Monthly Archives: June 2010

Use owssvr.dll to Display Useful Site Information in SP2010

I was reading forums this afternoon and learned something new (something that happens almost every day).  This is the posting:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/1cbdb0b4-eeda-4c61-9a52-da6212eebec5/

Basically, you can get some interesting information about a site by invoking owssvr.dll against it (h/t to Bil Simser and John Timney).

I gave this a try in a both a MOSS and an SP2010 environment.  It worked fine in the MOSS environment.  However, in the 2010 environment, Internet explorer didn’t want to download the XML:

image

As you can see, I know it had 21k or so of content.  However, when I clicked the Save button, I got:

image

(Unable to open this Internet site.  The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found.  Please try again later.)  

I fired up Fiddler and and I was able to see the output, however.  It seems like there may be something happening in SP2010 that prevents owssvr.dll from transmitting its XML payload the way it wants.  Or, my SP2010 environment is just acting funny.

Thought it was interesting…

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