SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 is Now Available!
[Cross-posted from Zach Rosenfield's blog.]
I’m excited to announce that the second version of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit is available for download! As I said back in April, we would be offering regular updates to this toolkit with new features and functionality for both Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3.0. With this release we added functionality to address some of the challenges associated with running a highly available and/or geographically disperse MOSS 2007 deployment—particularly aimed at synchronizing user profiles in the Shared Service Provider (SSP). Let’s look at these two areas:
High Availability
In order to provide a highly available Shared Service Provider, your deployment needs two identical SSPs available at all times. While this is easily done with search (each SSP has its own crawler and can create their own index)—keeping user profile data in sync is a bit more involved. You can see detailed instructions on running a highly available environment on Microsoft TechNet:
Geographical Replication
If your company is geographically disperse, you may not want to have a single MySite farm serving your users worldwide since some users may experience significant lag in response times depending on WAN bandwidth and traffic characteristics. Instead, it may be better to have several SSP farms located around the globe. Just like in the highly available environment, this configuration would require that user profile data is kept in sync.
Since synchronizing user profiles is something available in the MOSS 2007 product, some of you might wonder what we’ve done in the toolkit! Well, if you’ve ever tried to use the User Profile web services to achieve synchronized profiles—you’ve noticed it’s a very involved process with lots of code (and therefore a lot of room for mistakes). In this release, we’ve built a supported tool for scheduling partial or full replications of any number of your user profile attributes:
For a full overview of features and instructions see the official Microsoft TechNet articles for MOSS 2007 and WSS v3.0.
The download links for the SharePoint Administration Toolkit v2.0
x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F8EEA8F0-FA30-4C10-ABC9-217EEACEC9CE&displaylang=en
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=263CD480-F6EB-4FA3-9F2E-2D47618505F2&displaylang=en
Zach Rosenfield
Program Manager, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
