Our team just got back from a “SWAT” team approach with one of our customers and we spent the better part of two days discussing SPSiteManager and SPUserUtil.  We spent some time digging into the data reported by the new version of SPSiteManager, and we made a few slight changes to incorporate some items based on on our experience.  Nothing major, but it simply enhances and adds to the "Wow!" experience we've been getting..

• Level 2 analysis did not need to write out <doclib>/<list> elements, as they will always be blank at that level of analysis.  We only look at those items in a Level 3 analysis.
• Added databaseserver and databasename attributes to <web> elements. This aids in filtering data for webs specific to their database location. Currently, SPSiteManager writes it’s <web> elements in a hierarchical fashion, which makes it difficult to filter in Excel etc. Adding these attributes helps to consolidate and look at common web specific data.
• The Security ACE values did not contain the proper number in it’s <warning> elements, and this was corrected.
• It was thought that the Storage value was not correct when reporting for each site, if the items in the libraries had multiple versions. I use SPSite.UsageInfo.Storage to collect this value, and did some testing on my SP2 box, and it worked great, so this may be a pre-SP2 bug.
• Previously, Warnings were only reported for the “Worst” Library, List, Folder found on a site. Now warnings are generated for “EACH” instance found on all webs.

Overall, everyone who has had a chance to see the data it can provide has been left with a "Wow!" factor, and of course, the feature ideas started pummeling in :).  We told them that we had "Locked" down any more additions, as these features, combined with the features in SPUserUtil were merging into one common tool (See my previous posting "With Great Power comes Great Responsibility or Wicked Cool stuff you can do in SPSiteManager 2.0" ).  Any additional changes are going to be bug fixes.  Trust me....Every day I tell keep myself from listening to the voice inside my head saying "Implement me! Implement me!".

For the limited number of enterprise customers we’ve been working with, and one-off PSS cases we’ve used this on, the overall response we’ve been getting can be broken down into the following sentences:

• "Sweet!!!"
• "Wow!, no wonder that site has been performing badly."
• “This is cool, you’ve just provided me with the data I’ve been spending months of manual labor to compile in less than 2 minutes”
• “We're eager to meet up and see what this tool can do, so drop us your calendar, so we can get 30 in soon.”
• “We are thinking of building or extending your tool to generate weekly report which can give us information about these type of issues…”
• “Will this include features matching those of SPReports?”
  • The answer is yes…I’ve already contacted the author of the original SPReports, and we are incorporating those features into a future version of the tool

It can report where you have exceeded capacity planning guidelines and these issues can have varying levels of impact such as (but not limited to) the following:

• Service outages for short durations of time due to SQL Blocking.
• DB Connectivity issues because of the aforementioned SQL Blocking
• Crawl degradation

SPSiteManager now reports content makeup within the <doctypes> element of the XML report.  For example:

In the example above, 15,845 doc files were found, of which 18 of them were added to the system as List Attachments.

Site structure is then broken down as follows (I apologize for the formatting...I'm working on new ways to view this data once it's collected):

Of course, you would probability not want to look at the data in raw form most of the time.  I've been using Excel's XML viewing/sorting capabilities to group and sort and filter on this data.  I'll have a follow up post on it at a later date.

Warnings are then written when it detects occurrences of data beyond the recommended capacity planning guidelines such as the following:

Attached to this post is a sample Site Distribution Report generated from the latest build.  The SPSiteManager documentation will contain a complete description of the element data found in this sample.

Looking forward to your feedback and comments when this finally gets out the door!!

Keith Richie