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List of 10 useful SharePoint Tools from CodePlex

By Praveen Modi ⋅ February 21, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment
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Here are some really useful SharePoint tools available at CodePlex. I have tried some of these tools while others in the list seems to be popular and worth checking.

CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site.

SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard by Chris O’Brien

This is a great tool for quickly deploying SharePoint content from one environment to another. Here are some salient feature of this tool:

• Ability to “cherry-pick” content to deploy using a tree view - this is from entire site collection down to individual lists, folders, list items (including files)
• Dependencies of selected content (e.g. referenced CSS files, master pages) are automatically included in the export - check ‘Exclude dependencies of selected objects’ to disable this.
• All required content types, columns etc. are automatically included in the export.
• In contrast to STSADM export, it is possible to retain GUIDs during deployment. This is required for scenarios where the destination should be a mirror-image of the source, such as staging/production environments for the same site
• Open Source and free.

Read the detailed review of this tool

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard

Chris Obrien’s Blog
http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2007/12/introducing-sharepoint-content.html

SharePoint SmartTemplates for Visual Studio

The SmartTemplates for SharePoint project delivers a collection of Visual Studio templates which allow developers to create a range of SharePoint customizations in a painless and professional fashion.

SmartTemplate comes in 2 flavors:

Web Part Project Template:
It allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to write the web part code, generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment and generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation.

SmartPart Web Part Project
Allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to write a web user control (ASCX), wrap the user control in a SmartPart instance, generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment and generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/smarttemplates

SharePoint 2007 Features

SharePoint 2007 Features add new functionality to a SharePoint 2007 farm, site collection, or site. It install bunch of custom Features to address deficiencies in SharePoint 2007 or add new capabilities.

Some of the popular feature are Debugger Feature, Log Viewer, Print List, Toolbar Manager etc.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/features

SPIEFolder

Allows you to either Import a file system folder (And all files and subfolders) into a SharePoint Document Library, and also export a SharePoint Document Library to the file system for WSS 2.0/SPS2003 or WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007.

This tool completely replicates the document libraries folder hierarchy to the file system when exporting, and replicates the folder hierarchy from the file system to the document library when importing.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPIEFolder

SPSiteManager

The purpose of the SharePoint Site Manager (SPSiteManager) is to assist customers with performing SharePoint Site Collection maintenance activities for SharePoint Products and Technologies (which includes Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003). This sample source can be compiled to produce a tool that will allow you to analyze your farm looking for problems, repartition/level sites across content databases, perform batch backups, restores, and deletes of site collections, and perform Site maintenance and cleanup for SharePoint Portal Server.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPSiteManager

SPPurgeList

Allows you to purge the contents from any list or document library on WSS 2.0/SPS2003 or WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007.

If you need to retain a list/document library itself (Maintaining its original GUID) without completely deleting the entire list/document library and re-creating, this tool can help.
You could certainly use Web Folders (WebDAV) to clear the contents, but users stand the chance of accidentally deleting the contents of the forms folder which is not desirable. As well, you could script and automate the task using this tool if you desired.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/sppurgelist

SPLSBackup

The purpose of SPLSBackup is to mimic STSADM site collection level backup/restore but with options for setting/unsetting the sites lock state during the operation, therefore eliminating the need to manually visit the SharePoint Central Admin pages before and after.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/splsbackup

SharePoint Access Checker Web Part

Quickly check what objects within a SharePoint site hierarchy a user has access to.

The Access Checker Web Part is a Windows SharePoint Services Web Part, for use within Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, that displays a tree view showing permissions on objects for a user scoped to a Site hierarchy. It also has a second mode which will show the permission inheritance of objects within a Site hierarchy.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/AccessChecker

WSPBuilder

The WSPbuilder is a console application that creates SharePoint Solutions files based on a folder structure. WSPBuilder will automatically traverse a “12″ folder structure and creates a SharePoint solution manifest.xml and the wsp file based on the files it finds.

Therefore you do not need the knowledge of how to create a solution manifest.xml and wsp file any more.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder

SharePoint Used Space Information

SharePoint Used Space Information is a console application which allows to retrieve information about space used (bytes) by all sites and sub-sites for a specific site collection into .csv files.

Download from CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com/SPUsedSpaceInfo

If you have used any of these tools, please drop a comment and share your views.

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