Using authenticated RSS feed to Serve Public Data

I can only a little bit about this project now since we haven’t completed it but it’s really neat.

Currently Departmental phone numbers are tracked on a Sharepoint list and then once a year, formatted and sent off to the printers for publication. Some people decided we should make this information publicly accessible in an online version. The problem is the Sharepoint data lies in an authenticated NTLM environment, how do we get it out there for the public?

We, being Brian and I, created a simple AutoIT script that fetches the RSS feed of the list and saves it as an XML file. We added a service account to the Sharepoint site as a reader so it can access the information. The AutoIT runs as this user on a scheduled basis on a web server. With the XML file saved, it is passed through a ColdFusion script that parses the XML data to get the information we need and writes it into a SQL database. When users update a number in the list, the RSS feed sends this information along, the script gets it, processes it and dumps it into the database.

It’s probably a round about method of doing it and I’m sure there’s a more elegant Object Model method for this. As a non-developer, I relied on Brian’s ColdFusion ability to handle the data conversion.

We had a student programmer code an interface and it’s going to be rolled into our publicly searchable data soon.

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