Get a quick report of the SharePoint Databases with PowerShell [Tip]

Here comes another useful PowerShell one-liner I often use.
It will give you a quick overview of the SharePoint databases with properties like: Name, Server(Alias), TypeName, Web application name, Web application URL, Site collection count and the Size.
The size is actually the amount of disk space required for uncompressed backup. It might look something like a script, but actually it is a long and simple one-liner. You can see it below, I have used grave-accent(`) escape characters to fit it better in the blog. You can see it in one line here. Instead of piping to Format-Table you can generate CSV by piping to Export-CSV and later work with it in Excel.

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Get-SPDatabase | Select-Object Name,@{Expression={$_.Server};Label="Server"},TypeName,@{Expression=`
{$_.WebApplication.Name};Label="WebAppLication"},@{Expression={$_.WebApplication.Url};Label="WebAppLicationUrl"}`
,@{Expression={($_.WebApplication.Sites | Measure).Count};Label="SC Count"},@{Label ="Size in MB";`
 Expression ={$_.disksizerequired/1024/1024}} |  Format-Table -AutoSize

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Get Application Pool Identity credentials[Tip]

In this short tip I am going to post a PowerShell one-liner from my list of extremely useful one-liners. It can get the the credentials of the IIS application pools identity.
I use it mainly in two scenarios:
  1. Imagine that you will do a remote work on customer where you have only temporary access and credentials. Many times the account that is provided is Farm Admin, has local admin permissions on the SharePoint boxes, however it does not have permission to use PowerShell against SharePoint(no Shell Admin). You can use this short PowerShell script and get the Farm account(STS is running under it), many times it is left in the local admin group and you can log in with it and do what you need to do. Not a best practice, but it is a massive time saver.
  2. Imagine that you are working on issue where you need to restart the User Profile Synchronization Service instance and you need the Farm account password. You can get it with this script.

In order to use it you will need to have local admin permission. I can confirm that it is working on IIS 7.5,8.0 and 8.5.

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Get-WmiObject -Namespace "root\MicrosoftIISV2" -Class "IIsApplicationPoolSetting" | Select WAMUserName, WAMUserPass

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Copy List Views in SharePoint and SharePoint Online with PowerShell

In the last couple of weeks I am working with a customer that mainly uses SharePoint Server as DMS(Document Management System). I had to move a large number of documents from one library to another   due to  corruption in some of the files caused by excessive use of unique permissions (~ 32 000).

In this post I will not talk about why you should limit the usage of unique permissions especial in big libraries, it's a long story.

As part of the work I had to copy many list views to the new library. I am not a fan of "Save as Template" approach, my solution was to use a PowerShell script and copy the views programmatically.

The script did its job and I thought that it will be nice to have something like this for SharePoint Online.

I was unable to find any ready script that can do this, so I wrote one.

Both scripts are doing basically the same thing, getting the source and destination webs, getting the source and destination lists, getting the source and destination View collections and create new view in the destination using properties from the source.

It was a bit tricky to load what I need and not making the script extremely slow with CSOM, since we cannot use simple lambda expressions syntax in PowerShell. My solution to this was to use a function written by the SharePoint automation superstar  Gary Lapointe. You can check it out in his article for ItUnity, where he explains how to workaround the limitation in PowerShell concerning the lambda expressions. I highly recommend to read the entire series dedicated on using PowerShell against SharePoint Online.

You can download both scripts (on premises and online) below. Please, Test, Rate and use Q&A section in the Gallery!

 Download On Premises script from: TechNet Gallery

Download SharePoint Online script from: TechNet Gallery