As I mentioned was my plan yesterday, I was able to spend some time familiarizing myself with SharePoint Analyzer today. I was even afforded an additional, unexpected opportunity to do so in that I was asked to replace the version of the tool on my Virtual PC with a different version. In so doing, I was able to experience the setup process, and I'm pleased to report that the setup is so easy that even an end user (that would be me) can get the job done. Essentially, all it takes is running the Setup.bat file, following the prompts, and presto, you've got SharePoint Analyzer.
While SharePoint Analyzer is intended primarily as a tool for use by Administrators, and it seems rather unlikely that a (pure) end user would typically have a need for such a tool, for an end user who's interested in learning more about how SharePoint works and, in particular, the topography of a SharePoint deployment, the Analyzer allows you to take a walk through your SharePoint neighborhood (if you will) and get a pretty solid idea of what's going on throughout your SharePoint environment. Needless to say, a pure end user probably wouldn't be likely to have the permissions to install such a tool, but if you're curious and you ask your Admin nicely, maybe they'd give you a tour? Heck, I'm "just" an end user (though it's my philosophy that at the end of the day, we're all end users), and I find it pretty interesting.
Before I go any further, I feel I should mention that in the event you may find my (admittedly biased) word as to the usefulness of the tool to be suspect, SharePoint Analyzer was recently named one of the best free SharePoint downloads by none other than MOSS MVP, Eli Robillard.
I think I mentioned SharePoint Analyzer's ease-of-use yesterday, but that was based on having seen a demo of the tool. Now I can testify from personal experience to not only the ease-of-use, but to the completely intuitive nature of the user interface. At startup, here's what SharePoint Analyzer looks like:
Eagle-eyed readers will note that it's version 1.2 that's pictured. Version 1.1 is the currently released build, but our Engineers have been hard at work on the next point release, and we're anticipating its release early next week.
Expanding the Farm category will show the sub-categories Servers, Services, Feature Definitions, Solutions, and Account Security, each of which may, in turn, be expanded. For instance, the Server path will show all servers, and you can expand each server to see the associated Service Instances, Web Applications, and Log File. Following the Web Applications path further, for example, you can see every Web Part installed on that server. Drilling down to a specific Web Part, the Page Viewer Web Part, for example, will result in this display:
Clicking the View Schema tab (next to the Properties tab/display pictured in the image above) will reveal the schema for the Web Part:
The above UI follows through for the remainder of the categories in the tree, with Central Administration found within the Services space. Since Central Admin is essentially just another service, we treat it as such in the tree along with all other services.
Feature Definitions includes the sub-categories Farm, Web Application, Site Collection, and Site.
Solutions lists all solutions which have been installed throughout the farm, with informational tabs for Properties, Solutions Assemblies & Code Access Security, and the Location(s) of that solution in the farm (including the Page Name and a clickable URL to render the page, along with checkboxes to indicate if it's closed or hidden if it's a Web Part).
The Bamboo Products section is your one-stop shop for detailed information on all Bamboo products in your environment, and will include helpful notations such as whether there are newer versions available for download.
System Information includes System Updates (Hotfixes) and Microsoft SharePoint Info.
Database Info provides detailed information on all databases associated with your deployment.
Finally, we've embedded the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer in our SharePoint Analyzer, and running and displaying the best practices report is as simple as clicking the Run the Analyzer button. Here's what the results looked like for me after doing so:
Future plans towards making SharePoint Analyzer a fully-featured best practices tool include speaking with thought leaders about incorporating their best practices recommendations into the tool, and I hope to start those conversations with a few key individuals who will be present at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference next week. We also intend to provide full support for the upcoming Office 14 release with future versions of SharePoint Analyzer.
If you'll be attending the Best Practices SharePoint Conference next week, be sure to stop by the Bamboo Cabana session on Wednesday morning for a SharePoint Analyzer demonstration and discussion. If you can't be there in person, we'll be providing full conference coverage on the Bamboo Team Blog. (As a consequence, SharePoint Blank will be going dark for most of the week, but I'll be back in action here just as soon as my conference-related blogging duties have wrapped up.)
Reminder: More detailed information, including a link to the free download of SharePoint Analyzer, is available in the blog Introducing Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer, authored by the tool's lead Engineer.
Posted
Jan 30 2009, 06:48 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.