Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Integration

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Integration

Extend collaboration platform to include professional web content management

Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 is a comprehensive business platform for efficient collaboration within companies. In many firms it forms the technical basis of the employee portal, where the focus is on interactive management of documents and collaboration within the framework of project spaces. Through the integration of FirstSpirit™ with SharePoint 2010, users are provided with an additional, flexible and user-friendly solution for satisfying the highest content management requirements, which consolidates corporate communication and which simplifies the creation, maintenance and publishing of editorial content in the portal.

The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Integration for FirstSpirit™ has been developed by our technology partner MATERNA and makes our powerful CMS available to the .NET world. With our integration approach, important use cases such as the efficient management of multilingual and corporation-wide content or extensive multisite projects can be easily covered.

Advantages at a glance:

Reduce costs: Synergy effects through the seamless integration of SharePoint and FirstSpirit CMS
End-user friendly consolidation: Provide content and processes for employees, centrally in a portal
Synergy effects and usability: Editors can conveniently work in a single system in order to create editorial content and portal content and to publish it on different channels - leveraging capabilities far beyond those provided by SharePoint's internal CMS
Attractiveness: Easy usability ensures more and more up-to-date content and therefore attractive, successful employee portals
Flexibility: Variable layout design according to the CD/CI requirements
Improve collaboration and interactivity: Support for the standard collaborative functions of SharePoint 2010
Acceptance through personalization: Use of the SharePoint permissions for personalized access to content; WebParts for configuring the display of content
Safeguard investments: Easy functional enhancements due to platform neutrality and modular structure

Highlights of the portal integration with FirstSpirit™

Seamless integration of look and function

A central paradigm of FirstSpirit™ portal integration is the approach in which editorial content from FirstSpirit™ is perfectly integrated in the portal servers, especially with respect to the "fully coordinated" look. This also includes using the "native", portal server specific mechanisms to automatically output the content and navigation elements in the current look & feel of the portal.

Advantage:

Even complex layout scenarios can be completely covered by this, always starting from the defined corporate design. The modular construction of content elements allows for better layout conformity than the wiki-like approach in SharePoint.

The editing process is not affected by this flexibility of the portal look. Editors continue to maintain their content as usual, without having to worry about the output logic.

Content maintenance without portal know-how

Displaying editorial content and embedding it in existing portal navigation is a technically demanding task. Aspects such as

seamless visual integration,
support for any designs required,
hyperlink capability through special portal links

are necessary properties, which make the added value of the solution plausible. Nevertheless, in FirstSpirit™ the focus is on ease of content maintenance.

Advantage:

An editor can completely concentrate on the creation and maintenance of their content without having to have any SharePoint know-how. For example, setting a link to other pages is done conveniently using a tree selection dialogue, even if technically complicated portal references are created as a result in the background. FirstSpirit™ ensures the link consistency, even if the referenced element is moved.

FirstSpirit™ also does the layout creation completely in conformity with the portal due to its powerful template engine, without the editor having to concern themselves with it at all.

Native portal navigation

Truly deep portal integration of a CMS stands and falls with the elegant integration of content in the portal's own navigation structure. FirstSpirit™ generates "native" portal navigations.

Advantage:

Administratively generated portal menu items and content menu items from FirstSpirit™ are no longer visually and technically distinguishable. This makes it possible for all portal functions available in the standard, e.g. the

portal's own bookmark management,
navigation forwards/backwards using portal buttons,
click history or automatic breadcrumb navigation

to be automatically used for FirstSpirit™ content, too.

Personalized presentation of content

SharePoint 2010 provides sophisticated user, rights and role management, which enables personalized display of content and applications. FirstSpirit™ supports the rights and role management of the portal server by re-using the existing permissions infrastructure. This makes it possible for editors to define read privileges for their content, while the portal server checks compliance with the runtime privileges for each user.

Advantage:

Re-using the portal infrastructure for security and permissions, avoids duplicate data storage for users and roles, while at the same time the complete permissions control for content can be carried out by editors in FirstSpirit™. Administrative interventions on the portal side are no longer necessary for permissions control.