Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Announcing the Fourth Release of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit
I have been away from the blog for a while. However, the release of the Fourth Release of the Microsoft Administration Toolkit is a good enough reason to come out of hiatus. I have been spending quite a bit of time lately digging into permission issues at a customer I support. I was reading about the Permissions Reporting Tool and a tear came to my eye. Now to go give it a try!
Permissions Reporting Tool
In the past, customers have had a difficult time trying to detect what sites in a site collection have broken inheritance from the parent and thus why they cannot access some sites. The Permissions Reporting tool for SharePoint makes it very easy to detect where inheritance has been broken in a site collection. You can compare an object like a list or a site against its parent to see where inheritance was broken and run reports to get more information on such sites. You can also check effective permissions for a user or a group in a particular site, web, or list in a site collection; this feature lists the permissions that a user or group has.
Once the Permissions Reporting tool is installed in the farm, a site collection administrator can go to the top-level site or any subsite in a site collection and use the links on the Site Settings page to reap the benefits of the tool. The following image shows the new links that appear after you have installed the Permissions Reporting tool in the farm.
Note: To be able to see the links for Broken Inheritance Reports Jobs and Compare Permissions Sets, you must be a site collection administrator. However, anyone with the Enumerate Permissions permission — by default, people in the site Owners group — will be able to see the Check Effective Permissions link.
Click Broken Inheritance Report Jobs to run reports of broken sites in a site collection. Reports contain any information relevant to a broken inheritance. The report output is in XML, but you can save the files and then open them in Excel to see the information at a glance. For more information, see Run broken inheritance reports on Office.com.
Click Check Effective Permissions to check a user or group’s permissions on a site, list, or item. You can view what permissions are allowed and denied and any blocking permissions. For more information, see Check permissions for a user or group on Office.com.
Click Compare Permission Sets to compare an object such as a site or a list against its parent to quickly detect which object breaks inheritance in your site collection. For more information, see Compare permission sets on Office.com.