Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A

Hi, I work for a global charity and we have somewhere in the region of 400 collaboration sites and several regional intranets (built on publishing sites). It's all very much out of the box and our knowledge is somewhat capped in that my team have farm admin rights but the majority of our work is more akin to that of a site collection administrator.

Apart from expressing an interest in how people deal with the question in the thread title, I have a question.

Q: Is it possible to view latest changes at a farm level somehow?

I'm wondering how I can see, or build a list that shows, the last updated dates for our 400+ collaboration sites. Viewing any other stats such as site collection sizes would be a bonus.

If this is more an aftermarket solution, can anyone recommend a piece of kit that will make my life easier?

Thanks as always, Nosy

Nosy,

I have used some of Quest's (http://www.quest.com/sharepoint/) software to handle much of the reporting that you are looking for at a farm level. Their administration tool does some pretty good reporting across your entire SharePoint implementation.

However, if Farm level access is permitted for a lot of your users, I would highly recommend that the permissions be revoked since this can be very dangerous. Farm level access allows users to make configuration changes to SharePoint that could make your SharePoint farm totally inoperable.

Chris Quick

Thanks Chris. I took a look at that and browsed their site. Certainly one for consideration.

Re Farm level access, it's rightly limited to a few admin staff as it would be a little too trusting of us to grant widespread access :-)

I've been using AxcelerPinPoint just because it's a free download. Judging from your description, this should get you about 80% there for free...

http://www.axceler.com/SharePointProduc ... Point.aspx

Hope this helps!