Document your Farm with SharePoint Lists using PowerShell - Part 1 Farm Level

If you are the sole Administrator of a SharePoint Farm, you will know your farm like the back of your hand but once it grows and becomes mission critical, it will be necessary for Team Administration resulting in an exponential growth of communication channels leading to errors. The Farm Administrator needs to know every detail including every configuration setting that could affect the Farm and when the Admin team grows, how do you continue to maintain control so you can collectively Administer and support the Farm? Communication and documentation how to win this battle. 

Documenting a moving target is difficult, things are changing every day, features are added, content databases grow, quotas change etc. The first step is to baseline your configuration so you can compare settings to the previous months or years so when something goes wrong, you can compare and find out exactly what and when it changed. It is imperative to set up a process for documenting your Farm and will especially come in handy when troubleshooting problems. Implementing a manual process is doomed to failure. PowerShell and SharePoint lists to the rescue.

Why not create a SharePoint Site and store all your settings in various lists. You can use all of SharePoint goodness to filter, sort, search and compare. You have one place to go to check your settings and to find what you are looking for efficiently because this is what SharePoint is good at. But you do not have time to create lists and populate them with current data. The PowerShell script below is the first in a series of scripts I made that automates the entire process. I start with capturing the main Farm level objects and properties and will later capture Web Apps, Service Apps, Features, site collections until every property of every object is in a list for quick access to the Administrator or the Troubleshooter.

To see the script click here