A Developer's Guide to Mashups and Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint is Microsoft's platform for collaboration and document management.  It is widely used in organizations for sharing information with basic workflow and is typically a complement to existing content management systems, enterprise portals, and the like.

While SharePoint is able to support basic information sharing, it lacks dynamic mashup capabilities. We want to shed some light on mashing SharePoint rapidly and securely.

Let's first consider some of the questions you have been asking about mashups and SharePoint...

•  How do I mashup information within SharePoint?
•  How do I mashup SharePoint information with external information sources?
•  How do I leverage SharePoint lists and web services in mashups outside of SharePoint?
•  Can I mashup securely, using services that are protected via NTLM?
•  Are there web parts I can use to view mashups in SharePoint?
•  Can I view mashups in web parts outside of SharePoint?
•  Can I view SharePoint mashups in my Enterprise Portal, such as BEA Weblogic or Oracle WebCenter?

Additionally, many of you have wondered about mashups with other Microsoft technologies, including ASP.Net and Silverlight and we hope these articles will help answer the following questions:

•  Can I do mashups with Microsoft Silverlight? Is this preferred to Ajax? to Adobe Flash? to  <insertFavoritePresentationTechnologyHere>
•  How can I build a custom web part with ASP.NET?

We have prepared a series of articles, outlining how to do enterprise mashups with SharePoint (Moss 2007 and WSS 3) and we hope this series will help you answer these question and help get you started mashing in SharePoint today.

Here is a current outline of material in this series which will be released in the coming weeks. We'll add links to each of the article to the outline below as each is published.

First up is Part 1, focusing on Mashups in SharePoint and a discussion of using standard, out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts to publish enterprise mashup widgets, called mashlets.

• Part 1 : Mashups in SharePoint

  • Part 1.1: Using Standard Web Parts to publish Mashlets into Sharepoint

    • Introduction
    • SharePoint Consuming Mashlets
  • Part 1.2 : SharePoint Consuming Mashups using standard XML Web Part
    
  • Part 1.3 : SharePoint Consuming Presto Published RSS 
    • Presto Platform Feeds
    • Presto Published RSS Feeds
    • Mashup Generated RSS
    • SharePoint RSS Viewer
  • Part 1.4 : Using Custom Web Parts to publish Mashlets into SharePoint
    • Introduction
    • Mashlet View Custom Web Part
    • Part 1.4.1 : MashletList Web Part, using PC4C#
• Part 2 : Mashing SharePoint Information
  • Part 2.1: Presto Consuming SharePoint Services
    • Really Simple Syndication RSS
      • Enabling SharePoint RSS
      • SharePoint Search Results
      • Consuming SharePoint RSS Feeds
  • Part 2.2: Mashing SharePoint RSS Feeds with Presto Wires
  • Part 2.3: SharePoint Web Services
    • Publishing a SharePoint Web Service on Presto
  • Part 2.4: Mashing SharePoint Web Services