SharePoint 2007 STSADM?

What is STSADM?

STSADM stands for Sharepint Team Service Administration, and it's a tool for command line SharePoint administration, as state in this article it's not interactive and MUST be used with administration credentials. It can be combined with batch programming scripts for automation and doubtlessly it's a must learn if you manage SP servers for on the go fixes, creation, etc.

NOTE - I'm aware that this tool will probably be replaced by PowerShell

For Using STSADM :

• Administrators group on the Server credential
• Stsadm does not work remotely (Must be executed on the server)

To use stsadm commands the syntax is composed by the operation and first the mandatory parameters and then the optional one.

stsadm.exe -[operation] [mansatory params] [optional params]

For Accessing (if this can be called like that) you must open a MS-DOS command prompt (Start>RUN>cmd) and then browse to the directory that you can access stsadm.exe. The default location usually is

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin

Here I post 2 examples of basic operations you can try with the STSADM command line tool:

Stsadm Help: stsadm.exe –help e.g., stsadm.exe –help backup

This one is the classic help displaying command line

Stsadm SP Site count: stsadm.exe -o enumsites -url http://YOUR_spSERVER >> sites.txt

This one is a bit more elaborated this one enumerates the sites on a server and then export the results to a .txt file that will be located on the \BIN folder (yes the same where the STSADM is located)

Hope this helps. Regards, Art-Uhr