New Governance Tools and one must have freebie.
I've been a fan of Echo for SharePoint from Echo Technology as a solution to managing customizations and pushing out change across large numbers of site collections, and they have just announced their public beta will be in June 2007. It's been long coming. They tell me in addition to web parts and layouts, it will help you push out changes to content types, master pages, and information management policies like auditing and expiration.
The free tool you need to check out is SharePoint Spy. It's a tool that will help you understand the guts to customizations in SharePoint. I applaud Echo Technologies for sharing this type of IP. It helps cement their place as solid citizens in the SharePoint community. Thanks Sergio for the demo at the Auzzie SharePoint Conference. I recommend playing with this in a non production environment, just using the tool will help a dev learn a ton about the structure otherwise sometimes nested in xml or tough to get the syntax, and help an IT Pro understand the building blocks.
One other tool I saw at the SharePoint Conference down under is from MacroView called Wisdom. Their desktop solution provides a tree-view of their SharePoint environment and supports saving, opening, moving, renaming and moving of documents, messages and files. It also makes metadata capture in email a snap. It does unfortunately require a server component and the UI brought up a few questions around how well they scale to large numbers of site collections (the thousands). I was impressed with some of the outlook integration and how easy it was to save messages and drop in relevant meta data which contribute to compliant solutions.
