Oh yeah, time for fun stuff!  There are only maybe 50 people on the entire planet that care about this but here goes nothing…

The Privacy class has enumerations which are fine for C# IDE coding but if you ever run a direct TSQL select against the SSP database those become hard to read.  [UserMemberships.ItemSecurity] on the Shared Service Provider database stores these raw integer values if you ever need to query Membership data directly.  And here they are:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.userprofiles.membergroup.sourcereference.aspx

SELECT            UserProfile_Full.NTName, MemberGroup.Url, MemberGroup.Description, MemberGroup.LastUpdate,

                  MemberGroup.MemberCount, MemberGroup.WebID, UserMemberships.GroupTitle, UserMemberships.GroupType,

                  UserMemberships.ItemSecurity, UserMemberships.PolicyId

FROM        UserProfile_Full

INNER JOIN  UserMemberships ON UserProfile_Full.RecordID = UserMemberships.RecordId

INNER JOIN  MemberGroup ON UserMemberships.MemberGroupId = MemberGroup.Id

WHERE       (UserProfile_Full.NTName = N‘domain\user’)

I love SharePoint, but servers can drive me crazy.  So many!  So check this out …  http://spdash.codeplex.com/  Allows lightening fast multiple server management. RDP doesn’t scale. Manage 10 servers easier than 1 with incredible "Grid" scripts that put everything on one page.

Benefits

• Do admin tasks faster
• Scale up beyond RDP
• Add new servers without fear

Features

• Pure XML config
• Auto-detect SharePoint farm (machines + users)
• Grid output, easy to read
• Copy and paste to Excel

Real application screen-shots:

Background
DevAdmin is how I think of my work. An administrator that uses development (script/code) to get more done with less. A developer that administers system capacity, performance, and scale. It’s a mix. And it’s a beautiful thing.
SharePoint farms have many servers with various services, applications, traffic patterns, and purposes. Having "grid" scripts like the below sample screen-shots can be a life saver. What’s a "grid"? Simple. I wanted to build a real-time Excel spreadsheet to display ALL configuration without RDP. RDP won’t scale. While great for 1-2 servers, it is awful for 10+ servers. Having confidence in your configs and knowing everything is 100% consistent are BIG steps forward for most admins.

Yesterday I found some great articles on how to create SSP search scopes and SSP Managed Properties via code.   This isn’t for developers.   This is for administrators!   If you need to repeat something with high quality a console EXE in Visual Studio is a great way to script against SharePoint 2007 (no offense to PowerShell in 2010).

• Creating and Exposing Managed Properties  (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428648.aspx)
• Creating and Exposing Search Scopes  (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428856.aspx)

Bundling these up as Console EXE that take in paraneters like args[0] allows you to easily build CMD files that can run many commands (even across many farms).   Excel fill down is my favorite way of doing this … then you just copy/paste over to CMD!  

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //USAGE
            //0= SSP Name
            //1= Root site URL prefix

            ServerContext serverctx = ServerContext.GetContext(args[0]);
            SearchContext searchctx = SearchContext.GetContext(serverctx);
            Scopes scopes = new Scopes(searchctx);
            Scope newScope = scopes.AllScopes.Create("RecordsActiveArchived", string.Empty, null, true,
                "results.aspx", ScopeCompilationType.AlwaysCompile);

            string[] urls =
            {"/sites/records_mgmt/dept1/Lists/Active",
            "/sites/records_mgmt/dept1/Lists/Archived",
            "/sites/records_mgmt/dept2/Lists/Active",
            "/sites/records_mgmt/dept2/Lists/Archived",
            "/sites/records_mgmt/dept3/Lists/Active",
            "/sites/records_mgmt/dept3/Lists/Archived"};

            foreach (string url in urls)
            {
                newScope.Rules.CreateUrlRule(ScopeRuleFilterBehavior.Include, UrlScopeRuleType.Folder, args[1] + url);
            }
            newScope.Update();
        }