Under Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft made available “advanced lectures” in video or white paper format (and sometimes both):

click here for Advanced lectures and white papers

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I just updated the Sharepoint Database Exporter.  It now supports Sharepoint 2007.

For more details, see the my original post here.

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Where I’m currently working, we’re using WSS 3.0. We have a need for a workflow so I started evaluating if the offer answer our needs.

First of all, let’s try the workflows available in the web interface. I discovered that we only have the 3-state workflow template available… If we want more, we need the full-price edition of Sharepoint 2007. But still, we don’t know if the additional templates will answer our needs…

It turns out that we can create custom workflow using Sharepoint Designer, so lets download a trial edition to see if it does what we want. After being forced to register on Microsoft website under what they call “MSDN Evaluation Experience”, I receive an e-mail that states it is the first of a series of e-mail that will provide me technical resources… and that I should receive another e-mail with the download instructions within 2 to 8 hours!!! WHAT???

Well I later received an e-mail containing the link and the trial key. Now let’s try Sharepoint Designer. How do we create a new workflow?? ok a little google search revealed the task is as as simple as click “File / New / Workflow” ;). Good, let’s go! hum! File menu is disabled… DAMN!

Sharepoint Designer 2007 Trial is features limited!!! Not time limited as Microsoft project usually are. Then how do I test before buying? Why it was not stated anywhere? I lost my time registering an waiting for that download link for nothing!

All this to say that I’m missing the good old days… When Microsoft were making their applications easily available to developers so they can learn it. That’s how they got where they are in the first place. A developer will never promote a product he doesn’t know. Yes they are dealing with piracy issues, but still, as an observer I feel that they are exaggerating…

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You are in a situation where you created a second-level website and realize that you have a typo in the name of the website. No problem, you go to the website settings, in the look and feel section you can change the title, description and icon.

So you’re done. Nice you go to your home (top-level website) and what??? Typo is still there!! You then go back to the website but typo is corrected there. Hum! so the menus of the top-level website were not updated with the new name…

To change to top-link bar menu:

• Go to top-level site settings, in the look and feel section click on “Top link bar”.
• Edit the entry to correct and that’s it.

To change the left-link bar commonly known as “Quick Launch”, follow the same steps:

• Go to top-level site settings, in the look and feel section click on “Quick Launch”.
• Edit the entry to correct and that’s it.

Now you’re finally done.

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Hi,

Some months ago I was experimenting with Windows Sharepoint Services and found out that my machine was not powerfull enough to run Windows 2003, SQL Server and Sharepoint at a decent speed. I had data in Sharepoint I wanted to keep so I did an SQL Server backup of the database. I tought that I would re-setup everything easily after a machine upgrade… I was wrong! I never succeeded to restore the database backup in a running Sharepoint environment (I learned the hard way that I should have used WSS backup utilities instead of relying only on a database backup).

From that moment I decided to explore how Microsoft stores its data within Sharepoint. I found out about Docs and UserData tables and I thought I could develop a little tool to extract my data. In the mean time I discovered the Sharepoint Database Explorer from James Edelen. I was happy that I would’nt have to code it myself :)… The tool is nice, but it didn’t allow me to export custom lists and metadata…

As a learning experience, I decided to build an exporter program. It happens that I find it usefull in a couple of situations… So I decided to share in case anybody would have the same needs than I had!

***** Updated (2008-02-21) *****

Features (v1.1.0.1):

• It is possible to preview the pending version (checked-out and saved, but not yet checked-in) of a file.
  (on both: WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0) (see this screenshot)
• Bug fix regarding the extraction of document librarie items when files are checked-out.

Features (v1.1.0.0):

• Connects to either Sharepoint 2003 or Sharepoint 2007 database structure (automatic detection).
• It is possible to preview the version history of a file and to export individually a previous version of a file.

Features (v1.0.0.1):

• Connects to Sharepoint 2003 databases directly
• Does not rely on a working Sharepoint environment… it only connects to the database
• You can preview the list contents (see screenshots)
• It is possible to export individual files from the preview window.
• You can export custom list attachments and document library files
• You can export metadata

Metadata is exported in an xml file. For attachments, you have the choice to export them in a folder or to embed them in the xml.

Known issues:

• When a list is not customized (kept as-is — no additional fields added), Microsoft does not store the column mapping (Sharepoint field name mapping to SQL Server column name). They probably store them in a resource file so its faster to retrieve than querying the database. For us, that means we have to hardcode the mapping for each list type (Custom List, Contact List, Discussion List, Calendar, etc.). For this reason, some list types may not export well.

Screenshots:

• Preview tab - Attachment history
• Preview tab - Custom List
• Preview tab - Listitem with attachment
• Export tab
• XML sample

Download (Latest Version):

• Sharepoint Database Exporter (v1.1.0.1) - Binaries Only
• Sharepoint Database Exporter (v1.1.0.1) - Sources and Binaries
• License (New BSD License)

Add-On:

• XSL Transformation to convert output into an HTML Table
  (use this to import to an older Excel spreadsheet that does not have native XML support)

Download (Previous Versions):

• Sharepoint Database Exporter (v1.1.0.0) - Binaries Only
• Sharepoint Database Exporter (v1.1.0.0) - Sources and Binaries

• Sharepoint 2007 Database Exporter - Alpha 1 - Binaries
• Sharepoint 2007 Database Exporter - Alpha 1 - Sources and Binaries

• Sharepoint 2003 - Database Exporter (v1.0.0.1) - Binaries Only
• Sharepoint 2003 - Database Exporter (v1.0.0.1) - Source and Binaries

Final Notes:
This work is done on my free time, but I encourage to post bugs and feature requests so I can take a look when I’ll have time.

Also if you made your own modifications, feel free to post them back so I can integrate them, of course giving you the credits for what you’ve done…

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