to gather farm configuration for both farms.

Q: How is SPDocKit workstation licensed? Can it check and manage permissions?
A: SPDocKit Workstation requires a separate license that can be purchased for USD 299 per workstation. Ideally you would combine your workstation with existing farm licenses, i.e. connect it to the same SPDocKit database. With this setup, you can use the workstation to its full extent with all reports being available. On top of that, you can use the workstation to manage permissions on all your licensed on-premises farms and up to one SharePoint online tenant. Learn more.

Q: Are ALL the reports and interfaces identical using the new workstation license since I do not have access to the data center (no farm admin access)?
A: Yes, they are. You have three options. (1) If you can connect to the SPDocKit database, then you can use the reports from the database. (2) Farm snapshots can be stored to a file share, and you can use your workstation to import these. (3) You can ask someone who has access to the farm and SPDocKit to export snapshots for you.

Q: Can SPDocKit generate a comparison report? And is it possible for it to show only differences?
A: Yes, you can export differences in PDF format.

Q: Can the tool compare IIS settings?
A: Yes, you can compare SharePoint, SQL and IIS settings.

Q: Can you help us setup and run the first comparison between our farms?
A: Of course. Just contact us and we will arrange a support call.

Q: Can you please give some advice/best practice for documenting and then comparing multiple farms? Can we use just one DB as stated earlier?
A: Yes, just connect all the farms to a single SPDocKit database. As long as your farms can connect to this central database you should not have any problems. SPDocKit snapshots are relatively small, so having multiple farms in the same database should not be a problem. You can further restrict the growth of the SPDocKit database by enabling data retention.

Q: How long does it take to generate a snapshot for a large farm?
A: It’s really hard to tell. Creating a snapshot of all the farm settings even for the largest of the largest farms should not take more than an hour. (Some customers experience delays when they try to load all the installed applications, updates and pending updates from all the Windows servers in a farm. We have made this step optional, to make the load more efficient). For permissions load, this really depends on the kind of content you have in your content database. If a significant percentage of your sites, lists, libraries, folders, list items and documents have unique permissions with lots and lots of users, then the load may take a lot of time. If you are not sure how this is going to work for you and your farm environment, we recommend that you start with just the farm settings and then gradually expand while monitoring farm performance.

Q: Can consultants set snapshots to run automatically?
A: When you are using SPDocKit with the consultant license, you cannot schedule snapshots to be created automagically, but you can create them manually.

Q: If a scheduled snapshot fails for any reason, does it generate an alert or an email to inform the user?
A: Unfortunately, it does not. But that’s a great idea, and we will try to implement it in one of the future releases.

Q: At the moment we are using SPDocKit v5. Can we seamlessly upgrade to v6? Can we retain our settings?
A: Yes, SPDocKit fully supports in-place upgrades. All your settings will be preserved when you upgrade to v6. Please bear in mind that v6 does not support SharePoint 2007.

Q: Does a site collection comparisons reveal differences between what features are active?
A: Yes, it does.

Q: Does the user running SPDocKit ever require more than read permissions on the SharePoint farm?
A: No, they only require read permissions. Check our help page for more details. The only exception is Permission Management. If you would like to use this, you must have the right privileges to manage permissions in SharePoint.

Q: How long are logs kept when comparing permissions?
A: The simple answer is: indefinitely. However, to curtail the growth of the SPDocKit database, we would recommend enabling data retention.

Q: What’s the story behind the whale logo?
A: Great question! Our company, Acceleratio, was founded and is based in Croatia. You might have seen our beautiful Adriatic coast as the King’s Landing in the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. The Croatian word, “kit” translates to “whale”. And due to our inspiration and enchantment with the seaside, we decided to choose a whale logo for our products.

A big thank you goes to all the attendees of our webinar. We appreciate your many questions and hope you’ll join us in the next webinar with as much enthusiasm. If you have additional questions that we didn’t cover in this blog post, don’t hesitate to contact us.

We have shipped SPDocKit 6.1.0. This is a minor release with improved permission differences comparison, SharePoint 2016 MinRoles support, role based security, enahanced Principals filters possibilities and SPCAF collaboration. Read more about these new features.

Product version: 6.1.0
Build number: 31457
Release date: May 18, 2016

Click here to download new release.

Features

• Role Based Security – grant different access levels to employees using SPDocKit. There are two predefined roles: Admins and Viewers. The wizard allows you to create custom roles that best suit your needs. You can choose which SPDocKit element a specific user has access to and which reports he/she can use.
• Track Permissions Changes – the new compare wizard subtype provides an easy overview of all permission differences across a selected site collection. This report can track changes in principals’ permissions, permissions inheritances, and the AD state down to the list-item level.
• SharePoint 2016 MinRole support – SPDocKit reports now use server classifications according to assigned roles. The Farm Topology and Server List reports have been updated with new server roles and a new MinRole best practices report was added. This will help you detect services that are causing your server to be out of role compliance.
• Megafilters – expandable principal filters allow you to filter permissions reports by principals’ usernames, display names, or even email addresses.
• SPCAF and SPDocKit collaboration – These new SPDocKit extension reports help you analyze your farm customizations using SPCAF reports. The following reports are available: Analysis Summary, Code Quality, Code Metrics, Code Dependencies, and Code Inventory.
• IIS Log Path Report -new best practices report that checks whether IIS log and database files are located on the primary drive.
• Automatic Index Reorganization – SPDocKit system job that was created to improve SPDocKit database space usage and enhance report-generating performance. This job will be run outside your normal business hours.
• Site Explorer reports are again part of the SPDocKit farm documentation.
• If you want to trace which content type has been published from the content type hub or which type was custom created by a user, the Content Type Hierarchy report will now give you this information.
• It is now possible to provide custom credentials when connecting to SharePoint on-premises sites using SPDocKit on a workstation.
• You can now schedule subscription reports to be sent right after a farm snapshot has been created.

Improvements

• By default, snapshots are stored in the SPDocKit database.
• We’ve developed a better user experience in the Take Snapshot wizard regarding errors. If you have more than 1000 site collections, the Take Snapshot wizard will show you just a list of the site collections in which some sort of problem occurred. Successfully loaded site collections will not be displayed.
• Farm settings are now loaded by default, and they cannot be excluded when taking a farm snapshot.
• The results of the Web.config file comparison can now be saved as an .html file in case the report cannot be displayed correctly within SPDocKit.
• We added a warning message that alerts you when the SPDocKit service is not running even though it has been properly configured.
• The User Permissions Details report now supports multiple site collection selections. To change the selected site collection threshold limit, use the general options.
• We added an Add to Group option to the permissions management ribbon. You can use this option to add selected principals (users or AD groups) to the desired SharePoint group.
• The Delete Group Management action now supports multiple group selections.
• You can now delete groups without permissions directly from the permissions manage ribbon using the delete button regardless of the SharePoint object on which you are located.
• The scope of the Clean Site Collection wizard has been extended to the entire web application. In addition, we added more severe confirmation actions to the Clean Site Collection wizard.
• The Orphaned Users report is now separated into categories depending on the user’s state in the AD. The same classification is visible within the Clean Site Collection wizard for a better user experience.
• A View in SharePoint button was added to the Storage Metrics report. This button takes you directly to the selected SharePoint object.
• License Management now supports multiple farm license definitions.
• We optimized the Number of Users report generation.
• Error messages throughout the application have a new look. The error message box now provides more details for easier troubleshooting of problems.
• The Test Subscriptions action gives a wider overview of the performed action and issues that may have appeared.
• The Best Practices documentation contains the name of the farm in which the snapshot was taken.
• The Content DB Disk and Log Usage reports provide better detection of whether the information about the database size has been loaded in the available snapshots.
• The version number of the loaded WSPs has been added to the Solutions report.
• We implemented miscellaneous Best Practices report improvements for data sorting and report column names.
• We made minor improvements in the Generate AutoSPInstaller XML configuration file wizard.
• Permissions reports now show broken permission inheritance marks within the reports grid.
• The Crawl Database and Managed Properties best practices reports have been updated with SharePoint 2016 limits.
• The Configuration wizard now shows all steps performed during SPDocKit setup.

Bugs Fixed

• Resolved issue with the “System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘System.DBNull’ to type ‘System.String’” exception appearing in the Generate AutoSPInstaller XML file wizard.
• Resolved issue with the “Could not load file or assembly ‘Acceleratio.Common.Office365’ or one of its dependencies.” exception appearing because the wrong runtime version for SharePoint 2016 was configured when trying to use SPDocKit in run mode.
• Resolved issue with list items not being properly displayed within the document sets on live Permissions Explorere view.
• Resolved issue with errors occurring while taking a farm snapshot because of duplicate principal names.
• Resolved issue with the Go Live button appearing for non-local farms.
• Resolved issue with errors occurring while taking a farm snapshot due to a missing workflow definition.
• Resolved issue with errors occurring when trying to resolve AD group members when they contain a user that has been deleted in a different domain.
• Resolved errors appearing when taking a farm snapshot if the managed paths are not properly configured.
• Resolved issue with the Number of Application Pools best practices report not checking whether web application pools have been started.
• Resolved issue with WSP analysis failing because SPDocKit cannot resolve the framework version for a specific DLL; the result was missing information about a problematic DLL in the Solution Assembly Deployment Valid best practices report.
• Resolved issue with snapshots not being properly detected from the custom-named snapshots folder.
• Resolved issue with SPDocKit detecting and loading distribution group information for permissions reports.
• Resolved issue with Web.config compare not working properly.
• Resolved issue with the Site Visitors report containing GUIDs instead of usernames.
• Resolved issue with the Scheduled Tasks report not being exported properly.

Deprecated Reports

• Excel Services reports for SharePoint 2016.

Click here to download new release.

Even though it’s only been three months since our last release, we’ve already come up with another SPDocKit release. SPDocKit 6.1 is knocking on your door.

SPDocKit 6.1 brings a couple of new features that you, our dear customers, requested through surveys or the support channel. We hope you like using them as much as we enjoyed developing them.

Click here to download new release

Let’s take a tour of the newest additions in this version. For more information about other improvements, please check our official release note.

Role Based Security

This feature is the biggest change in the SPDocKit architecture and the reason for the name of this blog post. We have been asked many times if more-granular access can be granted to SPDocKit users, so we finally took the leap towards developing role-based security.

This feature allows you to grant users limited access based on SPDocKit elements or their SharePoint permissions. For example, you can grant your analysts access to the Farm Explorer and Best Practices reports only so they can keep track of the farm health, or you can give site collection administrators the ability to manage their site collection permissions only.

SharePoint farm administrators no longer have to be the only ones who can use SPDocKit. Divide the responsibility across the entire company and be sure that SPDocKit endless capabilities are used to the limit. Install SPDocKit on workstations, add SPDocKit users to a desired security level role and let them help you keep your SharePoint farm in the optimal state.

Track Permissions Changes

Another question we’ve been asked many times is “Can SPDocKit help me track permission changes on my SharePoint sites?” So far, the answer wasn’t entirely satisfactory. Yes, some of the permission reports and compare options can give you the desired information, but not in a perfect way.

Our new type of comparison, Permissions Differences, gives you a perfect way to keep track of permission changes across an entire site collection. This report gives you complete insight into which principal has been added, what type of permission has been granted or removed, which sites had permission inheritances broken or restored, and even if a user’s state in the AD has changed.

SharePoint 2016 MinRoles Support

SharePoint 2016 was officially released, and while SPDocKit 6.0 already had it covered, in SPDocKit 6.1 we added MinRole support. SPDocKit reports now use a new server classification based on the assigned MinRole.

We also added a MinRole Compliance best practices report to help you detect any role compliance issues in your farm servers. The report will provide a list of services causing these issues.

The Expandables

In the last couple of months, we received many inquiries about filtering permissions reports by the principals’ email or domain. The new principals filter, which we like to call the Megafilter, can search by display name, username (domain), or email.

Use the little orange arrow in the upper-right corner to expand the default filter view and combine all three search types to get the desired information.

SPCAF Collaboration

Rencore GmbH and Acceleratio Ltd. decided to team up and deliver an SPDocKit extension that allows you to analyze your farm solutions within SPDocKit using SPCAF reports.

SPCAF is a great tool that will help you detect harmful customizations and analyze customizations’ code quality, dependencies, complexity, and more. Visit SPCAF to learn more about the available reports.

For more information about other improvements, please check our official release note.

Give it a try and send us your suggestions!

We are very happy that we can introduce you to our new collaboration, which has resulted in an awesome new reporting solution in SPDocKit. Rencore GmbH and Acceleratio Ltd. decided to team up and deliver a new SPDocKit extension that allows you to analyze your farm solutions within SPDocKit using SPCAF reports. Let us explain how it works and give you more information about this pretty useful feature.

Analyze your SharePoint environment to protect it from harmful customizations!

If you often think that you are loosing control over SharePoint customizations, are not sure if everything is working properly, and wanna check if there is some bad code, this is the solution you are looking for! An issue in the code can have a critical impact on farm supportability, performance, security, and stability.

These reports use the SPCAF engine to analyze your SharePoint Farm solution packages. SPCAF is a SharePoint Code Analysis Framework that helps you get deep insight into your SharePoint customizations to avoid stability risks. It is very useful for administrators, architects, quality managers, as well as developers.

SPCAF can analyze far more than just Farm solution packages (whether they are sandboxed solutions or add-ins), and SPDocKit gives you a taste of that functionality. It will scan all the XML, .net (by decompiling the dlls), JavaScript, etc., code within the selected solutions and apply hundreds of rules to check if everything works correctly and according to best practices.

By default, SPDocKit provides the SPCAF Summary Report to all SPDocKit users (from version 6.1). If an SPCAF license is provided, the other reports (Code Quality, Code Metrics, Code Dependencies, Code Inventory) also become functional and available.

This feature became available with version 6.1; read more about this product update.

SharePoint is quite often characterized as an easy-to-use solution and let’s face it – it isn’t. However beneficial SharePoint might be as a centralized document repository, the more you use it and explore its endless capabilities, the more you become aware of the fact that it doesn’t always do exactly what you need it to do. What that means for your company is that you need to have a very skillful SharePoint administrator who can tackle the issues. If you’re a SharePoint and PowerShell savvy, there isn’t a thing that you can’t achieve and implement but the thing is, all of those great additions are custom dev.

When a company uses SharePoint on a daily basis, you as a SharePoint admin, will certainly realize that there are a large number of site collections that need administering. That, of course, calls for some kind of storage reporting for you to figure out which documents and items are using the most storage space. That’s where the matter can spiral out of control.

So before you start pulling your hair out from despair, try this:

Get acquainted with SPDocKit, the ultimate SharePoint admin tool built for every environment. SPDocKit Storage Metrics report can ease your SharePoint troubles.

Get insights into SharePoint storage metrics with SPDocKit

SharePoint’s own storage usage reports can be tricky to dig out. The platform provides these metrics and data but they are so well hidden, why bother digging them up or using PowerShell sorcery when you can get them in 3 clicks with SPDocKit?

To report on SharePoint storage metrics with SPDocKit, start SPDocKit and navigate to Content & Usage Reports > Content Usage > Storage Metrics.

With SPDocKit you can view the SharePoint storage space used by each SharePoint object on your farm. You can even view the object’s share size relative to the total size of the content database. That means you’ll know the total usage of the site collection and can see when it reaches the site collection’s quota. This comes in handy when you need to find documents and items that are using the most space and remove them if you are nearing the storage quota. But before you start spree of deleting all unnecessary items, use SPDocKit to find out which users are hoarding files. Having accurate SharePoint storage metrics can give you insights on whether or not you have to buy more storage.

Smash SharePoint barriers, download SPDocKit!

A free 30-day trial is available so give SPDocKit a go. Feel free to contact us with any questions or even suggestions. We’d like to hear from you!

A week ago, we presented a webinar about upgrading to SharePoint 2016 and we were honored to have an awesome presenter: Todd Klindt, a well-known, respected SharePoint MVP and SharePoint architect. We were very happy to see so many people in the audience, and we hope you are now ready to conquer the upgrade process.

Since this is a very complex, time-consuming process, we decided to reveal you SPDocKit’s emergency kit for SharePoint upgrade. Below, we list some very useful, time-saving features.

Inventory check

Upgrading SharePoint has changed so much, as Todd mentioned in his presentation. Back when you used SharePoint 2003 or 2007, you had a few options: Gradual Upgrade, Database Attach Upgrade, and In-Place Upgrade. Now, when you upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016, the only method available is Database Attach, and you can use all the content databases. So what could cause problems at this stage?

You need to be able to identify absolutely every database you will need in the upgrade process, which may be time consuming! To save time, use SPDocKit to perform an inventory check! It can help you detect and list all the content databases, site collections, web applications, etc., and it will show you the size, usage, number of files, and other important information for each database. You will also be able to check all the service applications you will need to set up in your new farm. This will help you estimate how long will it take to migrate and upgrade your databases.

Custom Solutions Analysis

As Todd said, you should ask yourself whether you need each of the solutions you deployed in your current farm. You should check if it comes as out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2016 or if you need to modify it. Farm solutions are extremely invasive, and they can easily create unexpected behaviors. Use SPDocKit to easily backup, identify, and analyze your customized solution files (.wsp). If you think some solutions may be critical, you can download them from SharePoint, examine them more closely, and decide whether to remove them before you start the upgrade process. If you are interested in this topic, you can read more.

Compare Farms and Security Check

As we all know, each farm has hundreds of different settings that can easily diverge between farms, and you need to make sure your new farm is as similar as possible to the old one. SPDocKit will help you compare your old and new farms to make sure you have the same configurations for both farms (for example, you can compare farms, web applications, site collections, and web.config files).

You can also use SPDocKit to conduct security checks. You can easily see who has administrator rights on the old farm and use the same settings on your new farm or change them according to your needs.

Best Practices Analysis

During the planning and upgrading process, you can audit your farm configuration using the SharePoint Best Practices check. SPDocKit supports SharePoint 2016. If something has changed or is not configured according to these best practices, you can check it here.

Analyze Content and Plan with Other Departments

Since you can list all the databases and site collections along with their owners, size, and other information, you can use this information to plan for and schedule upgrades with other business departments. You can ask those departments to decide which of these they still need and schedule upgrades. Content reports can show you site structures, and you can use this information as you discuss content and determine which content you don’t need anymore. Storage metrics reports can be very useful, especially when you need to identify the largest files, determine why some site collections are much larger than others, and learn whether size increases are caused by files with numerous versions. SPDocKit’s queries and rules can help you identify critical libraries and much more.

Good luck with your upgrade!

An upgrade to SharePoint 2016 can be a great opportunity to clean up your farm, filter important content to perform upgrade more efficiently, and create new farm with the best possible configuration and with content you actually need.