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Microsoft SharePoint Integration Simplified

Microsoft SharePoint is a multi-use web-based platform used by businesses to share, organize, build, and manage applications, documents, and projects. Traditionally known as specifically a document and content management system CMS, Sharepoint has evolved into much more.

 

SharePoint software extends the enterprise by enabling effective collaboration across business systems and divisions. With Sharepoint, businesses can easily:

  • Share information, ideas, and documents with colleagues throughout the organization.
  • Organize projects, obtain visibility, and collaborate easily.
  • Discover new connections throughout the enterprise based on projects and documents and easily create communities to share knowledge.
  • Build, publish, manage, and easily share applications and sites with others in the organization.

 

MS SharePoint is beneficial to businesses and with seamless connectivity to other applications (e.g. Outlook, Access, Cognos) and services throughout the enterprise, it becomes all the more valuable.

Enabling SharePoint Integration

Businesses have tried numerous methods to create connectivity between MS Sharepoint and the rest of the enterprise, including point-to-point integration. This method requires an experienced developer to write custom code between two endpoints in order to create connectivity. Although this approach is quick and easy for a business with only a couple of integrations, it is not realistic for organizations with numerous applications, services, and systems. The greater the number of endpoints within the enterprise, the greater the number of connections that need to be created. Very quickly, this method becomes a tangled web of connections, essentially looking like “spaghetti architecture”. What initially seemed like a quick and easy integration solution between MS Sharepoint, Outlook, and Access becomes complex, fragile, and difficult to maintain.

There are also numerous third party products and tools for creating connectivity between MS Sharepoint and the rest of the enterprise. Many of these tools function more as batch processing and file sync solutions, unable to provide real-time synchronization and integration across the network. These third-party tools are essentially packaged point-to-point integrations.  While they are easy to implement for simple connectivity, they are unable to support complex integrations involving more than a couple of applications or with real-time needs. The second category of MS SharePoint integration solutions was designed specifically to connect Microsoft applications to each other. Businesses looking to integrate SharePoint with applications outside of the Microsoft family will have to look elsewhere for solutions.

Mule as an ESB - A Solution That Works

Mule as an Enterprise Service Bus is the world’s most widely used integration platform for connecting applications. Mule as an ESB is capable of meeting and exceeding requirements for mission-critical applications. Mule ESB has attracted a growing community of over 175,000 developers and enables over 1,600 organizations in more than 60 countries to build application networks that increase the clock speed of business. With high availability, high performance, and robust scalability, Mule as an ESB outperforms its competitors.

As a core component of the MuleSoft Anypoint™ Platform, Mule as an ESB helps connect disparate business ecosystems. With a full suite of capabilities required to connect the enterprise, Anypoint Platform delivers a complete solution to create connectivity across applications and services - on-premise and in the cloud.

By leveraging a library of Anypoint™ Connectors, businesses can create instant API connectivity to deliver integrations rapidly. The SharePoint Connector offers a simple way to instantly connect to the MS SharePoint API from within Mule as an ESB, allowing users to connect applications to SharePoint without having to configure the Sharepoint API directly. This connectivity enables SharePoint users to streamline processes and create seamless communication across disparate applications, services, databases, and systems. With the Sharepoint Connector, it’s easy to create connectivity to Microsoft SharePoint so that all changes to SharePoint content including documents, resources, and applications are synchronized through Mule as an ESB. Moreover, with over 120 additional Anypoint Connectors, integrating SharePoint with other applications and services like Yammer and Outlook, or even CRM solutions, can be done quickly and easily.

Mule as an ESB and Anypoint Platform make connecting the enterprise painless. To learn more about Mule as an ESB or Anypoint Platform, speak to a Mule expert today.

Discover other Microsoft connectivity solutions MuleSoft offers by visiting the following links: