At @JoelOleson’s presentation on Friday, he highlighted the features available in preupgradecheck. For a developer/administrator this is awesome as it’ll highlight lots of issues that are good to know now, regardless of SharePoint 2010 next year!
Feature References
One of the big ones is highlighting the Features that are not installed in a farm but referenced somewhere! The below log highlights four features in a farm I picked at random that are missing from the farm! The htm report below highlights this:
Information Only : Feature Information
The following features are either installed or referenced by the content
Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [75a0fea7-12fe-4cad-a1b2-525fa776c07e], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing] Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [61dbd1f5-45bc-497b-878c-79d0ac6bf12a], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing] Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [d60b36f1-e8c5-40ed-884b-68f73a2709ce], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing] Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [5e12b147-0098-4975-835e-46ce01bf44e3], Reference count = [2], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing] You can see that they are all scoped at SPWeb and it’ll even tell you what Guids they are.
You can also look at the xml report and get more details:
[FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [13/07/2009 8:30:57 PM]: Found 1 webs using missing feature definition d60b36f1-e8c5-40ed-884b-68f73a2709ce in content database server01_SPSiteContent_Intranet.
This targets the exact Content Database where it has been referenced giving you more detail.
Server Farm differences
Another great thing is that you can run this with the ‘-localonly’ attribute in stsadm on each server in your farm. Then simply do a beyond compare to see if there are any differences between the reports. This should give you a bit more confidence on the health of your server.