Tools and utilities for MOSS 2007 in codeplex

SharePoint 2007 or MOSS 2007 is the most popular and sought-out skill from Microsoft Gold Partners and Customers across various industry sectors.

Eventhough, Microsoft has been constantly upgrading lot of new features with latest service pack releases, there are still some features & utilities which are desired by sharepoint developers.However, Codeplex contains many tools and utilities which are not only helpful for developers but to all people involved with Sharepoint portal. The following are some tools and utilities which caught my eye:

Community Kit for SharePoint 2007

The Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest.

Vision / Scope:
The latest version of the Vision/Scope document, click here!

Import data from Spreadsheet into Sharepoint Lists

Import from Spreadsheet is the missing facet to the SharePoint 2007 List features. SharePoint let’s a user create custom list from a spreadsheet, but lacks the ability to import data to an existing SP list. This feature developed in C# .Net and easy to install will do just that.

Sharepoint Solution Installer

Sharepoint Solution Installer is a Windows application for an eased and more user friendly installation and deployment of SharePoint 2007 solution files to a SharePoint server farm. Distribute your SharePoint solution files with this installation program instead of a raw script using STSADM.EXE to install and deploy the solution.

SharePoint Branding Tool

To have a tool that can help ease up the effort required to manually change branding on multiple sites.

Functionality:
This tool can be used modify the following for multiple sites:
* Themes 
* CustomMasterUrl/MasterUrl (Master Page) 
* CSS and SiteImage Paths
* …and more

SharePoint Cross-Site Configurator

This tool automates the process of deploying the MOSS site settings in all or selected sites in a server farm as shown in the following list:

Note The Tool also enables IT administrators to customize the site settings to be deployed.

• Applying Master Pages across a SharePoint server farm.
• Setting up Web Titles for all or selected site collections across the farm.
• Applying audit control settings to all or selected sites.
• Adding advanced settings such as “Allow content type management” to all types of lists.
• Adding a new Expiration Policy at the site collection level.
• Adding a new Expiration Policy to content types, lists, and documents.

SharePoint 2007 Multiview Webpart

The Multiview webpart allows you to display data dynamically from different views or even different sharepoint lists or libraries based on certain conditions.

Currently, it supports two types of conditions:

1) Group Membership – You can show a particular view based on the Group Membership of the current user.

2) QueryString – You can pass a parameter (say ViewCase) in the Querystring to specify the particular view to show.

You can also opt to use both the above conditions to create another condition.

SharePoint Shared Services Search Provider

This is a neat little command utility that lets you do four things when moving a database from development environment to production environment.

- Accept  relevant inputs from the user

- Export all Managed properties

- Export Crawl properties and relevant categories

- Import Managed properties and map relevant crawl properties.

The above utility is more useful when migrating data from intranet website into extranet website.