Often times we have a need to export term sets and the terms (and their children) from our Taxonomy Term Store of the Managed Metadata Service, after defining them in an environment. We often need to get the GUIDs of the terms / term sets, in addition to their display name. This becomes essential because, Share Point defines a new GUID for every term / term set when you create them through UI or even when you create them through Power Shell without explicitly specifying the GUIDs for the terms or the term sets.You might find a lot of tools out there (even in Code Plex), which already do this, in a sophisticated way, with much more details. But unfortunately, most of them need to be run from the server. In many cases, we may have to extract this information from certain environments, to which we may not have access and not necessarily from Development environment, all the time. Moreover, it would be really nice, if we can maintain the hierarchy while exporting and export it as an XML file, so that it can be converted to any desired format (say, Excel). The exported data can then be used to recreate the taxonomy terms in any other environment, which will ensure that all environments will have the same GUIDs for the terms / term sets. Though there are many tools out there (even in CodePlex), all of them are server based. They need to be run from within the Share Point Server. Many times, this may not be possible. This arises the need to have a client based tool, which can extract and export this information. This tool also offers the flexibility to just export the terms and their GUIDs, with or without hierarchy, by just setting a flag. SharePoint 2010 doesn't provide any way to do this OOTB, though, it does provide a way to import terms / term sets from a CSV. Currently, the tool only provides the term name and its GUID in the exported XML. But the code can be further customized to include more details to be exported.
Also, once the taxonomy terms / term sets are exported into an XML, they can be used to create the taxonomy terms in any other environment, ensuring the same GUIDs. This cannot be achieved through client side, since the taxonomy web service doesn't expose any method to create term sets, though, it offers methods to add/edit/delete terms. This can be achieved through server side code or through Power Shell. I have also provided the PS script, which uses the exported taxonomy XML to recreate the taxonomy term sets / terms in any other SP 2010 environment.
Note: This utility relies on the Taxonomy columns (of type Managed Metadata) at the site level. So, it will export only those term sets which are connected to the site columns. If you want all the term sets within a particular term group (in a term store) to be exported, please ensure the taxonomy site columns are connected to all the term sets in that term group.
Note: I have moved this from my actual project hosted (now archived) in CodePlex at: