SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool

The Feature Admin Tool finds faulty FeatureDefinitions and cleanly uninstalls them.
It finds feature remainders in sites, SiteCollections, WebApps and in the Farm, caused e.g. by forcefully uninstalled Features from a farm without deactivating them before. These faulty features, never visible, cause errors.
The Feature Admin Tool is able to identify them and remove them.

Very useful for migrations e.g. from 2007 to 2010 or from Enterprise to Standard.

Also, uninstall, (bulk) deactivate or (bulk) activate features with any scope farm wide.
Ideal, for activating or deactivating features in large farms with many sites and/or SiteCollections.

Features' of the FeatureAdmin Tool

* List features and feature definitions
* Search for faulty features in the farm and remove them cleanly if wanted
* Uninstall feature Definitions from the farm, even if faulty
* When uninstalling a feature, FeatureAdmin provides an option to deactivate this feature in the entire farm         before uninstalling it
*  Can also simply activate or deactivate features with any scope in the whole farm, in only a Web  
    Application, only within a SiteCollection or in a Site (SPWeb)
*  Web Apps are parsed automatically, after selecting one, all Site Collections in the Web App are shown
*  When selecting a SiteCollection, all sites (webs) are listed automatically.
*  Logging information is shown (e.g. change of selections, features added or removed)
*  Features and Feature Definitions are sorted (first after scope and then) after name
*  The FeatureAdmin window and all internal windows are resizeable (starting with version 2.1)


You need to have appropriate right

dbOwner rights to the SharePoint Configuration database and to every content database, you would like to cleanup, activate or deactivate features on.
You should add your login account to the Web Application User Policy with Full Control for each of the content web apps in the farm and it should be a member of the farm administrators group.
Additionally, this tool needs to run locally on a SharePoint Instance.
If you use the "find faulty feature" functionality, it will parse through the whole farm.

Reference : http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/

Sharepoint 2010 - Item Scheduling

Item Scheduling - Wow i liked this feature

I am not sure if everybody is aware of this new feature in SharePoint 2010 . 

* What is Item Scheduling ? 

Ans : Item scheduling is a feature which helps to publish a document/page for a specified period. This feature is available out-of-the-box for publishing sites for the Pages library. It can also be implemented in a Team Site for custom document libraries.

Prerequisites for Item scheduling 

* You need to Enable content approval on the library

* You need to enable Versioning on the Document Library both for Major and Minor versions. 

* And the Most Important thing you need to have the publishing feature enabled on the site . 

You have this feature enabled on the document library . now after selecting the document you get an option that says Item Scheduling . In which you can specify the Date and time when you want to display the document to the Users and also the End date when you want to stop displaying the document to the Users .

The document would be published as a Major version for the Users in the List view  

Understanding why we need Versioning and Content approval

 When you upload the document in the library ,The first thing that happens is it will be added as a minor version (0.1).

 Once the user wants to display the document in the library to all users, They sent a request for the document to be published. This will trigger a workflow for approval to the members of the SharePoint Approval group.
Till that time the document is marked as Pending. 

When a Approver approves the document The minor version will be changed to a major version (1.0) and the status will be marked as approved.

Now if Managing Item Scheduling is enabled

If The document Scheduling Start Date is not Immediate and current date and time has not reached the specified date and time. The status will be marked as Scheduled and the version number will remain as minor (0.1). The Document will not be Displayed to the users in the list

The timer job that Runs at the back on the server is Scheduled Approval which Looks for content that is scheduled for approval and moves it to the next stage in the process.it runs every 1 minute by default. 

It automatically switches the Status to Approved and sets version to major and the Document is displayed to the user.

If there is a specified Scheduling End Date then once the current date and time is greater, the status is marked as Scheduled and the version number is set back to highest minor release version of the previous major release.