Create a Blueprint of your SharePoint Farm using PowerShell

Corey BurkePrincipal Architect – Rackspace Hosting

About Me• Architect, trainer, speaker and Manager of the SharePoint Hosting Services team at Rackspace: The

Open Cloud Company in the UK• Contributing author - Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration • Technical Editor - Beginning SharePoint 2013: Building Business Solutions• Contact Me:

• Email• Corey.Burke@rackspace.co.uk

• Blog• http://blog.sharepoint-voodoo.net

• Twitter• http://twitter.com/cburke007

• Find me on LinkedIn• http://uk.linkedin.com/in/cburke007/

About Rackspace

• The largest collective team of SharePoint MVPs.

• The largest collection of published SharePoint authors.

• The most published SharePoint books. (23 and counting)

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• Over 1,000,000 dedicated seats.

• The most 'Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year' awards (4)

• The only company with Fanatical Support®

(As stated by Microsoft at the 'Worldwide Hosting Summit', May 23rd, 2013.)

Agenda• PowerShell & XML• Creating an XML structure• Mining SharePoint for configuration data• Reading & Writing XML• Mining the output XML for data• Usage scenarios

Why XML?• Natively supported by PowerShell and .NET• Lightweight/Portable• Easy to update by hand• Relational (Hierarchically)• Widely compatible

• Loading SharePoint Assemblies• 2007

• 2010/2013

Priming PowerShell for .NET

• 2007

• 2010/2013

Instantiating Objects

• Two most important CMDLets in PowerShell– Get-Help– Get-Member

Going Deeper into PS Objects

• Create the XML variable• Query your desired data• Select the XML Node where you want to insert data• Create a new Element and set any desired attributes• Append the new Element to the selected Node in the

XML Variable

Writing XML

Creating the XML object

Get the local Farm object

Saving the XML to a file

Reading XML from a File

Get Web App Data

Finding Data in XML

Searching XML with XPath

Get Alternate Access Mappings

Get Content Database Data

Get Service App Data

Display Web App Config Data

Display Databases for Web App

Putting it all togetherhttp://spaudit.codeplex.com

• Incorporate the XML output into an automated install script (AutoSPInstaller?)

• Use the XML as a data source in SharePoint• File it away for rebuilds or migrations

Where can you go from here?

• We covered– Gathering useful information from SharePoint– Storing that information in XML– Retrieving Information from XML– Using the output XML in an example scenario

Summary