Pearls of MOSSy Wisdom

I have found that my most time consuming task as a SharePoint admin is discovering what sites a user has access to.  Way too often I have been tasked with setting up a new user with the "same permissions as User X".  Now, while this isn't impossible, I will admit that my proper security groups aren't complete yet and a few legacy sites still have users added directly, so digging through all the groups a user is a member of takes alot of time. 

So as I am in the middle of a self-started user permission audit, I decided to write an application to show me not only the full list of users and groups in my site collections, but show me the sites and lists that a given user has access to.  This app is the SharePoint User Auditor.

UPDATE!  It's ready.  The full 1.0 release has been uploaded!

So what does it do?  Fundamentally, the User Auditor will show you the users for a given site or site collection.  While that is not hard, per se, it can be time consuming if you have to break down SharePoint and AD Groups.  This is where the User Auditor comes in.  Using SharePoint's Web Services and LDAP, a site is scanned and its users enumerated and presented in a format that is easy to understand.  Want to see what sites John Smith has access to?  Even better, think you deleted John Smith's access but he is still getting in?  Use this app to show not only that he still has access, but how his account still has the ability to log in to a site.

Taking it to the next step, if you maintain your SharePoint Licenses (CALs) via an AD Group (or groups), the User Auditor will use those groups as a master list of CAL'd users and show you who in your site has access but does not have a CAL.  This can be HUGE in preparing for a Microsoft audit or just in maintaining proper software licensing.

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