The SharePoint Pro’s Delivery Toolkit

I’ve been thinking about the applications I use regulary at work to help support the delivery of SharePoint projects.  I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise and list these out and to share what I use.

You will be surprised to find that this list has little to do with the SharePoint product, and more about the supporting tools that help me get on with my job.  They probably apply to many more cases than specifically a SharePoint Pro.  Here they are in no particular order:

  • Fiddler – a web debugger that is very useful for tracking many issues around SharePoint including authentiation (ie Kerberos), latency and proxy problems.
  • Lightscreen – My number one tool within the PortableApps suite, and just find it very quick and simple to use.  Great for grabbing that nasty error and to fill in documentation.
  • Password Safe – Perfect for keeping all the passwords in an organised fashion readily available.
  • Grindstone – Keeping track of time is a must for my role, and GrindStone makes it simple for me to keep track of my hours against projects.
  • Evernote – I ran my own wiki (Foswiki) for about a year running back to a PC at home, but I kept having problems with network connectivity, and just found the setup too unreliable (Foswiki itself was great for what I needed at the time).  Evernote is like a personal wiki on steroids, and great mobility options.
  • Putty – So what does an SSH client have to do with delivering SharePoint?  I can use it in the absence of telnet on a locked-down workstation or server for some rudimentary network tests, and I can in some cases use it to bypass proxy restrictions.

There are probably a few other, non-Microsoft tools that I use fairly regularly, but these are probably the main stable.  In all cases, these tools are also free to use, an added bonus.

What tools do you use?