Executive Summary:
Previous Microsoft Office versions could be deployed using Group Policy Software Installation (GPSI). However, it's not recommended that you deploy Microsoft Office 2007 using GPSI. Instead, you must use Systems Management Server (SMS) or System Center Configuration Manager to do so, or find an alternative, more cost-effective deployment method.
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Each new version of SharePoint has
brought changes in the options for
managing it via a graphical UI. The
current versions of SharePoint—Windows
SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007—provide
a Web UI called Central Administration.
This application lets you manage the Share-
Point farm at different levels—from individual
services on servers to Web applications to
shared services.
However, some operations, for example
changing the schedule of a background
task or setting the diacritical sensitivity on
a search index, aren’t exposed through the
UI. To perform such operations, SharePoint
administrators need to call upon the stsadm
.exe command-line utility. Let’s look at what
Stsadm is, some of the operations it supports,
and how you can use it to automate common
management tasks.
Stsadm
Stsadm has been shipping with SharePoint
products since its inception. It helps IT pros
perform operations that can’t be done through
Central Administration and automate and
batch operations that would take longer to
complete using the Web interface. Indeed, the
tool’s name alone gives us a clue to how long it’s
been around: The first real SharePoint offering
was called SharePoint Team Services (STS),
and it primarily was managed via Stsadm.
Each SharePoint release has significantly
extended the operations that Stsadm can perform,
and today, MOSS has 183 operations
that the utility can perform. You can extend
the functionality of Stsadm by adding other
operations to it, which is useful for third parties
that layer applications on top of SharePoint.
It’s also useful for extending the base capability
of SharePoint. You can find information
about how to extend Stsadm in the Windows
SharePoint Services Software Development
Kit (SDK) at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1c64af62-c2e9-4ca3-a2a0-7d4319980011&displaylang=en.
You’ll find Stsadm on any server that has
had either WSS or MOSS installed on it. It’s
located in the \%ProgramFiles%\Common
Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\ folder. That’s a long path to
have to navigate to whenever you want to use
Stsadm, so the first thing I recommend is to set
up a command prompt short cut that starts in
this folder. Note that to run Stsadm, you must
be a member of the local Administrator’s group
on the server.
You control what each operation does by
passing it relevant parameters. You can see the
syntax for each operation by opening a command
line and typing
stsadm –help
You can dump the list of all operations by using
Stsadm with no parameters. Microsoft provides
more information about Stsadm at technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/5beaaf55-b77c-442d-88f5-eb9672f82e661033.mspx and technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/2c5896ac-edf6-4c2db750-995bbb66909c1033.mspx?mfr=true and
via the WSS and MOSS SDKs, but the information
isn’t complete. Therefore, trial and
error may be required to achieve the desired
result. You can also find documentation for
commands that aren’t available from the UI at
technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/188f006d-aa66-4784-a65b-a31822aa13f71033.mspx?mfr=true.
The output of an operation will differ for
each operation and may or may not be useful
for automating common management tasks.
For example, the enumsites operation, which
enumerates the site collections in a Web application,
produces XML output that you can subsequently
parse to perform mass management
tasks on all site collections. Figure 1,
shows the site collections that were enumerated
from a Web application whose URL is moss.spysrus.com/. Attributes within each XML
node provide further information, such as the
content database and storage limits associated
with each site collection, so you could use this
functionality to move all the site collections in
one content database to another.
5 Favorite Stsadm Operations
It would be impossible to go through all 183
Stsadm operations, so here I highlight five
of my favorites. I selected these operations because they’re likely to be used in most Share-
Point installations.
MigrateUser. When a user is granted access
to a site collection, certain details about the user
are written to the UserInfo table in the back-end
Microsoft SQL database. One such detail is the
user’s SID, which ultimately controls access to the
site collection. Should the user’s SID change for
any reason—for example, if his or her AD account
is moved to a different domain—the user loses
access to existing site collections because the old
SID is still in the database. You can use the migrateuser
operation to fix the problem. This feature
reads the old and new logon details and updates
the relevant details in the database.
Createsiteinnewdb. Every site collection
exists in only one content database. By this I
mean that all the content from all the sites and
subsites within the collection are stored in the
same database. When you create a site collection
through the UI or through the createsite
operation in Stsadm, the content database that
houses the collection is the one that is currently
least full in terms of the number of site
collections that it can host. The createsiteinnewdb
operation is especially useful for situations
when you want to target a particular site
to a particular content database—for example,
certain sites may have particular service level
agreements (SLAs) associated with them and
are therefore stored on separate SQL servers.
Backup. The backup operation lets you
back up individual site collections as well as the
entire farm (including search indexes) to disk.
The ability to back up site collections is useful if
you have crucial sites that need to be backed up
more frequently than your regular backup. You
can create a single file that contains everything
within a site collection, and you can automate
the backup through a scheduled recurring
task. You can also use the export operation
to produce a backup file that doesn’t contain
the full contents of the site collection or farm.
For example you can omit item versions, thus
reducing the size of the backup file.
Restore. Of course having a backup of a site
collection is pretty useless if you can’t restore
the site collection if need be. The restore operation
can take a file created using the backup
operation and restore a full fidelity copy of the
site collection, either by overwriting the existing
site collection or creating a brand new site
collection. This operation is useful for making
copies of site collections for testing/debugging
purposes (e.g., copying a production site collection
to a test or staging farm).
SetProperty. The setproperty operation,
along with its counterpart getproperty, is used
to set attributes on many different SharePoint
components. For example, you can use the jobusage-
analysis property to control the frequency
and time of day for usage-analysis processing on
the server. Similarly, there are properties that
control the frequency and time that the server
sends out alerts. You can see a list of the configurable
properties by typing the command
stsadm –o setproperty
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