SharePoint - An Application Integration Platform

SharePoint 2010 - An Application Integration Platform

SharePoint includes a host of features that can be integrated with external applications:

• Document management features
• List features
• Excel Services
• Search
• Access Services
• & more…

Why use SharePoint as an integrated development platform?

• By leveraging existing capabilities within SharePoint, organizations can:
• Avoid developing redundant modules for similar functionality, thereby reducing maintenance costs.
• Increase functionality & reliability of integrated applications
• Easily extend / enhance SharePoint features, thus allowing for modular upgrades.
• Potentially reduce costs on infrastructure requirements.

What type of applications are ideal candidates to be integrated with SharePoint?

• Applications that make extensive use of documents.
• SharePoint libraries can provide a host of added capabilities such as maintaining versions, managing metadata, security, and search.
• Applications that require dynamic content updates (such as FAQ’s), require tracking (eg: issues tracking), facilitate discussions, or calendars, etc…
• SharePoint lists can serve as a repository of information for external applications.
• Dashboard / Business Intelligence using Excel
• Excel services within SharePoint provides a highly flexible platform for dashboards. External applications can query excel documents, display charts / graphs from within excel documents and update data.
• Search
• External applications use the SharePoint search engine to search content maintained with SharePoint, shared folders or even other databases.

SharePoint provides the following access points / API’s:

• Web Services
• Can be used for document management, list item management, and search.
• Client Object Models (COM)
• SharePoint provides three COM’s – a) .NET COM, b) Silverlight COM, c) Javascript COM. Although limited in its capability, COM provides a platform for integration from external applications and can be used for advanced query and manage content.
• REST API
• Query based API that can retrieve data from SharePoint. Can be used to dynamically retrieve graphs and charts from Excel using Excel Services.

Summary:

 

• SharePoint capabilities can greatly enhance functionality of external applications via integration.
• Increases ROI by leveraging the SharePoint infrastructure, while reducing costs on development & maintenance of redundant functionality.
• Increased time to market.
• SharePoint SOA based, thus allowing for other applications to integrate. No additional interfaces required to retrieve content from SharePoint.
• SharePoint is mobile enabled – thus providing an out of the box mobile interface for content.
• Overall, using SharePoint as a development platform contributes to CBE initiatives across the App Dev organization