کد:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/08/how-we-did-it-bluekiwi-sharepoint-connector-and-officeassistant.aspx
Introduction

The blueKiwi Software, a leading Europen provider of enterprise social software, just announced the blueWiki SharePoint Connector along with blueKiwi OfficeAssistant. The blueWiki SharePoint Connector allows SharePoint customers to integrate blueKiwi's complementary, highly specialised social software suite into their existing SharePoint environment, surfacing valuable social metrics, such as the most active discussions across the whole organisation, within a SharePoint portal.
SharePoint customers can also store any relevant file attachments from blueKiwi in a SharePoint Document Library or Records Center. In addition, SharePoint files can be attached to any blueKiwi blog post by browsing the SharePoint Document Library from within blueKiwi.
The blueKiwi OfficeAssistant enables blueKiwi customers to publish content directly from within the Microsoft Office 2007 client applications.
Microsoft invested considerable resources from the Emerging Business Team, which helps startups build and showcase integration with Microsoft products. We did the joint development work in the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Paris over a period of a few months.
Why Use blueKiwi and SharePoint

blueKiwi complements SharePoint by providing the following capabilities:

  • An enterprise blogging and conversation platform that allows end users to share ideas quickly and easily, including rich text, audio, and video.
  • A people-centric view of any contributions (blogs or comments on others blogs) that an employee has made within any community across the entire organisation.
  • A dynamic social network that is automatically defined by the interactions between people.
  • Automatic expertise classification based on the type of content that an individual contributes.
  • Expertise search platform that integrates with SharePoint search, making it easy to define expertise automatically and find experts quickly.
  • Rich and dynamic user profiles that can be integrated with My Sites.
  • Dynamic content tag cloud, providing a visual representation of the topics that are talked about the most across multiple communities or the whole organisation.
  • Dynamic social tag cloud, providing a view of which people share common interests or interact with each other the most.

Why We Did It

Many of our customers use both blueKiwi and SharePoint.

  • They use blueKiwi as a social software suite for expertise identification and search, improving communication across distributed teams, reducing group emails, stimulating innovative ideas, partner communication and increasing staff satisfaction.
  • They use SharePoint for collaboration, enterprise information and content management, intranet portals, enterprise search, and business intelligence dashboards.

It was important for our customers to be able to present blueKiwi information in SharePoint, add SharePoint files to blueKiwi notes, store blueKiwi file attachments in SharePoint, and search blueKiwi content from with SharePoint and vice-versa.
How We Did It

The approach that we took was to enable customers to use blueKiwi and SharePoint independently of each other, but allowing integration where required. SharePoint's open API and adherence to open standards made this possible. We'll describe three elements of blueWiki's integration with SharePoint:

  • Custom SharePoint Web Parts
  • SharePoint Search integration
  • SharePoint file storage integration

Custom SharePoint Web Parts

We have a number of features delivered through custom SharePoint Web Parts.

Figure 1: Conversation Web Parts and dynamic "drillable" tag cloud
Conversation Web Parts enable blueKiwi customers to surface secure, authenticated feeds of blueKiwi activity through a SharePoint portal. One can configure the Web Part to display blueKiwi notes from a particular community, author, or channel:

  • Community – All post from a specified community.
  • Author – All content from a particular author, including their own published content as well as their comments on other people’s notes across the entire organization. For example, some customers show the CEO’s post on the Intranet page, showing every conversation that the CEO is having, but those conversations from the communities that the end user belongs to.
  • Channel – All communications that have been published to a specific channel are shown. blueKiwi channels reflect the organizational taxonomy, so customers typically use this for a team site or departmental Intranet. For example, the sales department could show all communications from the Sales and Marketing channel, in their team site home page.

Tag Cloud Web Parts allow you to show a tag cloud for the entire organisation, a specific community, or a specific person. This is useful for corporate intranets, departmental intranets, team sites, or My Sites.
Personal Network Web Parts allow you to show a person’s social network from blueKiwi. This is particularly useful for a My Site or team site.

Figure 2: Personal network shown as a "people tag cloud"
All Web Part content is surfaced via the blueKiwi web service API. Authentication and security are maintained either by using Active Directory or username mapping to blueKiwi, so all content is personalized and secure.
SharePoint Search Integration

We had two options for search integration: 1) we could either develop a SharePoint protocol handler for blueKiwi and a blueKiwi protocol handler for SharePoint, or 2) we could just use OpenSearch integration. As blueKiwi already ships with a highly specialized search engine that is engineered for social computing, it didn’t make sense to index everything again in SharePoint. OpenSearch is an open standard, developed by Amazon and embraced by Microsoft in Search Server 2008 and very soon in SharePoint Server 2007. It enables search queries to be made using an XML format, and search results can be federated from multiple search engines and the results returned in one page as RSS or ATOM feeds. This option provides greater flexibility and performance for customers, because they are not duplicating indexing effort, and search can be customized based on specific needs. For example, you could configure a SharePoint search site to return results from SharePoint, file servers, Flickr, blueKiwi, Wikipedia, Twitter, and even Google News all on the same page. So, if you searched for “Microsoft” you would get results from all these different locations to be displayed on a single screen. In much the same way, users can search SharePoint content from within blueKiwi. This means that people can find information easily, irrespective of where they happen to be at the time.
SharePoint File Storage Integration

People often attach files to blueKiwi conversations. Unlike email, the file size per attachment is not limited, so people are able to send large documents without affecting mailbox size limitations. For some of our customers, it is a regulatory compliance requirement that these documents be stored in their ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system, which happen to be SharePoint. We facilitated this process by calling the SharePoint API from within blueKiwi so that all file attachments sent in blueKiwi can actually be stored in a SharePoint Document Library, Document Center, or Records Center in line with corporate policies. In addition, when attaching a file to a blueKiwi conversation, the user can browse the SharePoint document library from within blueKiwi as well as open and edit a document stored in SharePoint directly from within blueKiwi.

Figure 3: Attaching a SharePoint file to a blueKiwi conversation
Office 2007 Add-In: blueKiwi OfficeAssistant

Although not specific to SharePoint, the blueKiwi OfficeAssistant add-in enables users to publish content from within Office client applications directly into blueKiwi as a blog post, a wiki page, or a file attachment to a conversation. We did this fairly easily by using Visual Studio Tools for Office and calling the blueKiwi web service APIs.

Figure 4: Authoring a blueKiwi post from within Word 2007 (right), choosing communities, channels, and tags (middle), and the end result in blueKiwi (left)
Investing in the SharePoint Platform
As we look towards the future, we plan on investing further in integrating with SharePoint’s records management capabilities so that any to all blueKiwi conversations can be retained as corporate records. We will also include several Community dashboards that leverage SharePoint's KPI Web Parts and Report Center functionality as well as the integration of our social metrics into balanced scorecards built using Microsoft PerformancePoint Server.

Rob Gray, UK Country Manager
blueKiwi Software





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