Sitecore (news, site), provider of web content management and customer engagement solutions, has released its SharePoint Integration Framework, which allows users to integrate Sitecore CMS with content stored in SharePoint.
Sitecore Plus SharePoint
Many organization use SharePoint as a document management and collaboration tool to improve internal workflow, but have elected to leverage other platforms, like Sitecore, for web content management. Despite leveraging two tools, there may still be a need to share content to avoid the cost and effort associated with redundant information.
Sitecore has solved this issue with its newly announced SharePoint Integration Framework, which provides a real-time connection between Sitecore and SharePoint. The new framework is not the company’s first effort at providing access to information stored in SharePoint to Sitecore users. The new framework replaces an existing SharePoint Connector with a more full-featured solution.
The SharePoint Integration Framework can be used with all versions of SharePoint from 2007 and up, including Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) to connect to Sitecore СMS 6.3, CMS 6.4, CMS 6.5 and with Sitecore Intranet Portal 3.2. The product provides a number of features like:
- Real-time connection to SharePoint views, folders and search
- Active Directory single sign-on
- Bidirectional item provider
- Performance tuning
In addition, Sitecore’s SharePoint Integration Framework provides three styles of integration for users: page, item and API level.
Integration Approaches
Page level integration allows users to display SharePoint lists, add menu items and interact with SharePoint content from within Sitecore. This allows organizations to share pre-existing information in a familiar format without the complexity of recreating or synchronizing between systems.
Editing SharePoint menus from Sitecore
Item level integration exposes SharePoint content as Sitecore items and allows real-time or scheduled bi-directional content changes between SharePoint and Sitecore.
The lowest level integration option is API level integration. This allows developers to customize the framework by exposing SharePoint content as a Sitecore object and provides a bi-directional pipeline for managing content.
Sitecore has made an effort to make the integration framework easy to use. In addition to the functionality, Sitecore includes several customizable sample controls for page level integration and an integration wizard for item level integration.
The item integration wizard
Users of Sitecore that have also made an investment in SharePoint will appreciate being able to reuse the content without incurring additional licensing costs for SharePoint or the complexity and effort with attempting to synchronize content.
Are you using Sitecore and SharePoint? Will you be using the new integration framework. We would love to hear from you.
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