I like the STSADM Silverlight viewer, but the usefulness is limited by the scrolling you have to do.  They need to all a button so we can take it full screen or stretch the corners.  On my screen resolution, the little app is a small little box.  I hope they don’t mind if I show you some screenshots of the tool and comment on the categories, which are great!  I do find a lot of usefulness in the information, but the format keeps you from being able to fully explore the commands and what they do.  Don’t be afraid to click around… I think it was the third time using this, that I tried clicking on the commands.  I don’t remember it popping up the first time.

I refer to both the WSS 3.0 STSADM Technical reference and SharePoint Server 2007 STSADM Technical Reference.  You can get the reference for the commands in the article “Index of STSADM operations.” (remember there are WSS and MOSS references, but the MOSS one is comprehensive)”

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Not in UI

WSS

 MOSS 2007 (NOT in UI)                                      

Ok, so what is not in the UI.  The backup command?  Well ok backup a site collection is.  The VSS writer definitely isn’t in the UI.  Adding content db?  That’s in the UI, but adding wppacks aren’t.  Removing a solution you can do through the UI.  Right?  Some of these commands are in the UI, hmmm.  You can’t add it in the UI, but you can definitely deploy it and retract it.  Getting and setting ports is definitely not in the UI, you can do it in IIS, but it’s much better to do it via stsadm based on past experience.  Import and export are available to some extent in SharePoint designer with limitations.  You can create the SSP from the UI and from psconfig you can create the admin vs.  Maybe it’s not all that easy to find. :) 

New in SP1

WSS: Left                                                                MOSS: Right

Enumallwebs that’s a nice new command in SP2.  Guess we could build a nice XML tree of our environment with that.  Preupgradecheck.  This is the future baby.  Love this command.  Love the reporting.  Still waiting to do a full length report on that command and its awesomeness.

Variationsfixuptool – COOL.  Setqueryprocessoroptions, very interesting.  Sounds like some options :)  I’ll have to dig into these.  Woah! The setqueryprocessoroptions is incredible.  After digging in I can see there is a ton of search optimization information in there.

stsadm –o setqueryprocessoroptions –ssp ssp1 –Securitytrimmingcachesize <don’t set this unless you know what you’re doing>

“Specifies an increase of the w3wp process memory usage. This increases the probability of finding security descriptors needed in local cache, thus decreasing the number of roundtrips to a computer running SQL Server and the amount of data requested from a computer running SQL Server. This value should be considered if the search corpus contains a large number of different Access Control Lists (ACL).”

Also, when looking at this handy little app, you should change the Operations view –o to the properties view –pv and you’ll see even more you didn’t know.  Like the days-to-show-new-icon a property only exposed through STSADM

Not trying to be critical.  It’s a great start for giving us some useful views on the commands.  How much better would the app be if it gave us more real estate, and gave you not only a brief description, but the syntax and an example when you clicked on it.   Great work guys.  Keep it coming!