In this post I’d like to review existed tools for the SharePoint management. The idea to create this overview appeared after I read that Bamboo solution shipped their own SharePoint analyzer. The first I thought was - “Why do we need another tool, if we already have SharePointSpy and SharePointManager?!”

So, let’s start comparing of three tools, which exist on market

1) SharePoint Analyzer from Bamboo Solutions

2) SharePoint Manager from CodePlex

3) SharePointSpy from EchoTechnology

and how those tools functionality differs.

Results: analyzing those tools I found that SharePoint Analyzer and SharePoint Manager provide you the richest functionality to manage your SharePoint environment. I can’t name the best tool, because those tools have different target audience and must be used together.

SharePoint Analyzer from Bamboo solutions provides rich and good, structured overview of your SharePoint farm for administrator/infrastructure perspective – detailed info about servers, web applications, logs, and etc. Good usability, grouping and detailed information across all your farm servers, but there are few useful info for developers.

SharePointSpy is absolutely different tool – it stays away from infrastructure, providing your deep info about sites, features, site definitions and etc., allowing your to export different schemas xml. Really powerful tool for developers, who need deep dive inside SharePoint stuff.

SharePoint Manager locates between administrator vs developer poles. It provides you almost the same functionality as SharePointSpy, but has a lot of information for infrastructure guys/administrators as well.

My choice: combination of SharePoint Analyzer for maintenance and SharePoint Manager for development. But, if those three tools were shareware, then I’d chose SharePoint manager for its balance between admin and developer functionality.

Mirror: SharePoint Managers Tools overview