26 February, 2009 · 2 minutes to read
slkadm for SharePoint Learning Kit
slkadm is a tool which ships with the SharePoint Learning Kit and is analogous to stsadm for SharePoint itself, in that it's used the administratively configure SLK, in particular the SLK mappings.
What is an SLK mapping?
An SLK mapping is the link between a site collection and the SLK data. For each site collection you want to use SLK with you must create a mapping. You would normally do this through SharePoint Central Administration | Application Management | SharePoint Learning Kit.
A mapping consists of:
To re-iterate, if a site collection does not have an SLK mapping associated with it, you will not be able to use SLK on that site. A common problem is not setting the correct site collection on the Configure SharePoint Learning Kit page. It's actually not that obvious which site collection the page is going to update, even though it's the first control on the page.
What can slkadm do?
slkadm is a command line tool and can perform 4 tasks:
Configure a site collection
The command for this is
slkadm.exe -o configuresite -url http://server/site -databaseserver myDbServer -databasename myDatabase -createdatabase -instructorPermission "SLK Instructor" -learnerPermission "SLK Learner" -observerPermission "SLK Observer" -createPermissions -uploadSlkSettings "file name of slksettings.xml" -defaultSettings
The arguments for these are fairly self explanatory Some notes are:
Show the existing mapping for a site collection
The command for this is
slkadm.exe -o getsiteconfiguration -url http://server/site
and an example output is
Notice that slkadm has "found" the SLK configuration and then listed what is configured. The output could be clearer though, here's one for a site collection which has not been configured:
Although it does state that "no SLK configuration found", it then goes on to list the default settings, so at first glance it could be configured.
Show all mappings on the server
The command for this is simply
slkadm.exe -o enummappings
with an example output as
You will get one line per site collection configured, with some minimal information - the site url, GUID and database details. In the example here I've got 2 site collections configured for slk.
Delete a mapping
The command for this is
slkadm.exe -o deletemapping -guid 1234abcd-1234-abcd-1234-abcd1234abcd
where the GUID is replaced by the GUID of the site collection. The easiest way to get the GUID is by running the enummappings or getsiteconfiguration commands.
This will delete the mapping, and disable SLK on the site collection, but it will not remove the database or the Assignment List Web Parts from any pages in the site collection.
List the commands
As is standard with any command line tool you can view the commands by running
slkadm.exe /?
Founder / Chairman
Richard started SalamanderSoft in 2007 after a successful career as a software developer. Wanting to start his own company and with experience in integrating school systems he set out to build the best integration system for schools and to exceed customer expectations. He starting out on his own, doing all the coding, support and sales until finally the growing number of customers meant he needed to start growing the team. He is still heavily involved in coding the core Integration Suite product.