I saw a tweet from the Quest guys promoting their new cloud based app called 'Site Administrator Reports for SharePoint | OnDemand'. A bit of a mouthful, but a pretty compelling little tool!
Essentially you download an app to your local machine and then it opens up the cloud based app in a browser again (not sure what client app is for, maybe a requirement for some security bits the app does).
You log into the application giving your SharePoint Site Collection url, user name and password…again no mention of whether this is stored or not or what it's doing with those credentials. Can see some people not trusting this for that reason, I mean it's my blog so wasn't a big deal as the information is public anyway.
Then it starts pulling data to report on the Site for you I'm guessing via the Web Services.
It returns things such as total size of the content of the Site Collection, number of sub sites etc.
Straight away from the screen shot you can see the add in the bottom left corner…not necessarily for Quest either… I wonder what the source of that is.
I can see this tool being useful for quick health checks on Content Database sizing for Site Collection. But to be honest a quick PowerShell script will give you that anyway.
The reports are a bit large and really need to be on a high resolution monitor e.g. on my laptop screen there was a lot of scrolling. Most administrators who'd run the downloaded version of this tool will run it on a server and RDP in and usually these are restricted to low resolution too. Be interesting to see others thoughts on this.
I think this is a great start in the right direction. Imagine the Best Practice Analyser being able to be run from the cloud. With remote administration like this that could later even poll regularly and raise alerts on certain thresholds.
This is obviously the gateway drug to their main product which you download and install as pictured above that clearly has a lot more information about the site. I'm guessing a lot of this information requires more than just access via web services and this is what has limited the OnDemand reporting.
I would strongly advise Administrators to check this out, especially in a SharePoint 2007 environment where the reporting on these things is below par. SharePoint 2010 will give you a lot of this fruit, but obviously Quest have differentiated their product by adding more on top! Great work guys.