Enterprises rely on portals to facilitate information-sharing
and speed business processes. Portals provide a convenient,
centralized way for workers to gain insight into the business and
to collaborate on projects through a single point of entry, in the
form of a Web-based user interface. In cooperation with other
Interop Vendor Alliance(IVA) members and partners, Microsoft tested
the integration capabilities between Office SharePoint Server 2007
and Java-based portals in real-world business scenarios at the
Portal Aggregation and Integration Lab. In this scenario, we tested
two integration products to show how they can be used to consume
SharePoint Web Parts from a Java-based portal: the Mainsoft
SharePoint Federator for WebSphere Portal and the BEA AquaLogic
.NET Application Accelerator for BEA WebLogic/AquaLogic Portals.
The solutions tested demonstrated the interoperability between
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and portal technologies
from BEA and IBM.
Lab Scenarios
This interoperability lab focused on reusing user interface
portal components (Web Parts), such as document lists, task lists,
calendar data, and more, between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and
Java-based portals. In these scenarios Office SharePoint Server
2007 is the data provider, that is, Office SharePoint Server 2007
exposes its data and enables end-users to consume data from the
user interfaces of Java-based portals. For the complementary
scenarios where Office SharePoint Server 2007 needs to aggregate
data from various sources, users can rely on technologies such as
Web services; the Business Data Catalog feature of Office
SharePoint Server 2007, provides an easy way to integrate business
data from back-end server applications; and database connections to
consolidate data on a single portal in a way that makes it easier
for users to consume.
The Mainsoft SharePoint Federator is a solution that helps
organizations using IBM WebSphere Portal software as their
enterprise portal solution to aggregate contents from departmental
Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites into the WebSphere environment.
Using the SharePoint Federator, organizations that also have a
significant investment in Microsoft .NET assets, such as Web
content in Office SharePoint Server 2007, can easily reuse these
assets within the WebSphere enterprise portal environment.
BEA AquaLogic .NET Application Accelerator 1.1 helps
organizations reuse existing Microsoft ASP.NET technology and
expose it through the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
standard. Using the BEA solution, developers can integrate portal
assets built on the Microsoft .NET Framework into Java-based BEA
WebLogic or AquaLogic portals.
