SharePoint Administration Toolkit v4 for MOSS 2007

The Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog has recently announced the SharePoint Administration Toolkit v4 for MOSS/WSS (Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0.)

*** <Update> ***
There was an issue with the originally posted download regarding the Batch Site Manager and Permission Reporting tools, this has been fixed. If you experienced a problem, simply uninstall, re-download the new package (date: 9/1/2009), and reinstall it.
*** </Update> ***

The tool includes the following:

• SharePoint Diagnostics Tool (SPDiag) improvements

SPDiag version 2 contains several important updates and new features that increase its effectiveness as a troubleshooting tool, such as a new Diagnostics tab which allows SharePoint administrators to execute predefined rules designed to discover and report against some of the most common SharePoint issues, and command-line functionality for collecting farm data with no tool installation.

• Permissions Reporting tool

The Permissions Reporting tool makes it easy to detect where permission inheritance has been broken in a site collection. You can compare an object, such as a list or a site, against its parent to see where inheritance was broken, and run reports to collect more information about such objects. You can also check effective permissions for a user or a group in a particular site, Web, or list in a site collection.

The associated Stsadm unlockfgpreport operation assists an administrator in tracking and controlling permissions for report generation on lists with a certain number of items within an entire farm. An administrator can unlock or lock permissions for a site collection, list, or a Web application. If a Web application is specified, then all libraries or lists are unlocked.

• The updatequota Stsadm operation

This operation allows an administrator to change a quota template in bulk. Before this operation was available, the only way to change a quota template across multiple site collections was to manually update the quota template for every site collection or write custom code.

• Security Configuration Wizard manifests

SCW manifests for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are included the SharePoint Administration Toolkit version 4. These manifests add the SCW roles for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to Windows Server 2003, providing a simple method of reducing the attack surface for farm servers.

For more detailed information about the SharePoint Administration Toolkit v4, see the following TechNet articles:

• SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Office SharePoint Server)   (http://technet.microsoft.com/library/cc508851.aspx)

• SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Windows SharePoint Services)   (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508986.aspx)

The download links for the SharePoint Administration Toolkit version 4:

• x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=665e98ea-5318-486d-aba2-2bfe46254357   (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=142035)

• x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd2d09a7-1159-4d40-be1c-8efab1345381   (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141504)

As also announced by the SharePoitn Team, this seems to be the last planned offering of new features and functionality for this toolkit!