Sharetoperl: A half-shark, half-octopus creature created for the University, creates a whole lot of terror in Southampton while a computer scientist who helped created it tries to capture/kill it.
(alternative title: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly)
At the Univrsity of Southampton we’ve jumped into Sharepoint in a big way. It’s a grumpy beast, and doesn’t think like me, but it’s got some things going for it. Currently I’m working with SP2007 but I’m told SP2010 is less insanely IE/Windows centric. Which wouldn’t be hard. There’s options in SP2007 which only work in Internet Explorer on a Windows box – yuck!
That said it’s a good way to create sets of documents with rich controls on people & groups who can read and write them.
It does Calendars, but they’re a bit of a joke. Utterly Microsoft-centric so I’m just ignoring them. There’s probably ways to make them better, but I’ll worry about it another day.
The other thing SharePoint does is things called “Lists”, which is a kinda catch all term for, well, lists of stuff, including the contents of a document library, calendars (I think), and dataish spreadsheetish things.
Now if I could control those from a nice command line (Perl) script it would let me do lots of interesting clever things without ending up in treatment for .NET induced substance abuse.
So I’ve been around the Web, and there’s a few helpful posts, but none of them worked (quite), but a combination of hacks got me to something which did work (around 5am this morning).
Lets just place that in the public domain… It’s got scraps from all over the blogosphere, but I’ve done a fair bit of work tarting it up into something easy to use.
Next stop, uploading files into sharepoint and setting their metadata…
We’ve looked at getting SharePoint lists out as XML, and found the following:
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/271254/what-is-the-easiest-approach-to-exporting-a-sharepoint-list-in-xml-format
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms478653.aspx.
Hence, here’s a demo of one of our lists as XML:
* http://is.gd/dLNmmB
Very, very handy! As our back-end systems are Linux-shaped, and the University diving into SharePoint, this script will shine.
Thanks 🙂
Good one. One can also use curl to upload file in sharepoint
curl –ntlm -u domain/userid:passwd -T “sharepoint URL”