Importing bulk data into sharepoint

Question

I have an issue with a new sharepoint install that we've recently deployed to replace an ageing content management system that I implemented a few years ago.

What I'd really like is to save my colleagues as much effort as possible by transferring the content from my CMS into sharepoint.

I'm not very good with sharepoint yet, and my development platform of choice is PHP MySQL, so basically I'm wondering if sharepoint has any facility to import sites, I can easily built filters to reformat the content in my CMS into whatever (please let it be XML) format sharepoint will accept but I have no idea if sharepoint will even let me do this.

I have limited access to the sharepoint server, although in this case I can probably negotiate more if that's the only way.

Mostly I just need some pointers - does sharepoint have any facility to do this, and where do I start doing it?

Thanks

Answer 1

SharePoint has the ability to import data from an Excel spreadsheet (Site Actions > Create > Import Spreadsheet).

The only problem you may run into with this method is that you don't necessarily have full control over what column types the importer uses for your data--if that's important, then it will take some trial and error.

If you're familiar with .NET and you can get access to run a program on the server, you can write a program to import data into existing lists using the SharePoint object model.

Answer 2

And if you are having huge amount of data in EXCEL then the best option is http://praveenbattula.blogspot.com/2009/10/import-excel-data-to-sharepoint-list.html

Because, it has column mappings manually select and other features.