In this webinar we will discuss using PowerShell to extract configuration information from SharePoint to store in XML to include reading and writing XML and some example use cases.

1. Create a Blueprint of your
SharePoint Farm using PowerShell
Corey Burke
Principal Architect – Rackspace Hosting

2. About Me
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Architect, trainer, speaker and Manager of the SharePoint Hosting Services team at Rackspace: The
Open Cloud Company in the UK
Contributing author - Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration
Technical Editor - Beginning SharePoint 2013: Building Business Solutions
Contact Me:
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Email
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Blog
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http://blog.sharepoint-voodoo.net
Twitter
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Corey.Burke@rackspace.co.uk
http://twitter.com/cburke007
Find me on LinkedIn
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http://uk.linkedin.com/in/cburke007/

3. About Rackspace
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The largest collective
team of SharePoint
MVPs.
• Over 1,000,000 dedicated
seats.
The largest collection of
published SharePoint
authors.
The most published
SharePoint books. (23
and counting)
• The most 'Microsoft
Hosting Partner of the
Year' awards (4)
• The only company with
Fanatical Support®
(As stated by Microsoft at the 'Worldwide Hosting Summit', May 23rd, 2013.)
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4. Agenda
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PowerShell & XML
Creating an XML structure
Mining SharePoint for configuration data
Reading & Writing XML
Mining the output XML for data
Usage scenarios

5. Why XML?
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Natively supported by PowerShell and .NET
Lightweight/Portable
Easy to update by hand
Relational (Hierarchically)
Widely compatible

6. Priming PowerShell for .NET
• Loading SharePoint Assemblies
• 2007
• 2010/2013

7. Instantiating Objects
• 2007
• 2010/2013

8. Going Deeper into PS Objects
• Two most important CMDLets in PowerShell
– Get-Help
– Get-Member

9. Writing XML
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Create the XML variable
Query your desired data
Select the XML Node where you want to insert data
Create a new Element and set any desired attributes
Append the new Element to the selected Node in the
XML Variable

10. Creating the XML object

11. Get the local Farm object

12. Saving the XML to a file

13. Reading XML from a File

14. Get Web App Data

15. Finding Data in XML

16. Searching XML with XPath

17. Get Alternate Access Mappings

18. Get Content Database Data

19. Get Service App Data

20. Display Web App Config Data

21. Display Databases for Web App

22. Putting it all together
http://spaudit.codeplex.com

23. Where can you go from here?
• Incorporate the XML output into an automated
install script (AutoSPInstaller?)
• Use the XML as a data source in SharePoint
• File it away for rebuilds or migrations

24. Summary
• We covered
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Gathering useful information from SharePoint
Storing that information in XML
Retrieving Information from XML
Using the output XML in an example scenario