Integrating SharePoint And Confluence

Very thorough article and worth reading if you are trying to leverage existing SharePoint investments but take advantage of one of the better wiki platforms in the market. It would be valuable for Microsoft to continue down this path of providing well-defined and public interfaces (as opposed to vendor point-to-point deals) so that other blog and wiki vendors could integrate with the platform. While Confluence is popular, customers should be able to integrate other blog and wiki vendors as well(e.g., MindTouch, Six Apart's Moveable Type, Socialtext, Traction Software, and WordPress). Microsoft should avoid the appearance of dictating to customers what options they have for third-party integration and would be better off letting the partner ecosystem act in a more viral and customer-driven manner.

SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

A few months ago, we and Atlassian announced their SharePoint Connector for Confluence, which impressed both customers and analysts. Now, ThreeWill, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in developing SharePoint-based solutions, which helped design and implement the SharePoint Connector, will describe how they did it.

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Integrating Content and Search Results with SharePoint

Have you ever needed to integrate an external system with SharePoint, showing content from each system within the other? What if you needed to integrate search between SharePoint and the external system? How do you keep the user experience seamless if the systems use different authentication mechanisms? Have you wondered if this can be done if the external system is written in Java?

If you answered "yes," then read on. Along the way you will learn some of the internals of SharePoint 2007 web parts, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 enterprise search, and Microsoft Single Sign-on (SSO).

Overview

This blog entry discusses how three developers integrated MOSS 2007 with Confluence, an enterprise wiki, in about 2 months time. It discusses work behind implementing the features for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence as shown in the diagram below.

Those features are broken out as follows:

Feature	Primary Technology
Content Embedding	Web Parts
Integrated Search	MOSS Enterprise Search
Single Sign-On (SSO)	Microsoft SSO Service

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

Comments

[Sam Lawrence]

So how does Confluence bolt-on in this diagram?

http://www.joiningdots.net/downloads/SharePoint_History.jpg

[Lawrence Liu]

The SharePoint APIs used by ThreeWill to develop the SharePoint Connector for Confluence are all public and documented. There's nothing that ThreeWill did with SharePoint that another ISV couldn't do. Moreover, our partnership with Confluence is not exclusive. We are open to work with any interested partners, but potential partners need to recognize that we are looking for "2 way" relationships rather than just having someone jump on the SharePoint bandwagon, gravy train, hotcakes, etc. :-)

Lawrence Liu
Senior Technical Product Manager, Worldwide Community Lead, Social Computing Technical Marketing Lead, and a few other things...
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies