Useful Tools For SharePoint Practitioners

This post brings you a list of useful tools which every SharePoint practitioner should make use of to make his day to day life easier. I personally don’t know any of the developers who developed these tools so I’m not trying to do some marketing stuff for these tools. I just wanted to share the list with you guys so that you could get benefits out of it.

Note:

There are hundreds of paid/free third party tools out there to administer/manage SharePoint and I have not really tried a lot of them. The list which I’ve put together below is something which I’ve been using for quite some time now and just wanted to let you guys know that these tools have been vetted carefully during usage and they are not potentially harmful by any means, plus they are free of cost too and most of them are from code plex.

  1. ULS Viewer

    A windows application for viewing SharePoint ULS log files more easily. Supports filtering and easy viewing of data.

  2. SharePoint Manager

    The SharePoint Manager 2013 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. Please be mindful that you should have this tool running on a machine which has SharePoint installed on it.

  3. Fiddler

    The Fiddler tool helps you debug web applications by capturing network traffic between the Internet and test computers. The tool enables you to inspect incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before the browser receives them. Fiddler also includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, which you can extend by using any .NET Framework language.

  4. Network Monitor

    Network Monitor tool can be used for capturing network traffic and protocol analysis.

  5. WinDirStat

    WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows.

  6. SharePoint Log Viewer

    SharePoint Log Viewer is a Windows application for reading and filtering Microsoft SharePoint ULS Logs.

    Key Features:

    • View multiple SharePoint log files at once
    • Search by any field
    • Filter the log by any field
    • File drag & drop support
    • Live monitoring for entire farm
    • Export filtered log entries
    • Bookmark log entries
    • Get popup notification of SharePoint log events from system tray
    • Receive email notifications on errors
    • Redirect log entries to event log
    • Supports SharePoint 2007, 2010 and 2013

  7. SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool :

    Feature Administration is a tool for SharePoint administrators and developers to manage SP features. It finds and cleans faulty Feature Definitions and orphaned reminders.

    The Feature Admin Tool finds faulty Feature Definitions and cleanly uninstalls them.
    It finds feature remainders in sites, Site Collections, WebApps and in the Farm, caused e.g. by forcefully uninstalled Features from a farm without deactivating them before. These faulty features, which are never visible, cause errors.

  8. SharePoint Command Builder :

    As the name implies, you can use this tool to build SharePoint PowerShell commands that can simplify your daily work.

  9. SharePoint Manager 2013 Online :

    If you’re using SharePoint Online, then this tool could be your best friend. SharePoint Manager 2013 Online provides the user a quick and easy overview of the structure and data hidden behind the scenes. Unlike the server version on codeplex, this app only uses html and JavaScript leveraging the SharePoint REST API. The well-known navigation tree on the left side and a property panel on the right side deliver an extremely user-friendly interface, which allows the user to burrow into SharePoint Online structure and hidden gems.

  10. SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool:

    After running the query, you can view all types of result sets returned; Primary Results, Refinement Results, Query Rules Results, Query Suggestions, in addition to the actual raw response received from the Search service.

    This can be used both with SharePoint 2013 on-premises and SharePoint Online. I also explained in detail the usage of this tool in a previous blog post. Click here to read that.

  11. SharePoint Host name site collection creator :

    The SharePoint Host named Site Collection (HNSC) Creator SharePoint Admins to create HNSC via a GUI instead of PowerShell. This can be used by two ways. One of them is a Windows Forms application that needs no installation, and the second one is a SharePoint 2013 farm solution that plugs in the Central Admin for a native SharePoint experience

  12. SharePoint Designer :

    Microsoft SharePoint Designer (SPD), formerly known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, is a discontinued HTML editor freeware specialized in creating or modifying Microsoft SharePoint sites, workflows and web pages. It is a part of Microsoft SharePoint family of products.
    Please note that Microsoft has announced that SharePoint 2016 will not have SP Designer 2016. That has been discontinued in the 2016 version.
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