Tuesday 15 September 2009

Perth SharePoint User Group - September Presentation

I presented at the Perth SharePoint User Group September meeting.

The PowerPoint for the presentation can be downloaded here.

It was a blast! thanks to everyone who attended and the questions about SPDocGen, Database Management, Creating Explicit Managed Paths, Database Autogrowth settings and SharePoint Object Model Disposal.

Thursday 3 September 2009

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator - Full Source Code Uploaded

I've done some minor tweaks to SPDocGen, added some console output and a little error handling.

I've also uploaded the full source code for the solution, so feel free to modify it as you need.

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator

Here's some ideas I have for further improving and building on the solution:

1. Implement command line parameters to let users specify what is output.
2. Create a winforms UI to allow users to specify what is output, and specify the XML, XSLT and DOC filenames.
3. Document even more Farm level information...
4. SPDocGen currently produces Farm Level documentation, the next step is to produce detailed Site Collection level documentation with detailed reporting of Site Collection specific info such as Content Types, Site Columns, Lists etc. etc.

Post a comment here if you're interested in being involved and collaborating on this further.

Tuesday 1 September 2009

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator

I've just created this project on CodePlex http://spdocgen.codeplex.com/


SPDocGen aka. SharePoint Documentation Generator is a console app that generates WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 farm documentation or reports using the SharePoint object model api. It produces an XML file, which is then transformed into a .doc file using XSLT and WordML.

I started this project to save myself time, because I've been tasked with documenting SharePoint Deployments quite a few times, and its usually a time consuming process of clicking through Central Admin, running batch commands of STSADM or using SharePoint Manager then copy and pasting the info into a word document. Service Pack 2 also has a preupgradecheck command that can produce some documentation for you. It might also be worth having a look at the SharePoint Admin Toolkit, SPSReport, SPDiag or MOSSRAP

Hope it saves everyone some documentation time so you can get back to spending your time on more worthwhile tasks like SharePoint dev or SharePoint admin.

Get SPDocGen