SharePoint Cross-site Configurator

http://spconfigurator.codeplex.com/

Introduction

This section introduces the SharePoint Cross-site Configurator in the context of IT management challenges that have arisen with the rapid growth of SharePoint® deployments. 

The Challenges of Consistency and Standardization

As SharePoint adoption increases across various departments and business units, the need for consistency and standardization increases. In response, Microsoft has designed a simple tool to support standards and consistency in managing and configuring SharePoint site collections. 
The tool is sample code that you can use to deploy configuration changes across site collections as broadly as entire web applications or even entire farms. The SharePoint Cross-site Configurator eliminates the need to perform configuration tasks over and over again across thousands of sites for the purposes of applying standards and ensuring consistency. Instead, you can meet these goals using this tool and SharePoint’s built-in solutions deployment and features functionality. Even in environments where IT hosts the SharePoint infrastructure for the business, there are needs for standardization. The SharePoint Cross-site Configurator is designed to address these needs and at the same time, to provide a sample for addressing similar configuration needs. 

The SharePoint Cross-site Configurator

The tool automates the process of deploying the MOSS site settings in all or selected sites in a server farm as shown in the following list:
Note The Tool also enables IT administrators to customize the site settings to be deployed.

• Applying Master Pages across a SharePoint server farm.
• Setting up Web Titles for all or selected site collections across the farm.
• Applying audit control settings to all or selected sites.
• Adding advanced settings such as “Allow content type management” to all types of lists.
• Adding a new Expiration Policy at the site collection level.
• Adding a new Expiration Policy to content types, lists, and documents.

In this table, O indicates the out-of-the-box configuration tasks that are easy to perform manually and C indicates the configuration tasks that the SharePoint Configurator can easily automate with a simple change to the manifest and stsadm command to deploy the solution..

	List	Site	Site Collection	Web Application	Farm
Master Pages	N/A	O	O	C	C
Audit Policy	O	O	O	C	C
Expiration Policy	O	O	O	C	C
Content Types	O	O	O	C	C

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007	O
SharePoint Cross-site Configurator	C