MSDN Magazine - September 2008 - (Page 45)

Ted PATTISon Office Space Custom Auditing In SharePoint Many people using SharePoint® technologies don’t realize that there is auditing support built directly into the Windows® SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 platform. The primary reason this is not wellknown is that WSS auditing support is turned off by default, and it cannot be enabled using anything supplied by WSS out of the box. Taking advantage of the WSS auditing infrastructure requires extra code that is not included with WSS. One simple way to take advantage of WSS auditing support is to use Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. MOSS provides a user interface (under Site Settings > Configure Audit Settings) that allows a site-collection owner to enable and configure automatic activity event logging. MOSS also provides an audit-reporting facility that reads audit log entries and reports on which users have been engaging in activities, such as reading and writing content, within a specific site collection. A second approach to using WSS auditing support will appeal to you as a developer. You can build a custom SharePoint solution with Visual Studio® and create a custom application page that allows a site-collection administrator to enable and configure WSS activity event logging. But it’s not enough just to turn on automatic activity event logging. It requires more than that. A custom auditing solution targeting WSS must also include some type of user interface so that users can view or report on audit entries that have been added to the WSS audit log. Two years ago, not long after Microsoft released the first public beta for MOSS 2007, Joanna Bichsel and I published a white paper titled “Item-Level Auditing with SharePoint Server 2007” (msdn.microsoft.com/library/bb397403), along with an accompanying code sample. In this white paper, we discussed many important details about how to program auditing support in WSS. We also covered how MOSS leverages and extends the WSS auditing infrastructure using custom policies and audit report generation. In this month’s column I am going to walk through a new SharePoint solution I recently created with a Visual Studio project named AuditingDemo. The project contains some of the same auditing management code I covered in the white paper, such as the code that enables auditing support through the WSS object The Auditingdemo project provides a custom SharePoint solution that can take advantage of the auditing support built into the WSS platform. model. However, the AuditingDemo project has been totally redesigned and is a much better starting point than the sample code I wrote two years ago. For example, the AuditingDemo project has been created using the STSDEV utility, and I have incorporated many best practices in areas such as solution-package deployment, security programming, and security trimming. My goal with this month’s column is to explain these updated best practices and SharePoint development techniques. It is my intention to complement the original white paper rather than overlap its content. If you have not read the original white paper, I recommend taking a look at it first so that you have a proper context for this month’s column. The purpose of the AuditingDemo project is to provide a custom SharePoint solution that can take advantage of the auditing support built into the WSS platform. I designed the project around a scenario wherein a site-collection owner (or another user in the role of Audit Manager) can enable, view, and modify audit settings for the current site collection. The AuditingDemo project also provides viewing capabilities so that a user in the role of an auditor can see what’s in the audit log to determine what activity has occurred on a site-collection-wide basis and also on a per-item or per-document basis. As I mentioned earlier, this project was built using the STSDEV utility, which you can download from codeplex.com/stsdev. You can read about it in my March 2008 Office Space column (msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc337895). The AuditingDemo Project The AuditingDemo project has been designed with a central feature (also named AuditingDemo) that is scoped to the level of the site collection. To use the AuditingDemo, you simply need to activate the feature once per site collection. The AuditingDemo feature includes a feature receiver class with a FeatureActivated event handler (see Figure 1). The code inside Send your questions and comments for Ted to mmoffice@microsoft.com. Code download available at msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911. September 2008 45 http://codeplex.com/stsdev http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc337895 http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc337895 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/bb397403 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/bb397403 http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - September 2008

MSDN Magazine - September 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Data Points Advanced Basics Office Space Cutting Edge Hierarchy ID New Features for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Prism Data Services Advanced WPF Test Run Security Briefs Foundations { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - September 2008

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