Quest Site Administrator 4.4

Transcription

1 Quest Site Administrator 4.4 for SharePoint Product Overview

2 2011 Quest Software, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This guide contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. The software described in this guide is furnished under a software license or nondisclosure agreement. This software may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the applicable agreement. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any purpose other than the purchaser's personal use without the written permission of Quest Software, Inc. The information in this document is provided in connection with Quest products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property right is granted by this document or in connection with the sale of Quest products. EXCEPT AS SET FORTH IN QUEST'S TERMS AND CONDITIONS AS SPECIFIED IN THE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THIS PRODUCT, QUEST ASSUMES NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER AND DISCLAIMS ANY EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY RELATING TO ITS PRODUCTS INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL QUEST BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE, SPECIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR LOSS OF INFORMATION) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THIS DOCUMENT, EVEN IF QUEST HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. Quest makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this document and reserves the right to make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time without notice. Quest does not make any commitment to update the information contained in this document. If you have any questions regarding your potential use of this material, contact: Quest Software World Headquarters LEGAL Dept 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA legal@quest.com Refer to our Web site ( for regional and international office information.

3 Trademarks Quest, Quest Software, the Quest Software logo, Aelita, AppAssure, Benchmark Factory, Big Brother, DataFactory, DeployDirector, ERDisk, Foglight, Funnel Web, I/Watch, Imceda, InLook, IntelliProfile, Internet Weather Report, InTrust, IT Dad, JClass, Jint, JProbe, LeccoTech, LiteSpeed, LiveReorg, NBSpool, NetBase, Npulse, PerformaSure, PL/Vision, Quest Central, RAPS, SharePlex, Sitraka, SmartAlarm, Spotlight, SQL LiteSpeed, SQL Navigator, SQLab, SQL Watch, Stat, Stat!, StealthCollect, Tag and Follow, Toad, T.O.A.D., Vintela, Virtual DBA, Xaffire, and XRT are trademarks and registered trademarks of Quest Software, Inc in the United States of America and other countries. For a complete list of Quest Software s trademarks, please see Other trademarks and registered trademarks used in this guide are property of their respective owners. Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint Updated December, 2011 Software version 4.4

4 Contents 1 About Quest Software, Inc. 1 Contacting Quest Software Contacting Quest Support Overview 3 About SharePoint About Site Administrator for SharePoint How Site Administrator for SharePoint Works Information Portal Centralized SharePoint Farms, Servers and Sites Management Native Management Reporting Policy-based Site and Server Configuration Security Explorer Security Auditor i

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6 1.0 About Quest Software, Inc. Now more than ever, organizations need to work smart and improve efficiency. Quest Software creates and supports smart systems management products-helping our customers solve everyday IT challenges faster and easier. Visit for more information. Contacting Quest Software Mail: Quest Software, Inc. World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA USA Web site: Refer to our Web site for regional and international office information. Contacting Quest Support Quest Support is available to customers who have a trial version of a Quest product or who have purchased a Quest product and have a valid maintenance contract. Quest Support provides unlimited 24x7 access to SupportLink, our self-service portal. Visit SupportLink at 1

7 From SupportLink, you can do the following: Retrieve thousands of solutions from our online Knowledgebase Download the latest releases and service packs Create, update and review Support cases View the Global Support Guide for a detailed explanation of support programs, online services, contact information, policies, and procedures. The guide is available at: 2 Chapter 1. About Quest Software, Inc.

8 2.0 Overview About SharePoint Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies are quickly gaining momentum as a universal collaboration platform for knowledge workers. Ease of use, customizable user interfaces, Microsoft Office integration, personalization, and extensibility with third-party Web parts make SharePoint the perfect solution for many applications and for organizations of various sizes. With load-balanced Web farm configurations, SharePoint can handle thousands of simultaneous intranet and extranet users. SharePoint-based portal sites provide content aggregation, audience targeting, and enterprise-wide search capabilities. SharePoint offers many benefits, but as an evolving technology, it has some drawbacks from a management perspective: Administrators may not know about SharePoint deployments. Adoption of SharePoint today often starts at a grass-roots level: workgroups create collaboration workplaces before the entire organization decides to move to full-scale SharePoint deployment. This is often the case with Windows SharePoint Services in particular because it is a free Windows Server 2003 component available as a separate download. As a result, administrators may not even be aware of how far the organization s SharePoint infrastructure reaches. 3

9 Managing complex installations is cumbersome with native tools. As companies move from pilot single-server rollouts to full-scale production deployments, managing the SharePoint infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. Native management is Web-based only and doesn t scale well to multiple servers. No holistic view of servers and sites throughout the network is available; navigation through administration pages is tangled; and server management is separate from site administration tasks. Web farm configurations add another level of complexity. Managing site and server settings is difficult. Sometimes SharePoint administrators need to reconfigure site settings for a large number of sites at the same time or enforce new settings on SharePoint servers according to changing corporate IT policies. Both tasks are tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming with native administrative tools. Native reporting tools are insufficient. SharePoint products offer only very basic native reporting facilities. Administrators can generate per-site usage reports that give hit count for site pages and some less valuable information. To compensate for this shortcoming, Microsoft offers SharePoint customers a free report pack for SQL Reporting Services, but this report pack lacks many important reports and requires daunting manual configuration to work. Third-party reporting tools for SharePoint are available in the marketplace, but most of them require SharePoint to reside on the same computer. About Site Administrator for SharePoint Site Administrator for SharePoint provides many innovative features that help administrators learn how far the organization s SharePoint infrastructure reaches, gain a holistic view of servers and sites throughout the network, enforce server and site settings with policies, generate reports with comprehensive data about server health, server performance, and storage and user activity trends; search for and modify security on the SharePoint servers within the product scope. The main features of Site Administrator for SharePoint include the following: Information Portal. Site Administrator for SharePoint-Information Portal is a secure and easy way to get insights on how your SharePoint environment lives and breathes. Using Information Portal reports, you can get an overview on how fast your entire SharePoint is growing and how efficiently storage space is used, drill down to the information on specific sites, get the list of users with access rights for a specific site or list, their level of access, including expanded SharePoint and Active Directory group membership, and how this access is granted. Support 4 Chapter 2. Overview

10 for Microsoft Office 365 allows Information Portal administrators to view Information Portal reports for SharePoint Online. Centralized management of SharePoint farms, servers and sites. Site Administrator for SharePoint allows you to consolidate management of SharePoint farms, servers and sites. The Discovery Wizard within Site Administrator enables you to quickly understand your SharePoint environment by identifying all servers and sites across your network. Add Server Farm Wizard enables you to add an individual SharePoint server farm to the Site Administrator scope. Native management tools. The product provides simplified access to the native SharePoint administration tools. Site Administrator for SharePoint provides shortcut menu commands for every SharePoint object, enabling you to easily and quickly bring up the corresponding native administrative pages. Using the Site Filter options the administrators who have to work with the large quantity of sites can filter the number of sites and subsites visible in the tree. Comprehensive reporting. Site Administrator for SharePoint features over 30 separate reports that cover almost every aspect of SharePoint server health and site content usage. You can detect overused or underutilized servers, find sites with excessive outdated content, observe storage usage trends, and view all the installed web parts on SharePoint servers and much more. The product gathers all the required information for the reports from SharePoint servers remotely. You can also create custom reports based on the information collected by Site Administrator for SharePoint data gathering. The Site Permission report allows you to view the users and Active Directory groups having access to the site or its content, and their permission levels. Site and server policies. You can force your SharePoint environment to adhere to corporate standards and requirements by using site and server policies. Policies feature is available in the Premier edition of Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint. Security Explorer. The new Security Explorer feature allows the user to search for and modify security on SharePoint servers. This also includes group membership and permission levels management and ability to clone permissions from one user to another. Security Explorer feature is available in the Premier edition of Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint. Security Auditor. The new Security Auditor feature allows you to track the activity in your SharePoint environment by providing comprehensive auditing using a specialized event log. The information is stored in an easy-to-understand format containing the events related to Share- Point configuration and security, and operations with SharePoint documents. The application provides reports on all audited data. With these features, Site Administrator for SharePoint addresses the limitations of SharePoint and helps you use SharePoint more effectively in your environment. The following section describes the features of the product in more detail. About Site Administrator for SharePoint 5

11 How Site Administrator for SharePoint Works Site Administrator for SharePoint is a robust solution: you can discover all the SharePoint installations in your environment, gather report data from your SharePoint servers, enforce server and site settings with policies, and generate reports with comprehensive information about server health and performance, as well as storage and user activity trends. Information Portal Information Portal is a secure and quick way to get insights on how your SharePoint environment lives and breathes and make changes to permissions and content structure. Using Information Portal reports, you can get an overview on how fast your entire SharePoint is growing and how efficiently storage space is used, drill down to the information on specific sites, get the list of users having access to a particular site and their level of access, or search for any user s permissions within entire farm. The tool allows site collection administrators and site owners to review reports for the sites they manage. With Site Administrator for SharePoint - Information Portal you can rest assured all the information displayed in the reports is actual and up to date. Information Portal supports reports for SharePoint 2007 and Information Portal provides management tools which allows you to manage (grant, duplicate, remove, reassign) permissions for any user across multiple sites or restructure your SharePoint content. Centralized SharePoint Farms, Servers and Sites Management Site Administrator for SharePoint allows you to consolidate management of SharePoint farms, servers and sites. The easy-to-use SharePoint discovery wizard discovers the SharePoint installations throughout your organization and displays them in the management console. Note that discovery is non-intrusive and all actions are performed remotely, so no changes are made to your SharePoint servers. 6 Chapter 2. Overview

12 Site Administrator allows you to optimize scanning performance and reduce discovery time by offering two discovery scopes: Active Directory, which allows you to scan all computers in the Active Directory forest. You can also limit the search scope to a set of specific Active Directory containers (domains and organizational units). Microsoft Windows Network, which allows you to scan all accessible computers in Windows domains and workgroups on the Microsoft network. After the discovery process, you can see detailed information about the discovery results. Servers that you have sufficient access rights to manage and report on are called managed servers. When you select a managed server, the following additional data is displayed: Server name Site collections (name and URL) Front-end servers (name and URL) Report data gathering settings Policy links Policy Agent status Web Farms (the topology of your SharePoint 2003/2007 installations) Servers for which you have insufficient access rights are considered unmanaged. No management or reporting is available for unmanaged servers. When you select the Unmanaged Servers node, you can view the following: Server name Failure reason (that is, why the server is considered to be unmanaged) Rediscover and Remove buttons When you fix the access issues, you can rediscover an unmanaged server. After the discovery, you can also review information pages on all managed servers, including the following information: Operating system WSS and/or SPS version Content Database name and SQL version How Site Administrator for SharePoint Works 7

13 Number of Site Collections & Sites The interactive Add Server Farm Wizard allows you to add an individual SharePoint server farm to the Site Administrator scope and enables the data gathering on the newly added server farm. The Add Server Farm Wizard now avoids unnecessary checks for the SharePoint servers to which administrator has access, and completes much faster. This also allows you to add SharePoint web applications that might not be available at the moment to the product s management scope. Native Management Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint facilitates native SharePoint administration by providing simplified access to frequently-used native configuration pages for the following SharePoint objects in the console: Server farm Virtual server (Web application in Microsoft SharePoint 2007) Portal site Site Lists and libraries Site Administrator comes with Site Filter options, which allow the user to filter sites and subsites by the URL path and limit the number of the child sites to be displayed in the Site Administrator console. Due to these capabilities users are allowed to work with the large number of sites and subsites in the tree. Reporting Site Administrator for SharePoint uses Microsoft SQL Reporting Services 2005 and 2008 as a reporting engine. The Report Pack includes more than 30 ready-to-use reports that cover almost every aspect of SharePoint server health and site content usage, providing you with an in-depth picture of your SharePoint environment. You can detect overused or underutilized servers, find sites with excessive outdated content, observe storage usage trends, view all installed web parts on the SharePoint servers, etc. You can see the reports on the following aspects of your SharePoint environment: Resource usage Content storage User activity 8 Chapter 2. Overview

14 Server health and performance Security and auditing Web parts Custom reports Site Administrator for SharePoint allows you to create Custom reports based on the information collected by Site Administrator for SharePoint data gathering. Using custom reports you can view statistics for a list of web applications, sites in site collections, list of documents on the web application, the connection between Web Farm and content databases, site collections owners, site creators. Site Administrator comes with a User Permission report, which provides a summary view of security permissions that a user or group has within the specified scope of the enterprise SharePoint hierarchy. How Site Administrator for SharePoint Works 9

15 Site Administrator for SharePoint comes with a Site Permission report which allows you to view the users and Active Directory groups having access to the site, document library or list, and their permission levels. You can also see how each permission level has been granted to a user or an Active Directory group: Policy-based Site and Server Configuration You can make your SharePoint environment adhere to corporate standards and requirements by using site and server policies. Site Administrator Policy Manager allows you to create granular policies and later apply them globally: so that you can easily enable mass configuration of SharePoint server and site settings. Improved Site Administrator Policy Manager allows you to get a quick access to a wide range of policy information and policy options. You can view the policy settings and scope and see whether a Policy Agent is installed on each of the managed SharePoint farms and on which farm server the agent service runs. The Policy Agent can be installed or uninstalled on the selected host, you are also able to modify schedule when policies are applied, and apply policies immediately. Policy Manager feature is available in the Premier edition of Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint. 10 Chapter 2. Overview

16 Security Explorer Security Explorer is a powerful solution for real-time, interactive management of SharePoint that dramatically simplifies SharePoint security with point-and-click permissions management, search, and backup and recovery of permissions. Security Explorer allows you to search for and modify security on the SharePoint servers within the scope of Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint. With Security Explorer comprehensive backup, restore, search, grant, clone and export functions take management of permissions to new levels. Security Explorer feature is available in the Premier edition of Quest Site Administrator for Share- Point. Security Auditor Security Auditor allows you to track the activity in your SharePoint environment by providing comprehensive auditing using a specialized event log. The information is stored in an easy-to-understand format containing the events related to SharePoint configuration and security, and operations with SharePoint documents. The application provides reports on all audited data. How Site Administrator for SharePoint Works 11