A new version of SQList: version 6.2.0.0 is out today!

We haven’t blogged about new releases for years, why we don’t know. We’ve been notifying all our users of SQList, been publishing support articles, but not a mention on our website. Silly strategy you may think…and so do we! But it has not been a strategy as much as a negligence on our part, and today we’re putting an end to it!

AxioWorks SQList continuously export SharePoint lists and libraries as normalised SQL Server tables, making live SharePoint data available to reporting tools like Power BI, Crystal Reports, or SSRS.

So, as we were saying, a new version of SQList is out today. What’s new?

One of the main improvements is the addition of authentication methods to connect to SharePoint sites. We have added “Azure AD Applications permissions authentication”, “Azure AD Delegated permissions authentication”, and “Forms authentication”.

While “Forms” has been added to support legacy(-ish) On-Prem systems, “Azure AD” authentications have been added to support the modern ones on SharePoint Online.

There seems to be a variety of opinions on which authentication method is the best, and each method has its fan base. We at AxioWorks think that the whole thing may have been way over-engineered, over-complicated, and overblown, but we have to go with the demand, so there they are.

What else is new?

We have added a nice feature that allows you to re-synchronise a SQL table with its corresponding SharePoint list, which is very useful when you have accidentally modified data in a SQList output table (tut-tut…haven’t we always told you to use those tables in read-only mode?) or you added a few columns to SharePoint list with default values that you want to have reflected on the SQL table.

Until now, to do that you had to execute SQL scripts the SQL server, now all you have to do is just a few clicks in SQList Manager.

Next…

Oh yes, we have added a functionality that allows you to reset an export setting to its inherited value. SQList is very flexible when it comes to configuring how you want those SharePoint lists exported as SQL tables, with settings at global, replication, web, and list level. But it can happen that you loose track of where you are and when that happens the best thing to do is to go back to “factory settings”.

Is that all?

Nope, one more thing. We have changed SQList to use SharePoint Internal names rather than Static names to generate the column names for the SQL tables.

Static names, Internal names, Display names…boy, SharePoint has got names for columns stored all over the place, and they are all slightly different (for valid reasons, most of the times). That is not usually a problem, but when you start mixing site columns, site content types, and list columns with the same name in one single list you’d better know the difference between an Internal and a Static name.

We have also done some clean-up and fixed a few things here and there, which although being part of the regular maintenance they are just as important as new features. If you would like to read all the details about this release, head over to the support article here: What is new in SQList ver. 6.2.0.0

Finally, thank you as always to our selected customers who helps us with the testing. As much as we can test on all versions of SharePoint in our test environments, we cannot come even close to the huge variety of configurations that are out there, so testing in real-world environments is, as they say, priceless!

That is all folks, till next time.