Business Case

In some cases, such as retiring old 3rd Party WSP Solutions, updating custom WSP solutions and web parts, etc, you may find yourself in the need of finding all web parts across multiple sites and site collections.

How to

1. Open SharePoint Essentials Toolkit
2. Select the sites that you want to find the web parts for
3. Right click and select 'Create Reports→Item Query'
4. In one of the SharePoint sites, in Site Settings, you should see Web Part Gallery (or 'Web Parts'). Copy the Web Part internal name you need to locate (it will be the file name before the .dwp or .webpart). 
5. In SharePoint Essentials Toolkit, in the 'Item Query Options' section, use 'Include' where 'File Content' contains 'webpartname' (where 'webpartname' is the name of the web part we obtained in step 4 above).
6. Click 'Show Advanced Options' and under 'Inclusion Rules' we want to put Site "Pages;Pages" so that the tool will only change those Page Libraries. You may modify this as needed.
7. Click 'Run Now' to start the job.
8. The tool should find any instances of the web part and generate a report of their locations which you can also export to Excel or SharePoint to share.