Have your SharePoint libraries become slightly unorganised?
This tool visualises exported metadata exported from one or more SharePoint libraries. It will help you understand 1) where these documents are in in the library hierarchy, 2) what their metadata is, 3) which structure and governing rules might be missing and 4) what needs to be done to bring a bit of order and keep your teams productive.
The SharePoint Tree Browser features:
- Tree-based visualisation of documents in one or more SharePoint libraries
- Seamless zooming in/out to quickly understand large data structures and their relevant details
- Selecting Degree-of-Interest depth, to show more or less nodes surrounding the selected note
- Searching for documents based on keywords, expanding the tree to show search results
- Turn on coloring layers to visualise:
- Document age - Modification date minus Creation date
- Modification year - When was the document last modified
- Metadata top 10 - Ten most frequently used metadata elements per column
- Support for different languages by indicating the necessary columns via the 'SharePoint_instance.properties' file
How to use:
- Observe that the tree at the first level shows the repository, followed by the particular library at the next level.
- Use the depth slider to show a larger part of the tree, or select a particular node to uncover a deeper part of the tree.
- Click various nodes to see the tree parts expand.
- Pan by holding the left mouse button (not on a node) and moving.
- Zoom by holding the right mouse button and moving up or down.
- Double click to fit to zoom.
- Select a metadata column (Group) and turn on the visualisation (tick box) and observe the most used elements in the legend.
- Reset by selecting the root node, setting depth to 1 and clicking the Center button.
- Enter a keyword in the search box, click the Expand tick box to expand.
- Click the Center button to center the visualisation in case you loose perspective.
Requires Java 1.8 or higher.
The SharePoint Tree Browser was developed on a display with a 1680 by 1050 resolution. Screen options or buttons might have moved or may be hidden when you are running on a different resolution.
Based on prefuse, a visualisation library for Java developed by Jeffrey Heer.
Prepare metadata you would like to visualise as follows:
- Create a custom view in the SharePoint library where all (/relevant) columns are selected
- Export the metadata to Excel and save as xlsx.
- Place the xlsx file(s) in a subdirectory called 'data'
- Modify the data/SharePoint_instance.properties file as needed to indicate the correct column names
- Start the jar file with 'java -jar SharePointTreeBrowser-[release].jar'
This software is provided 'as is', without any warranty. At this time, the source code is not publicly available.
I am interested to learn about your experiences. Does it help to visualise your SharePoint library structure? Do you encounter any bugs or have an idea for a new feature? Don't hesitate to open an issue or get in touch.
The SharePoint Tree Browser is available via this link.
The zip archive contains the fat jar binary, as well as a 'data' directory with an example SharePoint export and a configuration file.
- 20190102 - Testing the release process and the first release (discontinued).
- 20190114 - Support for xlsx files (iso xls), Multi-language support, Removed need to rename sheet.
- Search does not support looking up consecutive keywords well. Change the depth on the depth slider to change to update the visualisation to the new search results, or restart the application.
- When running the ActionList, the prefuse visualisation framework sometimes throws a NullPointerException, which can be ignored.