Monday, January 4, 2010

SharePoint and LiveLink Integration: Part 1

Sometime back i got a requirement for integrating LiveLink with SharePoint. The need was to search Livelink data through SharePoint interface and archive SharePoint documents to LiveLink. So i dicided to integrate the two using Web Services and was able to achieve the requirements successfully. So here is a blog post describing how you can integrate SharePoint 2007 with Livelink ECM.


Integrating SharePoint and Livelink using Web Services.

SharePoint can be integrated with Livelink Server though the Livelink Web Service .This uses standard HTTP protocol to communicate with the Livelink server. Livelink Web Services are installed on a Web Services application server, we do not have to install any Livelink software on the SharePoint Server or on the machine where we are building our applications. The following diagram shows how SharePoint can interact with Livelink through Livelink Web Services.


Archiving SharePoint Documents to Livelink


The purpose of this is to provide an “Archive to Livelink” option for documents stored in SharePoint sites and on click of that button the document will be archived to Livelink. The following steps tell us how to do it.


Step 1: Create a custom feature in SharePoint to add an extra item in the dropdown menu that comes when you click on any document.  Specify the item name as “Archive to Livelink”






Step 2:  Create a web part Page in SharePoint  and Modify the above created feature to Point to this page when we click on the “Archive to Livelink” option






Step 3: Create  a user control in Visual Studio 2005/2008 and add a web reference to the DocMan Web Service of Livelink. Use the ListObjects function of this web service to get the livelink folder structure (to allow users to select the folder in which they want to put the selected document). Then add this user control on the Web part page that we created in the previous step using SmartPart(This is a SharePoint web part which is used to add ASP.NET user controls on SharePoint sites. It is available as a free download on www.codeplex.com)
Note: I am creating user controls instead of web parts because it is easy to design the UI but the same thing can also be done by creating a web part.






Step 4: Create another user control in Visual Studio which uses the AddDocument(if file size is less than 1Mb) or AddDocumentSegmented(If file size is greater than 1Mb) function of the DocMan web service to copy a document to Livelink. The required parameters for the add document function are provided by query string and the above web part that we created. Add this user control to the same webpart page.






Step 5: Create a confirmation page (a web part page in SharePoint) to confirm that your document is archived or not after you click on the Archive button.





So this is one way of Integrating SharePoint with LiveLink using LiveLink  web services. Same thing can be done using LiveLink APIs also.

10 comments:

  1. Can you share code for this project as well as for the web service?

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  2. Hi Dezi9or, Please drop a mail to me (anshul.sharepoint@gmail.com) ....and ill try my best to share the code of this project with you

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  3. Given your knowledge of the 2 solutions; if a company had very basic document and records management requirements would you recomend going down this integration path, or would you advise to migrate into SP 2010 and use a single platform? (background: currently LL has a very small footprint in the company I am working with and they already use SharePoint as their collaboration platform. Their D&RM requirements are basic and I'm not sure if expanding LL's footprint is required).

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  4. Hi Anne1f,

    If the amount of data in livelink is very small, then i would suggest migrating all the data to SharePoint Server as it will help in the long run.
    The above integration method can be used when there is a lot of data in LiveLink and it is not very feasible to move that data to SharePoint. Using the above integration method you will be using LiveLink as your backend and SharePoint as the UI.

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  5. 'LiveLink as your backend and SharePoint as the UI.' - is this really correct? Once the document is archived into Livelink from SP the Livelink copy can't be manipulated or accessed from SP again can it?

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  6. Hi Anshul
    Could you share your source code..I would like to to try your solution in my loal dev env.
    Thanks

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  7. Hi Anshul,
    I have one question,
    We are using LiveLink for Authorization and Authentication in some java application, but customer wants to retire LiveLink and want to use SharePoint Group instead of LiveLink Groups.
    We have a custom code which connects to livelink and brings all the group IDs. if the user belongs that group. we are authenticating them for to view pages in the application..
    How can we replace the LiveLink Groups with SharePoint.
    plan is to move all groups to Sharepoint.. but the same application has to look at SharePoint Site and autheticate the application..
    any idea and feedback?
    I m very new to LiveLink Sharepoint..
    Guidance is needed.

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  8. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/c91ec0e6-86b8-498a-8980-7b6a643f4222
    have look on this also

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  9. Hi, Any idea on LiveLink to sharepoint migration?

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