Toolkit for SharePoint Interoperability

A toolkit containing documentation and sample code will help developers incorporate SharePoint Web Parts in sites built on non-Microsoft Web portal server platforms, such as SAP’s Enterprise Portal. The Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Toolkit for SharePoint 2007 updates a similar toolkit for the previous version of Microsoft’s portal and collaboration platform and provides a starting point for interoperability in organizations with heterogeneous Web platform infrastructures. However, developer effort will be required to support more sophisticated interoperation scenarios than those provided by the toolkit’s limited samples.

Nod to Standards

The toolkit aims to show developers how to build Web services to display SharePoint 2007 Web Parts on sites built on Web server platforms that conform to the WSRP standard developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). WSRP specifies a Web services interface for the exchange of modular, interactive, user-configurable Web page components called portlets. Conceptually, portlets and Web Parts are similar—Web Parts are effectively Microsoft’s implementation of the portlet concept for the ASP.NET platform. Many open source and commercial portal solutions, including Apache Pluto, IBM WebSphere, and SAP Enterprise Portal, conform to a portlet API standard called the Java Portlet Specification.