Update:
When we ran this script on a new environment, it was pretty cool, but in production, it generated some unreasonably large files.
Reader Amy also posted her experiences in the comments below and had a 3GB file!
So this will take some more work – looks like we’ll need to identify what is important, what kind of changed we’d want to track and trim down the script as a result.
Original article:
My awesome co-worker Stevan found this link today and it is such a great find that I wanted to put it here to share with all, plus it helps me find it later!
Basically it’s a PowerShell script that catalogs everything in your SharePoint farm and exports to XML Files
This link is to the 2013 version, but there is a link to the 2010 version on the same page:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff645391(v=office.15).aspx
My intention is to modify the script so that the output gets placed into folders named Year-Month-Date that way I can create a scheduled task in windows, and run this on a regular basis. Then it’ll be a simple matter of using a tool like Windiff to compare files from one folder to another and I should know quickly what changed.
When I get to that point, I’ll paste the updated code below.
– Jack
Have you run this script in your farm? In my DEV environment, just the first command generated a 3Gb .xml file.
Amy, Yeah, I found that too. It worked great on a brand new farm, but on a production farm, it generated a huge file an I finally stopped it. I’ll update the article. Looks like for weekly production use, the amount of info collected would need to be trimmed down significantly.