Create a SharePoint site map in Visio using Powershell

A great little script that crawls your farm and produces a nice visual site map.

Works on SharePoint 2007, 2010, and 2013.  

The following PowerShell Snippet exports all SharePoint Farm Solution Packages (.wsp) from the farm solution store.

SharePoint 2007 solutions and dealing with stuck deployments

STSADM provides the commands to manually deploy 2007 solutions.


If at this stage the solution is stuck on 'Deploying", try this.

STSADM will spit back a list of jobs. Look for the one that is related to your attempted deployment (its often the last in the list). Grab the guid and run delete the solution with Redeploy

Removing libraries that don’t allow deletion

There are libraries that can’t be deleted by simply going to the list settings page is one of those things that I haven’t come across too often. If there’s no ‘Delete this library’ link you can use PowerShell to remove the library.

Rename Web Application in Central Admin

Sometimes web applications get created with names that aren't very descriptive , or are just untidy, so here is a short Power Shell script for renaming them.

Create SharePoint Search Service Application With PowerShell

When the Search service application is created from Central Admin, all created Search databases have GUIDs at the end. I like to like to create Databases with a friendly name rather than a nasty GUID. If we create the Search service with PowerShell, we can specify the database names SharePoint uses. The following script will do this for you... 


The next step is to manually create the crawl component, and index partition and query component. Fortunately this only take a few seconds from the GUI.

Batch check in multiple files with Powershell

I recently came across a problem where a user had migrated 10000 documents to a Team Site. The user hadn't turned off the check in/out in the library settings, so all the documents needed manually checking in.

This normally wouldn't be a problem. The user could either navigate to the manage content and structure page '/_layouts/sitemanager.aspx?' or, I could take ownership from library settings > Manage files which have no checked in version  '/_layouts/ManageCheckedOutFiles.aspx?' and check them in myself.

Unfortunately, from 'manage content and structure' you can only check in 2100 files at once. This is something to do with a SQL limit.

Instead I used the following PowerShell script. This iterates through all the folders in the library you specify, takes ownership of the files, then recursively checks in all files that are checked out.