Create SharePoint Site Map using Visio

Having a well-planned Information Architecture is critical for the success of a SharePoint implementation.

Also Mapping out our SharePoint environment helps us a lot in day to day administration and up-gradation.

Below are the steps using which we can create a visual sites map in Visio which can be exported into various formats or hosted using SharePoint Visio service as a webpage.

Steps 

 

On the SharePoint server, open the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and perform the following command:

Get-SPWebApplication https://portal.contoso.com | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | Select Title, URL, ID, ParentWebID | Export-CSV C:\InfoArch.csv -NoTypeInformation 




Open the CSV file in Excel.



To link all of the Site Collections to the Root Site Collection, replace all ParentWebID’s that are “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000″ (minus the Root’s) with the ID from the Root Site Collection. So, in our example, all of the “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000″ values would be replaced by the ID of the Root Site Collection “0c187a2c-e3fa-42e8-9de6-6b2987e41972″.



Save the file as XLSX, then open Visio 2010/2013

On the New selection, pick Business under Template Categories and then Organization Chart Wizard

The wizard will start, accept the default of” Information that is stored on a file…” and click Next


Click Next again to say that the data is stored in an Excel file



Browse for the saved XLSX file and click Next

Now you tell the wizard what the Employee-Manager relationship is. For our case, Name is the ID of the site and Reports To is the ParentWebID.



On this screen, we select which fields we want to display on each box



For Shape Data pick columns to display the data relevant to that site. For instance, we could have included the Site Owner, Last Modified Date, or Created date in our PowerShell command and included those columns in the Shape Data as well.



Leave the default of “I want to specify how much…” and click Next



Leave the default again and click Finish



Once the process completes, you should have a single page Visio diagram with the Root at the top and Site Collections and subsites connected underneath.





Zoomed in view of shape data after clicking on the Helpdesk subsite



We can save this as a Visio Web Drawing file, publish it to SharePoint 2010 using the Visio Graphics Service and have users click on each site to see Owners, Created Date, Web Template

 SharePoint | Create Visual Site Map SharePoint | Visio | Information Architecture | Admin Map 

Saravjeet Lamba