IT Glue's Export Function - Damn!

The Director of IT hits me up last Friday afternoon to let me know that management needs some reports on how the Online Library is coming along. Since I built so many cool things into the system, my first thoughts were to just take some screenshots and quickly throw something together (they get a full demo this Friday).  Then I remembered Adam Mihaly of IT Glue telling me that I should check out the Export Data function.

The Export Data function is under the Account Menu. It provides you with the option to export everything...yes everything, or better yet, it gives you the option to export a single organization.  I built my library as an organization so this worked out perfect.  Once you are ready, you just start typing the name of the Organization and then select it when it appears in the Search results.

Now you're ready to export.  Just click the Start Export button and let it do the rest.  When the export is complete, you get an email indicating that the job is done.  A link in the email gets you where you need to be, or you can simply click the Download button on the Export Data page that appears when the export is complete.

You then get this zip file with everything neatly organized.

It provides all of your documents in PDF format.  Each spreadsheet file covers each area of your organization.  For example, I set up a page called "Status Tracker" and a page called "Review Tracker" built as forms.  It neatly takes all the data and plugs it into a spreadsheet.  With the click of a button, I could show them all my documents, the status of every document, and even what documents were currently being reviewed.  I could show them documents waiting in the queue, and I could show them documents already released to the library. I had a complete picture of all my data separated the way the organization is separated. Everything had its own place and all I had to do was some minor tweaking of columns in the spreadsheet just to make it look nice.

I attached the files I needed to an email about an hour after I was asked.  The meeting was Monday.  And yes, they were impressed.  But then again...so was I!