SharePoint site creation tool

Introducing Verasti

If you are ever in the position of having to create and recreate customised SharePoint sites with specific folder structures for different uses then I have designed and developed a tool to do this.

I call it Verasti and you can purchase licences from Verelogic IT Solutions 

at: https://verelogic.com

Verasti lets you create customised SharePoint sites.  All the customisation data stored in an Excel workbook (no database needed).

The Verasti engine looks at the Excel workbook and uses the metadata to create or configure a SharePonit site.

The workbook as a series of worksheets that control the creation process.

Assuming you have the correct permissions on the SharePoint tenant, you can deploy the same configuration as many times as you wish just by modifiying some metadata in the workbook.

Verasti features

Verasti can do the following.

• Create SharePoint sites (Modern and Classic)
• Deploy "Apps" from the central "SharePoint" catalogue
• Activate a SharePoint Theme
• Enable and disable SharePoint Features
• Create new SharePoint Roles (Permission Levels) for the site
• Create custom SharePoint Groups
• Add members to the SharePoint groups (SharePoint users, Azure groups)
• Create Lists and Libraries with full customisation (e.g. version count, compliance tags)
• Add Fields to Lists (text, number, datetime, lookup etc)
• Add Folder hierarchies to Libraries (or lists)
• Create Views on Lists and Libraries
• Upload files into Libraries (whilst maintaining original meta data such as date created and date modified)
• Create List items 
• Deploy Site Content Types into Lists and Libraries
• Create Site Pages
• Create Section layouts on Site pages
• Add Web Parts to Section Layours with customised properties of the Web Parts
• Create Sharepoint "Shares"
• Break Inheritance at Library/List Level
• Assign Permissions at Library/List/Item/Page/File level
• Create QuickLaunch and Top Navigation entries
• Modify Branding of the site (The "chrome")
• Generate Reports on Lists/pages/Libraries

I have designed the tool to deal with time consuming SharePoint configuration.  No need to write or support your own PowerShell any more!

It can save many many hours of tedious repetition and can be integrated in with other systems.

 Dynamics FnO Entities 

Dynamics API documentation is pretty scare and if you are doing work using the Dynamcis REST API you need to know the entities and propeties.

It is quite tricky to get documentation about the entities and properies so I needed to gather information myself.

Getting "Metadata"

There is one URL that will give you an XML represntation of everything. It is:

https://{your_dynamics_host}/data/$metadata

This gives you an enormous response (so big that it may not even be possible for a browser to handle the response).  Best to use a tool like "Postman" to get that XML

Strangely there does not seem to be a need to get an authorisation token to get this response. 

When I tried this out I got an XML response of over 615 thousand lines

Extracting Entity/Property/Primary Keys

Inside the XML is a treasure trove of information.

1. Entity names
2. Entity primary keys
3. Entity Properties and their data types
4. Entity Navigation Properties (i.e. properties that link to other entities)

I used my tool "Vermonti" to process this XML file as follows:

1. Turn the XML into JSON (resulted in a file of over 1.6 million rows) and store it
2. Use Vermonti to parse the JSON and extract properties to a CSV file
3. Use Vermonti to parse the JSON and extract navigation properties and APPEND to the CSV file
4. Convert the CSV file into an XLSX workbook and sort by Entity Name.  This gives me a list of all the fields for all entities (nearly 75 thousand properties) 
5. Use Vermonti to parse the JSON and extract primary keys into a XLSX workbook.  There are nearly 11 thousand properties used as primary keys - most of which are compund primary keys.

If you want a copy of the workbooks Vermonti generated then emaill me...