Sharepoint Shared Services Search Provider Property Creation

A neat little command utility that lets you do four things when moving a DB from development to production.
-Accept relevant inputs from the user
-Export Managed Properties
-Export Crawl Properties and relevant categories
-Import Managed properties and map relevant crawl properties

Background
Recently, Angus Logan from Microsoft Australia pinged me with a rather interesting SharePoint 2007 related problem that Tourism Western Australia (www.westernaustralia.com) was running into. See, they have SharePoint 2007 on their intranet.

In their SharePoint 2007 installation, they had search configured to search the Australian Tourism Data warehouse – a HUGE database using BDC (Business Data Catalog) (read more). So far so good – until of course they need to create an Extranet, and now they need to move all the Managed properties and Crawl properties over the Extranet SSP (Shared Service Provider).

This scenario is actually fairly common. Say for instance, you have a serious BDC catalog – configured on a development server. And now you wish to move it over to a production server. You’d probably run into the same situation. While you could backup/restore your DB, you know that approach suffers from the “copy way more than required” syndrome.

Now if you’ve been using SharePoint 2007 a bit, you’d notice that moving all this stuff over manually is a royal pain in the behind. So with the help of Angus, I wrote a neat little command line utility that lets you do four things.

• Accept relevant inputs from the user
• Export Managed Properties
• Export Crawl Properties and relevant categories
• Import Managed properties and map relevant crawl properties.

More Information
Check out Sahil Malik's blog entry: http://blah.winsmarts.com/2006-11-Solving_an_interesting_deployment_scenario_in_SharePoint_2007.aspx

Want the code?
Get it from http://www.codeplex.com/SSSPPC/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

Want the build?
Get it from http://www.codeplex.com/SSSPPC/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx

Want Membership?
mailto:ssiadmin@microsoft.com?subject=Membership Request - Sharepoint Shared Services Search Provider Property Creation