Microsoft SharePoint and Content Aggregation
Share More Than Just Desktop Documents

Since its inception in 2001, SharePoint has been on an amazing, and sometimes painful, journey. The first release offered a loosely connected solution—SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services 2001. In 2003, Microsoft made two big decisions to increase SharePoint adoption: ensuring that the entry-level solution (Windows SharePoint Services—aka WSS) and the Portal Server shared a common platform; and providing WSS no-charge licenses to anyone owning a license of Windows 2003. Microsoft then crossed the chasm with the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and WSS 2007. The growth in number of licenses in 2003 skyrocketed due to the “free” edition of 2003, but SharePoint 2007 was the real tipping point; Microsoft partners, customers, analysts and the press started to consider SharePoint as a serious unified platform. The fourth generation, SharePoint 2010, built on top of the success of SharePoint 2007 and enhanced functionality in many aspects ranging from records management to social interaction and Web content management.

Current Reality
Given the recent release date of SharePoint 2010, the majority of organizations are using SharePoint 2007, and it’s estimated that many enterprises will not migrate to SharePoint 2010 for some time. Therefore, we’ll concentrate on how customers currently use SharePoint 2007.

There isn’t a straightforward way of describing SharePoint usage, mainly because SharePoint is acknowledged as a “jack of all trades”—providing everything from an intranet portal, to a document management, collaboration, knowledge management platform to a replacement of file shares. Some think that SharePoint is the “Swiss Army Knife” of content and collaboration, but the reality is that, although it fills many gaps, others gaps remain—which require complementary solutions. It is in this area where the power of the Microsoft partner ecosystems shines; partners around the globe provide services and products that complement SharePoint’s core functionality.

Another factor facing today’s organizations is the diversity of content sources, formats and repositories. Research shows that more than half of surveyed organizations have more than one repository, and 15% have more than five repositories—with SharePoint as one of many. With such disparate sources of content, it is difficult for knowledge workers to quickly and easily locate the information they need to make operational or strategic decisions. Integrating all content into one “master repository” is a worthy goal, but typically not realistic due to challenges presented by multiple operating platforms, unique line of business needs, cost (financial and personnel) and the continuing growth of organizations through mergers and acquisitions. SharePoint unites collaboration and document management in a way that is easy for many knowledge workers to learn and use, but it doesn’t address the even broader set of ECM and collaboration requirements of other information workers. Vast amounts of electronically stored information are scattered around the enterprise in disparate repositories and on different platforms, out of sight of SharePoint. That content cannot be migrated into SharePoint due to economic and practical factors, such as the fact that SharePoint stores every document as a binary large object (BLOB) inside SQL Server.

On the other hand, SharePoint can be considered a unifying user interface for multiple sources of information. In every SharePoint deployment, disparate content must be considered from two perspectives: first, how to access and view all content to make business decisions, giving appropriate users access through a single, common interface; and second, where to store the content to meet guidelines for legal and regulatory compliance while keeping storage costs under control, providing a long-term scalable repository and satisfying business and departmental requirements.

To address these two requirements, we’ll focus on two cases highlighting common SharePoint usage:

• SharePoint is used as an intranet or extranet portal in many organizations. Portal users need to access content not only from SharePoint, but also from other systems. In certain cases, users don’t know where the information is and become frustrated.
• SharePoint libraries are also becoming an acknowledged replacement of file shares. Organizations have viewed SharePoint as an easy way to add controlled versioning and collaboration features to the sharing of users’ documents, with direct integration to authoring tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote. SharePoint fosters self-provisioning sites for document workspaces, discussions, projects, etc.; with each new site, document libraries—and therefore documents—are created and stored inside SharePoint database. This uncontrolled growth leads to issues ranging from long-term storage to maintainability and costs associated when SQL Server is used as the store for large static objects.

Case 1: SharePoint as an information portal. Portal users need to search for and access information both inside and outside of SharePoint. However, SharePoint “out-of-the-box” presents challenges for seamlessly integrating external content into SharePoint pages. Structured SQL data and Microsoft-friendly formats are not an issue; the challenge is instead presented by content such as customer invoices, statements, accounting reports and other non-desktop documents generated in a high-volume laser print format and stored on a different platform (e.g., mainframe, UNIX, etc.). In the same way, high volume images (e.g., millions of pages per week/month) and other massive content sources are usually stored in repositories outside of SharePoint. Still, those are also very important pieces of content that users need to access—along with the content residing in SharePoint.

There are two primary options to address users’ needs: IT departments develop custom interfaces from all “other” sources to SharePoint, or they obtain a content integration solution developed specifically for SharePoint from a partner (such as ASG’s Total Content Integrator for MOSS solution). A content integration solution uses the ubiquity and end-user familiarity of SharePoint to leverage content residing in other repositories, thereby bringing new and added value to information portals.

Content integration extends SharePoint’s search capabilities. SharePoint provides search tools for its own content and can crawl across content in external sources, but crawling is not feasible or practical for all types and sources of content. Federation of search and configurable user interfaces are required regardless of where information resides. Search Web Parts can be easily personalized by a SharePoint page designer to meet users’ expectations in the context of the page.

Content integration into SharePoint pages also allows automatic content presentment. In many cases, portal applications need to automatically present the information users require in the context of the portal or site page they are using—without forcing the user to navigate to a search page or to conduct an explicit search. In these cases, the flexibility of interconnected Web Parts, the ability to predefine criteria based on user properties or page context and the ability to transform and present content in the same page provide unlimited possibilities to the imagination of SharePoint site designers.