Standardization and Consistency is the key - SharePoint Configurator Released to Codeplex

I'm happy to announce the release of the SharePoint Cross Site Collection Configurator!  This functional sample source and solution deployment is designed to be simple to configure and easy to deploy, and is available now on Codeplex.  Not only provides consistency and ease of deployment for IT and business standards, but it also supports much more flexibility in your information architecture so you can truly scale while having tens of thousands of site collections and not having to put all your eggs in one basket (single site collection with a single database).  (Note super large scale tests have not been performed and it's recommended to test these in your environment.)

• Applying Master Pages across a SharePoint server farm.
• Applying audit settings across all my sites.
• Adding advanced settings such as “Allow content type management” to all types of lists.
• Adding a new Expiration Policy at the site collection level.
• Adding a new Expiration Policy to content types, lists, and documents.

From consistency in enabling auditing to capture viewers or to catch that rare document that was uploaded/modified/deleted or even security/permissions changes To pushing out master pages to provide the consistency that nearly every SharePoint environment is looking to provide across their environment.  You don't have to remind me that the out of the box MS blue with the SharePoint logo isn't at the top of every person who deploys SharePoint list to wipe out with their corporate logos and colors.

In this table, O indicates the out-of-the-box configuration tasks that are easy to perform manually and C indicates the configuration tasks that the SharePoint Configurator can easily automate with a simple change to the manifest and stsadm command to deploy the solution.

Key

In a nutshell, this tool, which is really just a feature that is sample code that anyone could write or now leverage to push out updates to their sites across site collections and web applications to push out configuration, settings, or files.  Want to make all your farms consistent?  This is a great example of one way to do it. 

As this source has been uploaded to codeplex we welcome the opportunity to see both partners and the community add to it and develop it into something greater.  Your imagination for cross site configuration management is possible. (I know that sounds cheesy.) 

Visit Codeplex.com/SPConfigurator and download the source code and guide.

Please let us know if this met the need by leaving comments or logging bugs or issues in the codeplex site.

Before I sign off, let me add a few other thoughts on consistency and corporate governance.

One of the few things in governance that I hear over and over again is how the business wants to build brand.  It's the question of how to provide that sense that you are on the corporate environment and it makes you feel comfortable that when you upload a file, it will be backed up and totally encorporated as a true asset.

When I first heard that auditing on permissions and deletions... that I could look at a log when someone deleted a file and find out who did it... vs. grovelling an IIS log to never find exactly what I was looking for, I was stoked!  Then I found out that oh, by the way auditing is not enabled by default, oh and also the setting is in the site collection I was bummed.  Then you hear oh, developers could simply write a feature that could be deployed to activate whatever you want.  Great, but I'm not a developer and I don't know any developers that I'd want to give access to my production environment (no offense devs).  This is how you can really use these features.  I'm into multi tenent commodity hosted environments where it's about hosting masses and masses of site collections where I really have no ability to connect with the site administrators, it just doesn't scale for me to send mails to tell people to turn it on, or to create custom templates again didn't scale and wasn't the direction I wanted to go.  Now this starts to address what I'm looking for and what corporations that are looking for a scale way of getting the consistent repetitive way of setting changes.  Echo has some great features around this type of functionality and really take these concepts to the Nth level.

Something I've been asked about more recently is how can I push configuration from one environment to the next.  To capture just the configuration itself requires object model access, but to decide top down that you want specific settings, such as consistent master pages, consistent content types, consistent auditing settings, etc... now things become standardized and can be pushed in a straight forward way with a zero footprint or residue.  Make dev like test, and test like production from a settings standardization perspective.  Backup and restore, import and export, database migration, there are different methods and different pros and cons for getting consistency moved between environments.  My favorite?  Databases.  The more I understand the portability of SharePoint via what's in the content databases vs. what's in the config databases the better I can manage my environment.  The more I can roll up into a common small manageable set of solutions the more portable the entire environment becomes.  Repeatability, scriptability... roll on, roll off.  Hopefully this helps.

Luis Camara Manoel and Joel Oleson
Microsoft Solution Accelerator Team and SharePoint Team

P.S.  Looking for more governance tools?  See codeplex.com/governance for more.  We just added a link to SPTweak based on some information from one of our readers.  Sounds like an interesting way to improve the admin experience with features that give you more information from your logs, and detail on your sites and databases.