“Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft® Office System” has Shipped!

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) programmatically collects settings and values from data repositories such as MS SQL, registry, metabase and performance monitor. Once collected, a set of comprehensive ‘best practice’ rules are applied to the topology.

Administrators running this tool will get a detailed report listing the recommendations that can be made to the environment to achieve greater performance, scalability and uptime.

You can get a copy here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cb944b27-9d6b-4a1f-b3e1-778efda07df8&displaylang=en

Bill Baer from MS IT includes more detail on the release in this post.

(The same team that brought you the WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 MOM packs were responsible for this.)

 <update 4/23/07>

The rules in this analyzer are pretty basic.  Bill Baer provides some additional rules and how to create rules on a recent post in his blog.

If you don't see any errors, it's because you have a configuration database, outbound email is configured, SSP is created, and other basic things that you'd expect.  It gives you access to a lot of things (databases, registry, file system), but the rules it shipped with are no brainers for experienced SharePoint IT folk.

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