One extremely useful utility for SharePoint is SharePoint Manager 2007. SPM2007 is developed by Carsten Keutmann. You may know him better by his other project – WSPBuilderthat is one of the best SharePoint add-ins for Visual Studio.
CodePlex site describes this tool as follows: “The SharePoint Manager 2007 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. It also enables you to change the properties (at your own risk). This is a very powerfull tool for developers that like to know what the SharePoint holds of secrets.”
Basically it lets you explore SharePoint server and see properties of all objects. You can see and sometimes modify even those properties that SharePoint doesn’t show you through browser based interface. There are more very cool uses for this tool but let’s see some pictures too.
SharePoint Manager 2007. Properties of Dead Site Delete timer job.
Click on image to see larger version of it.
Properties of all objects are presented same way as on screenshot above. For lists you can see also some additional tabs like shown on following screenshot.
SharePoint Manager 2007. Lists and libraries have also browsing and schema tabs.
Click on image to see larger version of it.
When building SharePoint solutions on Visual Studio you may need XMLs for list schemas. SharePoint Manager 2007 gives you these schemas. Just move to Schema XML tab and use copy-paste. XML is nicely formatted so you can also read it without using editors that can step XML. Same way you get also XML definitions for content types, site columns, groups and role definitions.
I used SharePoint Manager 2007 to compare properties of site columns to find out differences that caused problems on one server. It took only couple of minutes to find out problems. And as a bonus I got all list definitions to my Visual Studio project very fast.
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The List Schema Xml you can get is the same that comes from the Object Model. One thing to remember is that this is not a full implementation of a List Schema that can be used as part of a ListTemplate within a Feature or as part of a Site Definition either. Solution Generator which is part of the VSeWSS 1.3 download can reverse engineer these using a UI wizard.
Also, SPSource found at http://www.codeplex.com/spsource, I have literally just checked in the first pass at this to reverse engineer a list like SPSource has done with Content Types, Site Columsn and Files. This add-on works with VSeWSS, WSPBuilder and STSDev projects. I need to do some more testing on the SPSource ListTemplate bits, and will be announcing a release version shortly.
Is it okay to use this tool on QA or Production server?
Yes, you can use this tools on all servers you like. It is small, comes as couple of file to extract and no need for install. Run it in administrative privileges to access SharePoint.