SharePoint Manager 2010

Although SharePoint 2010 offers the Central Administration Site and PowerShell as methods to expose current settings in your SharePoint environment, they can often be a little clunky to work with.

If you've never seen it, you're going to love SharePoint Manager 2010. It's a free download from codeplex. As the description for the tool states, "SharePoint Manager 2010 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. It also enables you to change the properties".

To get your very own copy for free, simply visit http://spm.codeplex.com/.

I first stumbled on this tool when I was going through application event logs on my SharePoint 2010 server and couldn't figure out what site certain errors were referring to. As many of you know event logs simply use the ID of a site (ex: 0a90494e-c226-4067-9762-7d75f952c803). A simple Google search for linking ID's to names turned up SPM 2010. Now I can simply drill down to my Site Collections with the tool and it's easy to see:

The tool is also very handy for finding all your application pool and IIS settings, not to mention having a look at what's in a sites recycle bin. You can also look at quota settings, as well as what features or services are deployed. Curious to know who has permissions on a site or what lists are in a site? Just drill down and the information is there!

Some additional points:

• The application has to be installed on the SharePoint Server you want to work with.
• You have to be logged in as a SharePoint administrator.
• The tool has multilingual support. 
• It uses the SharePoint object model and doesn't access SQL directly.
• It was architected and designed by Carsten Keutman - http://www.keutmann.dk/. Thanks Carsten!

Download it today and let me know what you think. If you know of any other tools other admins might be interested in, pleas let me know.