Monday 14 April 2014

Create SharePoint Site Map using Visio

Having a well-planned Information Architecture is critical for the success of a SharePoint implementation.

Also Mapping out our SharePoint environment helps us a lot in day to day administration and up-gradation.

Below are the steps using which we can create a visual sites map in Visio which can be exported into various formats or hosted using SharePoint Visio service as a webpage.

Steps 

 

On the SharePoint server, open the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and perform the following command:

Get-SPWebApplication https://portal.contoso.com | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | Select Title, URL, ID, ParentWebID | Export-CSV C:\InfoArch.csv -NoTypeInformation 




Open the CSV file in Excel.



To link all of the Site Collections to the Root Site Collection, replace all ParentWebID’s that are “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000″ (minus the Root’s) with the ID from the Root Site Collection. So, in our example, all of the “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000″ values would be replaced by the ID of the Root Site Collection “0c187a2c-e3fa-42e8-9de6-6b2987e41972″.



Save the file as XLSX, then open Visio 2010/2013

On the New selection, pick Business under Template Categories and then Organization Chart Wizard

The wizard will start, accept the default of” Information that is stored on a file…” and click Next


Click Next again to say that the data is stored in an Excel file



Browse for the saved XLSX file and click Next

Now you tell the wizard what the Employee-Manager relationship is. For our case, Name is the ID of the site and Reports To is the ParentWebID.



On this screen, we select which fields we want to display on each box



For Shape Data pick columns to display the data relevant to that site. For instance, we could have included the Site Owner, Last Modified Date, or Created date in our PowerShell command and included those columns in the Shape Data as well.



Leave the default of “I want to specify how much…” and click Next



Leave the default again and click Finish



Once the process completes, you should have a single page Visio diagram with the Root at the top and Site Collections and subsites connected underneath.





Zoomed in view of shape data after clicking on the Helpdesk subsite



We can save this as a Visio Web Drawing file, publish it to SharePoint 2010 using the Visio Graphics Service and have users click on each site to see Owners, Created Date, Web Template

 SharePoint | Create Visual Site Map SharePoint | Visio | Information Architecture | Admin Map 

Saravjeet Lamba

Remotely Manage SharePoint using PowerShell

Windows PowerShell 2.0 on Server 2008/R2, which is also a required for SharePoint 2010, supports Remoting. We can manage SharePoint 2010 remotely with Windows PowerShell prompt from our local machine.

Here is what needs to be done to remotely control SharePoint using powershell.

Prerequisite

Windows Powershell: By default windows powershell is available on all windows 7 and windows 8 machines. If not we can download powershell and install on our local machine.

Follow the steps in the link to install Powershell 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968929/en-us

Steps


Commands to run on the SharePoint server:

  1. Enable-PSRemoting -Force
  2. Enable-WSManCredSSP -Role Server -Force



 Command to run on the client machine

 Enable-WSManCredSSP -Role Client -DelegateComputer * -Force 


(The -force parameter is not required but does not hurt if we want to avoid some blockage)

This sets up our SharePoint server to be controlled remotely

Using Remote PowerShell


If our current user on client machine has permission to the SharePoint farm and Windows PowerShell on the remote box, we can use just  Enter-PSSession to create and enter the remote session.

For example, connecting to sarav. sharepoint.com…

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName sarav.sharepoint.com
 
If it works, the command prompt will be changed to...

[sarav.sharepoint.com]: PS C:\Users\Administrator\>.

We can close the session by typing Exit

To connect to a machine with CredSSP and a different credential, we can use

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName sarav.sharepoint.com -Authentication CredSSP –Credential domain\username

This command will bring up the authentication window where we can enter the password 

Now we just have to load the SharePoint Windows PowerShell Snap-in and we are ready to remotely control our SharePoint environment

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell

.............. 
SharePoint | Remote SharePoint Management | PowerShell | Administration
Saravjeet Lamba