Sharepoint – add doc entry as placeholder long before real unknown-type arrives

So “we must use Sharepoint – it is our corporate answer for everything” … Ok, but it is the wrong tool for … never mind – lets just get a solution and in doing so a lot of learning results … and ALOT did. Lets state that

  • SharePoint assumes you have the document and its type (eg. pdf, xlsx etc.) BEFOREHAND – this is not our case
  • a lot of programmatic ways of getting info into SharePoint have their nuances, advantages and disadvantages. Some are being phased out or already are

In our example we do NOT have the document before hand NOR do we know what the document from our vendors might be. It might a pdf, might be excel or might be word. We have a Document Library and the admin staff will be editing various dates (columns) long before the docs come in all the way. To start, this SharePoint placeholder list is auto-generated from an excel spreadsheet that states project, placeholder name,  code and how many of that item we should make in SharePoint . Continue reading