TE2008 Session Notes: MOSS 2007 Lifecycle Management: Methodologies, Tools, Best Practices

I thought I would upload my raw notes from Tech Ed 2008 Orlando in case they're of use to anyone. Hope these make some sense...

The first session I caught was given by Luis Camara Manoel and Satish Mathew, who are Program Managers at Microsoft. They gave a demo of new reporting tools which help to manage and report on SharePoint usage in an organization. The question they posed was:

How can you govern SharePoint if you don’t know what is out there? Discovery is required.

The emphasis of this session was on the following utilities.

SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool

Agentless utility; crawls network and reports on deployment and topology inventory.

How it works – runs WMI call to see if IIS is running somewhere. Then sees what web apps IIS is running.

Therefore “agentless” and CPU intensive only on the client, not the server (because it makes SOAP calls as if it were one user requesting).

Download: Currently in beta.

Executive Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc295797(TechNet.10).aspx

SharePoint Capacity Planner

Helps see impact of various device utilizations: CPU, Network, Disk IO.

Steps to use: Assess, Recommend ,Simulate, Report. Can export models to Visio and Excel for further work.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=DBEE0227-D4F7-48F8-85F0-E71493B2FD87&displaylang=en

Executive Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988(TechNet.10).aspx

SharePoint Cross Configurator

Solution Deployment Package to enable / disable features and configuration. Includes audit, expiration policies, content types, master page deployment and enablement. Source code available in CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/SPConfigurator.

Leverages stsadm and makecab. To use: provide app.config file to setup.bat.

The tool will run against existing site collections only; new site collections will inherit the default settings. Only works across site collections, not across farms

Download: http://www.codeplex.com/SPConfigurator

Executive Overview: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/06/standardization-with-cross-site-collection-sharepoint-configurator.aspx

SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit

WSS / MOSS/ SQL / IIS Health roll-up

Uses System Center Operations Manager.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E4600FD9-F53D-4DED-88BF-6BB1932794F9&displaylang=en

Executive Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb975149(TechNet.10).aspx