Selective Restore? Yes! But which Backup?

Here a real user story and solution. One of our customers would be able to selective restore SharePoint content. Because he has already a great SQL backup strategy he decided for a third party tool from from Metalogix, Selective Restore Manager, which gives him the ability to selective restore from SQL backups or databases. Not a very extra extraordinary scenario. But which backup should he use? Maybe a document or site has been deleted accidently some weeks or months ago. Searching in all backups for the missing item would be very cumbersome. How we can solve this in an agile manner? Sure, with our good old friend PowerShell! The approach is a scheduled PowerShell script querying the SharePoint audit logs for delete events in all site collection from a specific web app and write the log entries in a usual SharePoint list on another web app (central admin). Writing this script has taken less than an hour. Even lunch has taken longer ;) I really love the speed, power and flexibility you gain with PowerShell!

The list looks like this (click to enlarge):

The script:

Review ShareCamp 2010

Last week end was the very first ShareCamp (BarCamp about SharePoint) at the Microsoft Headquarter Germany in Munich. We got about 200 participants, 45 session and the spirit was really amazing! I think we could fulfill our slogan born2share.

You can find many more pictures here.

Thanks to all participants and sponsors for making this great event possible. I’m convinced there will be a ShareCamp 2011!

Freshly Graduated MVP

I'm glad to announce that I am since the 1th of Avril a Microsoft SharePoint MVP. What for the actor is a Oscar, is for a Microsoft tech geek the MVP Award. This is a big honor for me and I would like to thank Microsoft and the SharePoint community!