Skip to main content

Using Powershell to extract users from Sharepoint

Before decommissioning a Sharepoint server, I needed a list of all users on the different team sites. Time for some Powershell magic!

On the Technet site I found a script that promised to do exactly what I needed:

This script enumerates SharePoint 2010 or 2013 permissions across the entire farm down to the site (SPWeb) level. It also recursively expands the membership of any AD group and lists the assignment role binding on the permission. The output is an XML format.

So I copied the script over, logged in on the Sharepoint server and opened up a Powershell command prompt. However when I tried to execute the script it failed with the following error message:

Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation

+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], TargetInvocationExcept

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException

So I opened up the script to find the root cause of the error and saw that it failed on the call to AllWebs:

image

On StackExchange I found some information telling me that the issue was probably related to security. The following solution was mentioned:

All permissions required:

  • Site Collection administrator on the SPSite (whether given through Central Admin or Site Settings)
  • PowerShell scripting admin: add-spshelladmin domain\username
  • PowerShell scripting admin on the content databases: get-spcontentdatabase | add-spshelladmin domain\username

And indeed, after adding the user, I was able to run the script successfully!

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more