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!

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

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.