Export TFS 2008 (Team Foundation Server) Groups and Permissions - security

Is there a way to export all of TFS 2008 Groups and Permissions for an Audit?

I looked at the TFS Permissions Manager mentioned in another answer and couldn't easily figure out how to use this for an audit of user permissions. That said I looked around and found a few other possible tools to help in this process:
Team Foundation Server Administration Tool - This can be used to produce a list of TFS groups, users & permissions on a per project basis. The utility uses a grid control to display the results and this can easily be copied and pasted into Excel, etc.
TFS Project Audit - This tool generates output in an indented text format. It too works on a per project basis however it lists the output grouped by TFS role.
I think both of the options I mention are more recently maintained than the TFS Permission Manager at the time of this writing. Also, keep in mind that for purposes of a security audit I believe that the local & domain administrators groups in Windows Server have the ability to override any of the TFS permissions (at least with TFS 2008).

I'm the guy who wrote TFS Project Audit and I'd like to clarify a few things about my tool. First, it works on a project basis for TFS 2008 or a collection basis for 2010. It can report on a specific collection or all collections on a TFS server. These are enhancements I made in the newest version, released only a few days ago. Also, the output can be restricted to a specific group, Project Administrators, for example, across a project, collection, or the entire server.
I am always soliciting but rarely receiving feedback on this pet project of mine, so please feel free to leave suggestions for future releases! I have plenty of ideas in mind but it would help to know where my time is best spent, because this projectis hardly all I do with my days.
To prove it is really me, I'll give Saul a shout at tfsprojects.codeplex.com. Thanks a lot Saul!

Have you looked at this?
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2006/11/27/TFS-Permission-Manager-1.0-is-Finally-out.aspx

Related

What is a low-cost way to study Sharepoint?

I want to study Sharepoint. But if I create a project in VS 2010 it will shows an error message like "Sharepoint server is not installed in this machine". So is there any free Sharepoint server or service available? Is there any other way to start learning sharepoint 2010.
SharePoint is a very demanding platform to work with, ensure you have hardware matching the specifications, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485.aspx.
Working with crappy hw, virtual drives and so on will cause a lot of pain and consume loads of time. Think of learning SharePoint and SharePoint development as an investment.
However, if you just want to play with it for a bit follow this guide for installing SP on Windows 7
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx
It do require x64
Download SharePoint 2010 Foundation since it's free. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee263910.aspx#tab=1
Cheers
Cloudshare (www.cloudshare.com) is the easiest and fastest way to get setup using SharePoint. It's about $60/month, but you get a machine pre-installed with SharePoint, SQL Server, and Windows Server. All you need, and you don't have to do a thing!
Also, if you're looking for something a bit cheaper, try Office365 w/SharePoint. It won't give you every feature, but it's less than $10/month per user, so it might be what you're looking for?
Two avenues to try:
Free sharepoint service: http://www.freesharepoint.com/
Trial Sharepoint 2010: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/Try-It.aspx
Have a look here. There are VHDs available for download to have a play with.
[edit] If you can't find your way around VHDs best place to start would be getting your hands on WSS4 (Microsoft Sharepoint Foundation). WSS is a free version of sharepoint as opposed to full whack MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) and a good place to start playing.
I highly recommend SharePoint 2010 Developer Training Course from Microsoft.
A SharePoint development rig can be pricey. Check out the free trial at cloudshare.com. money well spent...currently 49 a month.. Removes the headaches of maintaining the environment so u can focus on Dev work.
As mentioned in the other posts you should have a look at MSDN to get started with the SharePoint Framework itself.
Cloudshare.com is offering SharePoint developer systems hosted in the cloud. There is a 14 day trialversion.
Cloudshare is great, it's fast and it's offering a lot of templates for SharePoint developer Farms.
One of the best books for SharePoint development is "Inside Microsoft SharePoint" from Microsoft Press.
NothingButSharePoint.com is also a great point to get started with SharePoint regardless to your profession. There is a lot of content for Users/IT-Pros/Developers
Thorsten
There is a really useful script which helps to setup all the environment you need to start development for SP (SP2010 trial, VS, SPD, Office and so on). So, you can just start it, enter some input details and right after it finishes you can start development.
It is absolutely free (if my memory serves me well, it is 180 days trial).
I highly recommend it for quick start.
SharePoint 2010 Easy Setup Script

What are the "cool" use cases for SharePoint?

I went to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 launch event in Minneapolis yesterday and was slightly surprised by how much they were trotting out SharePoint and improved SharePoint development in Visual Studio 2010.
SharePoint is something I've largely ignored over the years as a web developer and solution architect on a small development team. I was always under the impression that SharePoint was used mostly for intranets in large corporations, and that if you were developing for SharePoint, it meant that a corporate decision had been made to use it and you as a developer probably had few (if any) options.
I realize this assumption is probably incorrect. So, what are the "cool" uses for SharePoint? What unique business problems have you solved using it? What could make a developer excited to be working on something for SharePoint?
Document libraries in a Microsoft environment. There are many nice out-of-the-box features for managing documents.
Intranet sites that have permissions setup in such a way to allow business entities to control use of the site within their group.
Project requirements lists. List in SharePoint can be customized to some degree without ever programming.
As a conclusion so far, SharePoint is a blessing and a curse. It has a lot of value-adds, though anything outside that box is difficult change, but there are indeed many 'hooks' to do just that. WSS3.0 is free for Windows Server 2003, as is SP 2010 Foundation for Server 2008, so you can get quite a bit out of that without upgrading to MOSS or 2010 equivalent.
It's probably best used in intranet/extranet scenario's, true. There's many public facing internet sites built on it as well, if you find that cool :)
See http://www.topsharepoint.com/ (I built one of the top-10 sites ;)
It's definately not the best web content management platform but it is not bad and companies like people who have learned to manage their intranet to be able to seamlessly do the same for the internet site.
Personally I find it "cool" that I can deliver functionality quickly and without building the world from scratch (I've built enough document management solutionettes and prefer not to do it ever again). But if I have to custom build there's many footholds for customization and all of the .NET platform is available. There's workflow solutions that allow business users to customize their own workflows and not bug me with them. I'm sure there's plenty of other solutions out there that can do something similar but the integration with Microsoft Office and the rest of the Microsoft world is quite good IMHO.
I don't understand the antagonism against SharePoint and find it's mostly fueled by ignorance and people trying to use the platform for something it wasn't meant to do (like being a relational database). You will have to learn it; it's not like adding ELMAH to your project, it's a really big layer in your architecture.

Verify SharePoint Restore

I have created a new SharePoint 2007 MOSS Intranet. Our admin people are purchasing backup/restore software and I will eventually have to verify a restore of the farm backup they create. Has anyone got some suggestions on a best practice for this? Ours is a small 2-server farm built with VMWare VMs on SAN. How will I know that the restored version is a duplicate of the original in every way and what should I look out for?
In answer to the remarks:
There's no checklist. The problem is the dynamic nature of SharePoint. Team Sites come and go, as do documents and libraries. Who's to say one of your users didn't delete a document library and then you think after a restore something is missing.
I think the best bet would be to require your users to do a quick scan after a restore, see if they miss anything major, like sites or libraries that are supposed to be there. You yourself could have a "homemade" checklist that you follow to check if all major features deployed by you (features, timerjobs etc.) are still there.

validate security setup with Team Foundation Server

It seems that security setup is a bit of a nightmare with TFS --- particularily as it relates to TFS versus SharePoint versus Reporting Services.
Does anybody know of a tool that can validate the security setup --- because as it stands now, people can't create projects, because something is wonky with SharePoint --- yet all the farm administrators and site collection administrators seem to be set correctly.
One thing to try is to create a new Team Project logged in to the TFS server (AT) using the account that you used to install TFS (tfssetup).
If that still doesn't work then sounds like you might possibly have your Sharepoint Admin URL set incorrectly in TFS.
One thing you might want to try if the TFS Best Practices Analyzer which comes with the TFS 2008 Power Tools and will point out common configuration issues.
You might also want to try the tfsadminutil ConfigureConnections /View command to see if you can see anything there.
Good luck,
Martin.

Strategies for moving to Team System

Does anyone have any strategies/tips/traps for moving to Team System? Should it be done in baby steps, or all at once? Should we migrate our SourceSafe library over, or draw a line in the sand and move forward? Is it worth brining SharePoint into the mix? Any thoughts are appreciated.
I've never had to migrate to TFS, but have used it pretty extensively for the past couple of years.
Regarding your question on Sharepoint, we've found it pretty useful in conjunction with TFS. We use it primarily for documentation management and for storing other "non-technical" artifacts related to the project. Some dev teams advocate keeping documentation in source control alongside source code, which is OK, but in my experience our project stakeholders have an easier time accessing relevent project documentation via the Sharepoint portal than they would having to interface with source control.
I basically was able to distribute the URL to the sharepoint site associated with our TFS team project to the concerned non-technical team members and have been able to avoid constantly e-mailing documents around, so it's been great for us.
It may just be too much work to do it all at once.
I feel that it is easier to divvy out projects to different people one at a time.
That way they can move them across and ensure that each works okay before closing out the SourceSafe.
You will always want a backup of the SourceSafe "database" around just in case.
I do not know how to migrate from SourceSafe to TFS and keep the comments and versions.
By far the easiest it to just add the projects in, but having migrated that way in the past, we always missed the ability to find out what others had done to particular files.
If you find a way to migrate, I would go that way unless it is hideously expensive.

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