Tip 13: What’s Old is New

This tip is for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0/3.0, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and may apply to SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

Here is a tip for those of you who want to interface with a SharePoint without programming against the SharePoint Web Services or the SharePoint Object Model, use WSS RPC and FrontPage RPC URL Protocol.

So what can be done with WSS RPC URL protocol? Here are a couple of interesting commands you can run on a SharePoint site to display information about the site. Keep in mind that you will need the appropriate permissions still on the SharePoint site to run some of the RPC commands.

Here is one that will list, in XML, information on a site like the lists that are in the site, the document templates available, the master page for the site and much, much more.

http://server/sites/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=GetProjSchema&Name=SiteTemplate

Here is one that will list, in XML, very verbose information on a list or document library. The list GUID and be found by navigating to a list and selecting; Settings-><TYPE OF LIST> Settings and copying everything after the “&List=” in the browser address bar. It will look something like this: %7B756E8BEF%2DA8E6%2D4E1B%2DBF51%2DABCA8454A52D%7D.

http://server/sites/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=ExportList&List=<LISTGUID>

There are many more commands that can be run, play around with the commands and you will be able to gather a lot of information on SharePoint without writing a line of “code”.