Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint

With Quest Software's release of Quest SiteAdministrator for SharePoint, administrators now have a comprehensive tool for managing multipleMicrosoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 servers andWindows SharePoint Services 2.0 across the enterprise.Quest will add support for Microsoft Office SharePointServer 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 infirst quarter 2007.

Installing Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint was comprehensive, with compatibility checks that ensured that previously installed software applications were compatible with Site Administrator. My only concern was with the Report Server virtual directory page. The default setting points to http://myserver/reportserver. This poses no problem if the administrator chooses the default configuration during the installation of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, but if another directory name is chosen, the SiteAdministrator installation will fail.

At the management console, which Figure 1 shows, the navigation tree contains the three maincomponents that help you manage your SharePoint servers. They are Enterprise SharePoint, fordiscovery and maintenance of SharePoint servers; Report Manager, for reports about the usage andviability of these servers; and Policy Manager, for the creation and application of policies for theseservers.

Site Administrator provides a consistent UI for administrators by framing all SharePoint Webadministration and reporting functionality within one management console, reducing the timerequired to find and maintain Web sites on multiple servers. The reporting features provide a goodoverall view of the status of all managed servers. For the full-length version of this review, go tohttp://www.windowsitpro.com and enter InstantDoc ID 94601.