EntropySoft : SharePoint Integration

Since Microsoft SharePoint delivers the most advanced Microsoft Office integration for creating or editing documents, it makes sense for it to be the single point of access to all documents. But there are often many different legacy applications in different locations making information fragmentation a problem. With Content Hub Content Federation everything appears to be stored in Microsoft SharePoint. So the user experience is a SharePoint experience even if users are accessing data from many scattered repositories.

 

Content Federation works by unifying many content silos into one virtual repository which is exposed in SharePoint through Web Parts that can be deployed in a matter of minutes for a 360° seamless access to legacy applications and assets. So users can create documents, check-in, check-out, manage versions, add metadata and set permissions to documents stored in each and every one of the remote silos, easily giving them what they want when they need it.

Finding information in a fragmented landscape is like finding a needle in a number of haystacks. A common SharePoint deployment challenge is delivering unified search results from many content silos to a single result list. 

 

There are two approaches to consider for federated search. First, since all repositories maintain their own search index, a brokered query can be used to leverage existing indices. Content Hub can pass text or property-based queries to each distributed system, and respond with a uniform result set that spans all systems.  The search is performed in real-time with no index build latency, and doesn’t require the added storage of a consolidated index. This approach is most suitable for high-volume systems with very little, if any, text like imaging or report management systems.

 

In the second approach Content Hub acts as a mechanism to feed data from disparate content sources into the SharePoint global search index. Content Hub becomes a crawler for the FAST Search for SharePoint or SharePoint Search Server portal search engine. The SharePoint portal can take advantage of the statistical features of the search index, and the user can expect a faster response time.  This approach is most suitable for repositories that contain low to mid volume content that is largely text- based like document management and general ECM systems. Examples of this would include document management and general ECM systems.

 

These approaches are not mutually exclusive and most (if not all) SharePoint portal deployments can benefit from both.

With Microsoft SharePoint, anyone can create a new site and start using it for managing documents in a matter of minutes. But this strength raises serious questions and concerns about information governance. How can organizations tame these proliferating environments to ensure regulatory compliance and correct integration with business processes? 

 

And, as the volume of content grows, the overall performance of the system degrades. Organizations need a strategy for decommissioning and archiving sites that are no longer active to avoid needless maintenance costs.

 

The regulatory environment is continuously evolving, becoming more and more constraining as the data continues to grow. At the same time, business processes impact the document lifecycle with issues like integration with business applications, and the requirements to deal with multiple content silos. All while, the number of SharePoint sites continues to increase.

 

EntropySoft Content Hub addresses these concerns by hosting and operating the customer content processes to address compliance, integration and interoperability. Here’s how.

 

Content Hub Content Process Automation has features to ensure compliance with the regulatory environment and to transfer the documents by either scheduled or dynamic methods. Content Hub listens to SharePoint events in real-time and immediately starts the relevant process when an event is detected. For example, it can monitor the creation of a document described with enterprise metadata identified by Records Managers, implement the appropriate policies and ensure the retention period is set before declaring a record or archiving the document. 

 

Content Hub Content Process Automation can also distribute the document to other repositories to multiple teams and locations, and it can synchronize parts of the SharePoint libraries with other ECM systems. This synchronization allows information sharing among remote teams and establishes a single version of the truth, since users can trust that the document is synchronized in all systems.