Vyapin Blogs

A short note about our Admin Report Kit for Active Directory (ARKAD). This product of ours has evolved over time and has essentially become a single solution for  Administrative reporting, Management reporting and Compliance reporting such as SOX and HIPAA.

The latest version includes a broad range of built-in reports that pretty much cover everything a company needs for all aspects of AD reporting. One of the outstanding feature of the product is the ability to let users customize the report fields and formats in a variety of ways. All the built-in reports may be filtered (to reduce the size of the report), customized (to get the required fields in a certain order and format) and the settings may be saved for repeated use in the future.

Another outstanding set of reports in ARKAD are the Forest Reports. The Forest Reports lets you take reports for your entire organization by letting you run these reports across multiple domains in a forest. For example, one great use of the Forest report feature is to check users who are members of groups in other domains. A user in domain X may be a member of a group in domain Y. ARKAD generates a list of all such users who have cross group-membership across domains in a forest. This is very useful in tracking down users and their groups in complex multi-domain AD deployment.

Two of the most common questions from our customers while migrating documents  to SharePoint libraries are the following:

1. Can DocKIT import Created Date and Last Modified Date fields of files in file system?

2. Can DocKIT import Created By and Modified By fields of folders and/or files to SharePoint?

Let us answer the first question: DocKIT propagates the Created Date and Last Modified Date fields from original Source (file system or summary properties) to the respective date fields for folders and/or files in SharePoint. For this to happen, the DocKIT Web Services must be installed in Windows Server 2003 running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 (32-bit or 64-bit platform). Without the web service component, this will not work as the component takes care of carrying forward these two date fields. There is one more requirement to get this to work correctly. The user name specified in SharePoint Login dialog / user account specified in the Run As parameter in the scheduled task is a:

• Member of administrators group in the local server and remote SQL Server (or)  
• Application pool user account (or)
• Owner of the site where the destination library resides.

Apart from the file system date fields, DocKIT also allows users to assign ‘Date Created’, ‘Date Last Printed’, ‘Date Last Saved’ in MS-Office documents to be assigned to the system date fields in SharePoint (namely, Created Date and Modified Date).
 
Next, what about the Created By and Modified By fields of folders and/or files?
 
DocKIT propagates the Created By and Modified By fields from original source document (namely, Author, Manager & Last Saved By) or any other user column specified in the external metadata file to the respective user fields for folders and/or files in SharePoint. Again, the same requirements of installing the Dockit web service and running the scheduled task  stated above apply to this scenario too.