One of the cmdlets that needs to be used when scripting a 2010 farm using PowerShell is the Initialize-SPResourceSecurity This does the same as psconfig -cmd secureresources. A have used this hundreds of times and knows that it is, according to the technet command line reference  ”Performs SharePoint Products and Technologies resource security enforcement on the server. For example, security is enforced on files, folders, and registry keys”. Earlier I have been happy with that explanation since it’s quite obvious what it does right? But what does this really mean, what security is set and on what folders and files? It turns out that if you Google on it, everyone mentioning it says more or less the same as the sentence mentioned on Technet. This made me even more curios, and to find out you can actually run the command from the command line and get the result there or you can pipe it out to a txt file like this:

psconfig -cmd secureresources > c:\temp\secureresources.txt

The below is a copy of the result (Moss) and should give you a hint on what it actually does and what files, foldres and registry keys are affected.

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LoadBalancerSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘LocalService’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices\Root’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LoadBalancerSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘LocalSystem’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices\Root’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘NetworkService’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\Diagnostics’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Diagnostics’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APPID\{6002D29F-1366-4523-88C1-56D59BFEF8CB}’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Logs\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS’ of type ‘File’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Bin\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘LocalService’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Logs’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Logs\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\ComponentsToRegister’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Office Server\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APPID\{58F1D482-A132-4297-9B8A-F8E4E600CDF6}’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\Bin’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘Users’ ‘Read, Execute’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘NetworkService’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘C:\WINDOWS\Tasks’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LoadBalancerSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0′ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0′ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\WebServices’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘E:\Microsoft Office servers\12.0\’ of type ‘Directory’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Full Control’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{90120000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_WPG’ ‘Read, Write’ permissions .

Successfully secured resource ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server’ of type ‘RegKey’ by granting security group ‘WSS_ADMIN_WPG’ ‘Read’ permissions .

Thanks for the tip Andrija!

SYNTAX:
SP-Upgrade -help
Displays the help topic for the script

SP-Upgrade -Binaries
Installs the wss and MOSS Binaries on the local machine

SP-Upgrade -Binaries -DetacheContentDBs
Detaches all content databases and installs the wss and MOSS Binaries on the local machine

SP-Upgrade -PSConfig
Runs the SharePoint Product and Configuration Wizard

SP-Upgrade -PSConfig -AttachContentDBs
Runs the SharePoint Product and Configuration Wizard and attaches all content databases

SP-Upgrade -OnlyAttach
Attaches all Content databases found in ContentDatabases.xml

SP-Upgrade -OnlyExport
Exports all Content databases found to ContentDatabases.xml

1. Log the amount of time it takes to install the updates to estimate downtime in produciton environment
2. Be able to reuse it without having to change any code
3. Be able to choose if I wanted to detach all content databases before the binaries and then attach it after psconfig and then have that automated.

The first two things are actually not that tricky but the last point needed some more efforts.

1. This is how you work with the script:
   Download it from here of from the download section, and put it on the SharePoint server/servers that are about to be upgraded.
2. Create a folder on the same level as the SP-Upgrade.ps1 file and name it Media.
3. Download and extract the CU or the patches that should be installed and put it in the Media folder.
4. Rename the .exe files in the Media folder so that they have a digit in the beginning representing in what order they should be installed.
   For instance, if you want to upgrade your MOSS environment you have both the WSS and MOSS CU name the WSS CU 01[WSSFilename].exe and 02[MossFileName].exe
5. Open up a PowerShell command window with enough priviliges to run the setup.
6. Depending on your environment and what approach you want to use, run SP-Upgrade with any of the following switches.

When the script is run it will create a Log folder and put all logs in that folder. Except for the log files generated by the installation I create a log file named Upgradelog.log and will contain the steps taken by the script together with time stamps. The time stamps are also printed to the screen and can display installation times, detach and attach times of content db’s.

When detaching the content databases the following information is stored in the ContentDatabases.xml file:

Web Application URL
Content Database Name
Content Database Max Site Count
Content Database Site Warning Level
Content Database Read Only
Content Database Status
Content Database Server Name
Detached Time
Reattached Time (Used when attached)

Syntax examples

SP-Upgrade -help
Displays the help topic for the script

SP-Upgrade -Binaries
Installs the wss and MOSS Binaries on the local machine

SP-Upgrade -Binaries -DetacheContentDBs
Detaches all content databases and installs the wss and MOSS Binaries on the local machine

SP-Upgrade -PSConfig
Runs the SharePoint Product and Configuration Wizard

SP-Upgrade -PSConfig -AttachContentDBs
Runs the SharePoint Product and Configuration Wizard and attaches all content databases

SP-Upgrade -OnlyAttach
Attaches all Content databases found in ContentDatabases.xml

Feedback and ideas for improvement is more then welcome!

What the script does is that you specify a site, list and workflow name and then all workflows will be terminated so that you can run them again. I also included the option to include already running Workflows and also a Restart parameter that could actually be used to start multiple Workflows only.

This is how it looks:

DESCRIPTION:
NAME: Cancel-SPWorkflow
Cancel SharePoint Workflows and restart them if wanted

SYNTAX:
Cancel-SPWorkflow -help
Displays the help topic for the script

Cancel-SPWorkflow -site http://yourSPSite -list Listname -Workflowname YourWorkflow
Terminates all workflows with the specific workflow name

Cancel-SPWorkflow -site http://yourSPSite -list Listname -Workflowname YourWorkflow -Includerunning
Terminates all workflows with the specific workflow name and include running workflows

Cancel-SPWorkflow -site http://yourSPSite -list Listname -Workflowname YourWorkflow -restart
Terminates all workflows with the specific workflow name and then restart the workflow for all items

The key in the script is how we cancel the workflow. That is done through the SPWorkflowManager and done like.

[Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWorkflowManager]::CancelWorkflow($Workflow)

And when we want to start a workflow we first need the workflow association and association data together with the SharePoint item to start it for.

$SPList.Parentweb.site.workflowmanager.startworkflow($item, $WFAssociation, $WFAssociation.AssociationData)

You find the whole script here or from the Downloads section

Hope you find it useful

But today I wanted to use the script to copy items to a specific folder in that list and it was a bit tricky at the first to understand how this could be done. But after some testing I figured it out and this is how you do.

# First open the list to create the new item in.
$TargetWeb = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite(http://yoursite)
$OpenTargetWeb = $TargetWeb.OpenWeb()
$OpenTargetList = $OpenTargetWeb.Lists[$TargetList]

# Then we need to get the folder name and set the objecttype
$FSObjectytype = [microsoft.sharepoint.SPFilesystemobjecttype]::File
$Folder = $targetweb.GetFolder(http://urlToFolder)

# Now we can create the new Item
$NewItem = $OpenTargetList.items.Add($Folder.Folder.ServerRelativeUrl, $FSObjectytype, $null)

# Add values
$NewItem["Title"] = “Yada Yada”

# Finally use update to create the new item
$NewItem.update()

My intention is to add this to my copy items script later on.

What it does basically is that it connects to the SPWebService and for each web application it finds it lists all SharePoint Content Databases and writes it to a text file.

This is how you use it:

.\SP-EnumContentDBs -path e:\contentdb.txt

And now in the first version you will get the following information:
Web Application name
Content Database Name
Content Database ID(GUID)
Current amount of sites in DB
Maximum site count allowed in DB
Read only state

But it’s easy to add more attributes by just adding more properties to the code. You can find all available properties at msdn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spcontentdatabase_properties.

If you want to make a comparison to what you have on the SQL server you can easily run the script, import it to e.g. Excel and then run the following on the SQL server to get the list of databases:

select name from master..sysdatabases where dbid>4 order by name

You can download the script by clicking here, or it’s available at the download section.

Finally thanks to Travis Lingenfelder who with his blog post helped me with some strugeling getting the names out since it differs some from c#.

http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/tlingenfelder/archive/2009/06/26/using-non-cls-compliant-types-in-powershell.aspx

There is a verry easy way to hide the Quick Launch if you only want to do this on or two pages.

This is how you do:

1. Go to the site or list where you want to hide the Quick Launch.

2. Go to Site Settings and select Edit Page

3. Add a Content Editor Web Part to any of your Web Part Zones (This web part will be hidden so it doesn’t matter where you put it).

4. Make sure that you select the Hidden attribute for the Web Part and the click on Source Editor…

5. A little bit depending on if it’s on a site, what kind of list, theme and if you have any custom styles on your site the below code could change but it will work in most cases and I will describe how you find make it work in case it doesn’t.
Copy the below code and past it in the Source editor

<style>

.ms-pagetitleareaframe
{
display: none;
}
.ms-navframe
{
display: none;
}
.ms-titleareaframe
{
display: none;
}
</style>

6. Click Save and then Ok in the Web Part Settings frame and finally exit the Editing Mode

7. You should now have a page that does not show the Quick Launch and we have done this by overriding the style sheet. If parts of the navigation is still showing you need to override more attributes and to know which ones I recommend you to use the IE Developer Toolbar.

This IE plugin from Microsoft makes it easy to click on an object on a web site and show what attributes or classes it is using. If you are using IE 6 or 7 you can download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en

And if you are running IE 8 which is default in Windows 7 you have it already built in, how to use it can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/sv-se/library/dd565628(en-us,VS.85).aspx

There is a big difference in how this is handled within SharePoint. Because if you do it through the API, all changes become “SharePoint aware” in the sense that all those entries are not only added to all web.config file on all the WFE servers but it is actually added to the config db (Objects table). So when in this case adding a new server, SharePoint takes the web.config template and then pulls the customized entries from the config db. Any manually added entries will therefor not be provisioned out to the new WFE server.

The entries added to web.config through the API can be found in the object table and if you want, you can make the following query against the table in SQL Server Management Studio to see all the entries you have.

Select * from dbo.objects nolock where name like ‘webconfigchanges%’

So a best practice is to always use the API to make changes in web.config and if something is not possible to add programmatically into it, make sure to document it properly.

Mark Wagnar has written an excellent post with more information on how to modify the web.config using the SPWebConfigModification class found here: http://www.crsw.com/mark/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=32

This is what is done.

You now execute the script by using the following:

SP-WebAppBuilder.ps1 -configpath [path to configfile.xml] -Webapplication [yes/no] -SiteCollection [yes/no]

The configpath is same as before. It’s created from an Excel file found in the Zip-file. More information on how to use it is found here:

What is new is that I have added two switches. -WebApplication and -SiteCollection. This gives the possibility to choose if you only want to create the Web Applications, only the Site Collections or both. This is especially useful in scenarios where the Site templates are added in a soluion. In those Cases you need to first add the Web Application, Add the solution with the Template inside and then create the SiteCollection.

What I have also done is to add a -help switch to be able to see the syntax and reference.

You find the updated code here or in the download section. More about the script itself from  can be found in my older post: Web Application Builder.

In next updated version I’m thinking of adding logging and better error handling, or should I say, add error handling. Hey, don’t muck me, I’m an Admin, not a Developer

This is done by using an “where” statement like this.

if($OpenTargetList.Fields | Where { $_.InternalName –eq $OpenSourceListField.InternalName}) {

}

To dowload the script click Download or you will find it on my downloads section