Sean Wallbridge
Stumbled across this gem today. The Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint from Acceleratio Ltd.
As any SharePoint professional knows, SharePoint combines ease of use and the ability to change software to suit your business needs and requirements rapidly. That is the positive of SharePoint. The negative is the expectations that come on IT to be equally as nimble. That means keeping on top of the environment, controlling it and maintaining effective change controls.
Enter the importance of good SharePoint documentation
Documentation is critical to the success of maintaining a healthy SharePoint environment. And if you can maintain a baseline (being able to refer to changes over time), all the better.
Introducing the Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint
Like any girlfriend (note, I’m happily married for 16+ years, this is just an analogy folks!) 
, I only met this product today and a marriage (should be) for life. But I like what I see.
The product is intended to:
- Save time generating documentation about your SharePoint environment and offers a number of ways to output the information as well as a very slick visual display in the tool itself
- Provide baseline capabilities so you can capture trends over time, including having emails sent to you when changes are made (take that tinkering admins who swear they didn’t touch the system!)
- Would help with maintaining consistent settings (tracking changes, and comparing them) across your DEV, QA, Testing, Staging and Production Farms (And in small business land, we don’t have the luxury of that, so documentation is even more important)
For a complete list of features, visit the product website.
Check it out. The price is certainly fair, considering the value it provides.
More Information
- Features of the app: http://www.spdockit.com/features/generate-sharepoint-farm-documentation/
- Brochure: http://www.spdockit.com/downloads/documents/Documentation-Toolkit-SharePoint-Product-Brochure.pdf
- Sample output: http://www.spdockit.com/downloads/documents/SharePoint-3-Server-Farm-Documentation.docx
My only complaint is I didn’t get off my butt and do it first. I often thought about creating such a tool and then life caught up with me. 