Lightning Tools is beginning to see many of its customers begin their upgrade planning for SharePoint 2010. We know from experience that there are A LOT of considerations when planning an upgrade and the process can take months. These considerations include Hardware upgrades to a 64 bit environment, Software upgrades such as Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Office 2010 as well as other considerations such as branding and ensuring custom code or third party product will continue to work successfully.
As well as ensuring that everything is in place for a successful upgrade, it is worth noting that the upgrade planning is a ideal opportunity to revisit the organization of content and to clean up the permission assignments and dead accounts. In lots of environments, the creation of SharePoint Groups, setting the membership of those groups, and the assigning of permissions is left to the Site Collection Owners or Site Owners and is therefore overlooked by stakeholders in the upgrade process.
Reporting on permissions in SharePoint 2007 is very difficult and time consuming. The deletion of Dead Accounts (Accounts that exist within SharePoint but no longer in the Active Directory) is also a difficult process.
DeliverPoint 2007 provides permission reporting for the entire SharePoint Farm right down to the Folder and Item level permissions providing you with the functionality to also reassign or delete those permissions. Below you can see a permission report that has been executed on the account ‘dpbrett’. The same report can be run on Domain Groups as well as Domain Accounts.
The Unique permission report allows to to view assigned permissions right down to the item level which is shown below and is the bottom half of the report above.
As well as checking the permissions on each account individually, DeliverPoint allows you to report on any object at any scope to find out what permissions everyone has to that selected object. Below you can see the Discover Permissions report on a selected site.
All of this information is also available to export to a spreadsheet for further analysis. Once you have determined who has what permissions to each site, you may want to remove some of those permissions, copy them or transfer them to other accounts. DeliverPoint allows you to perform those operations at any scope (Farm, Web Application, Site Collection or Site) in one go. Removal of permissions or re-assigning of permissions prior to upgrading would be beneficial rather than waiting until after the upgrade. Below is the Delete operation being performed on the Sales site.
If you have accounts that have been removed from Active Directory, but have not been removed from SharePoint, you will have a hard time removing these accounts since SharePoint tries to verify the existence of the account in the Active Directory prior to allowing you to remove it. DeliverPoint provides a report of these dead accounts and gives you the opportunity to remove them.
DeliverPoint is therefore an essential tool for SharePoint 2007 prior to your upgrade to SharePoint 2010. If you purchase DeliverPoint 2007 with our software maintenance plan, you will receive DeliverPoint 2010 free of charge once you have upgraded. If you require more information about this please email sales@lightningtools.com
Lightning Tools is hosting a webinar to show this functionality on Thursday the 16th September at 4pm GMT. (11am Eastern). If you wish to attend this event please register here:
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/844699519
If you wish to download a trial of DeliverPoint, please download it from the following URL: https://lightningtools.com//sharepoint-user-management.aspx
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