Enhancing SharePoint for Content Integration

Microsoft SharePoint is a "jack of all trades" technology—providing everything from an intranet portal, to a document management, records management, collaboration, knowledge management solution, to a replacement of file shares. This functionality, combined with the low cost to deploy, has led to many department-level SharePoint deployments and content repositories. And with the spreading of SharePoint throughout organizations, IT and business application consolidation, reduced maintenance and training costs and perceived ease of use in comparison to other enterprise content management (ECM) suites, many companies have opted to standardize on Microsoft SharePoint, making it their new approach to content management.

Standardizing on SharePoint makes sense for some companies, but these organizations must also consider existing content repositories for other business applications already in use such as finance/accounting, customer relationship management, warehouse management, records management, etc. When combined with SharePoint content repositories, these pre-existing and disparate content repositories create many separate silos of geographically dispersed content that very likely have relationships to one another. Separate silos of content repositories make it difficult for employees to quickly and easily search for, identify and locate all of the information they need to make operational or strategic decisions. It is equally as difficult for legal teams and IT management to administer and manage the content according to corporate policies, information governance rules and industry regulations. And just as important, this complexity adds IT costs associated with storing duplicate information, as well as trying to build and maintain custom applications and integration connections that may be affected during software updates.

So, what can you do with SharePoint to enhance its capabilities to better integrate with other SharePoint deployments, access content outside of SharePoint and reduce overall content chaos?

Content Integration Is Critical

Microsoft SharePoint can be used as an enterprise content management solution and/or as a business-specific content management solution. For example, many small-to-medium sized organizations have standardized on SharePoint to manage their content. The challenge they face is accessing content outside of SharePoint (legacy content management solutions, ERP and CRM systems, contract management solutions, accounting applications, etc.). In multi-regional and global organizations, it is common to see SharePoint used as a business-specific content management solution for business units and individual departments (e.g., for Web content management, document management, collaboration, etc.), but this tends to create multiple SharePoint deployments with their own, disparate content repositories. Combine that with the multitude of content repositories from other business applications, and IT complexity can be overwhelming. Both SharePoint deployment strategies are fine, but being able to search, access and retrieve content outside of SharePoint-or between two or more SharePoint deployments—via SharePoint's user interface is critical for business success. Just as important is IT's ability to easily administer SharePoint, have a single place for enterprisewide content integration, store content into a "repository of record" and move content to less expensive storage devices.

The SharePoint Interface

Organizations that have implemented SharePoint, either as an ECM solution or a business-specific content management solution, have seen the SharePoint user interface become an increasingly important information access point for knowledge workers. As a result, knowledge workers want to utilize the same search, access and retrieval capabilities they use in "their" implementation of SharePoint with other SharePoint deployments across the organization. They also desire this same functionality for non-SharePoint content stored in external repositories.

Some solutions that integrate external content into SharePoint consist of custom Web Parts that present information from a single repository with unique and proprietary functionality and behavior. Unfortunately, these types of approaches merely move the content access problem to multiple SharePoint pages—new SharePoint pages with custom Web Parts that must be created to view content from each repository.

Microsoft's Business Connectivity Services (BCS) can be used to integrate external information into SharePoint, which can provide a common look and feel for various repositories. However, Microsoft's approach does not address the need to horizontally integrate content from multiple data sources—a single SharePoint "viewing" page with standard Web Parts to view content from multiple repositories. Further, to implement BCS requires configuration, and often code-development effort, if working with anything other than a SQL database. BCS also does not support content presentment; it is geared toward structured metadata.

To access content outside of SharePoint through the SharePoint user interface, organizations need to implement a unified, federated, integration-enabling layer that integrates the functions of search, discovery and presentation into a single user interface while normalizing dissimilar but related terms and metadata across various data sources. The solution should leverage the familiarity, power and flexibility of BCS, and then enhance it with zero coding, out-of-the-box integration of both external metadata and the content delivered to standard BCS Web Parts. This will result in content from external repositories being displayed through standard BCS Web Parts in the SharePoint user interface.

When reviewing a content integration layer solution for your SharePoint deployment(s), select one that is designed for reliability, scalability and robustness, and that includes the following components:

• Out-of-the-box connectivity to content repositories, applications and databases, as well as the ability to easily create custom adapters;
• Core services such as search, authentication, index mapping, index updates and content delivery; and
• A published, Web services interface used to develop applications to retrieve content from all repositories and display content through standard BCS Web Parts.

Extend SharePoint's Search Capabilities

SharePoint provides search tools for its own content and can crawl across content in external sources. However, crawling is not feasible or practical for all types and sources of content. A way to optimize and extend SharePoint's search capabilities is to add federated search to SharePoint's own search. The content integration-enabling layer should provide this functionality out-of-the-box. For example:

• SharePoint users start a search from a BCS search Web Part in any page or SharePoint's search center.
• In this mode, an intelligent field-mapping functionality within the content integration-enabling layer is applied, so end-users do not need to know individual repository field-naming conventions or switch to other applications. Further, end-users don't need to know where the data or documents are located, but simply search all repositories or specify the search scope.
• The search criteria are sent to the content integration-enabling layer, which in turn federates the search to all appropriate repositories (depending on the scope of the search). Results are returned from repositories to the content integration-enabling layer, then to SharePoint and, lastly, properly presented and identified in the BCS results list Web Parts.
• Once users decide to view one of the results, the Web Part can be used to display the document.

These extended search capabilities presents users with the ability to search for the content they need, transparently federating the search to repositories scattered across the organization, while normalizing index names and values. Users find what they need, without losing time by switching windows, changing applications or re-keying values for search criteria-and all activities are completed via a known and familiar user interface.

Expose External Content to SharePoint

In many cases, portal applications need to automatically present the information users may require in the context of the portal or site page they are using—without forcing the user to navigate to a search page. In those cases, the flexibility of interconnected BCS Web Parts, the ability to predefine criteria while hiding them from users, and the ability to present content in native viewing Web Parts, provides unlimited possibilities governed only by the imagination of SharePoint site designers. The combination of the content integration-enabling layer and BCS should provide Web Parts that SharePoint site owners and designers can use in SharePoint pages to execute automatic or hidden searches, list focused results and present content.

For example, let's consider a regional sales site in which a site designer can configure the main page with a hidden Web Part to automatically search for the six most recent monthly regional sales reports from a business intelligence content repository. Another Web Part obtains the information and lists it on the site's main page; the results list is configured to be sorted chronologically, so that the last month's report is displayed at the top. To make it more useful, the designer may specify a third area of the page to showcase the most recent sales report for that region. This approach offers unlimited flexibility to meet the needs of different user constituencies:

• When a sales executive logs into this page, he will automatically see the latest sales report—without conducting any additional research.
• The sales executive may want to compare his current progress against last month's results; therefore, he simply clicks on the previous month's report from the list, and the page is refreshed to present the information he needs to see.
• In another case, the page designer might be more specific. Instead of displaying a list, the Web Part could be configured to automatically open the last month's report for that sales team-in the Web Part region of the display.

Another example is a Web Part for the customer service organization that searches exclusively for transactions for a particular account number. This scenario can be easily expanded to present lists with bank statement reports coming from one source and transaction images from other source, filtered by a selected statement date or by transaction numbers, as contained in the report. These use cases, as well as many others, are made possible by combining documents from SharePoint, output from ERP systems, images, and reports from non-SharePoint repositories-all on the same SharePoint page.