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SharePoint blow up in daily business and nobody writes important stuff to the Farm documentation

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Hello @all,

it's every time good to see large SharePoint environments where every feature inside the farm was activates and each of them is completely used, Languages Packs were installed and so on...

Such a farm blow up with the time but unfortunately the farm documentation increase with a documentation gaps.

Such a documentation is necessary in case you need to upgrade your farm to the next version. losing such a info will bring you in trouble for the many scenarios like:

  • disaster recovery
  • Patching
  • Upgrades
  • ...

To fill the gap, here comes my favorites:

1. In which architecture SharePoint is installed

Answer: check registry,

32bit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\InstalledProducts\90120000-110D-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE

64bit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\InstalledProducts\90120000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE

2. In which language SharePoint was installed?

Answer: check registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\ServerLanguage\ <LCID>

here you should see only one LCID

3. Which SharePoint language packs were installed?

Answer: check registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\InstalledLanguages\ <LCID>

here you will see something like this:

LCID - Reg_SZ - {language pack build level}

1033 - Reg_SZ - 12.0.4518.1000

1031 - Reg_SZ - 12.0.4518.1000

...

or

LCID - Reg_SZ - {language pack build level}

1033 - Reg_SZ - 12.0.6219.1000

1031 - Reg_SZ - 12.0.6219.1000

...

Note: It's important to have all language packs on the same build level!

4. Which server role is installed on each the server?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\WSS\ServerRole

Value = {Application || WebFrontEnd ||Standalone}

To get an overview about all Microsoft LCIDs you can use this article: Local ID (LCID) chart

Here are my favorites:

Locale description

Short string

Hexadecimal value

Decimal value

English - United States

en-us

0x0409

1033

French - France

fr-fr

0x040C

1036

German - Germany

de-de

0x0407

1031

Spanish - Spain (Traditional)

es-es

0x040A

1034

Italian - Italy

it-it

0x0410

1040

5. Which Custom Code was installed on the farm?

Answer:

a) Get All WSP-Files from FARM using SharePoint Farm Solution Extractor 

b) Check if features were installed without wsp files!

using WssAnalyzeFeatures to get a list of all featureID's inside the farm. Then you need to compare the featureID's with the 12-Hive-Features-folder. Here you should find for each featureID the feature binaries.

c) In case you do not have the feature binary any more it's important to remove the feature completely from SharePoint using WssRemoveFeatureFromSite.

regards

Patrick