SharePoint Support for WSRP
A number of people have posted about the publication yesterday of new WSRP webparts and services for SharePoint 2003 (Daniel McPherson, Patrick Tisseghem) . I guess a number of people are wondering what on earth WSRP is about and why are people excited about it ?
A large part of the benefit of a portal comes from aggregating together information from other sources. On it’s own SharePoint 2003 does a great job of bringing together unstructured data such as word or excel documents through individual team sites into an overall structure.
This is great for the ‘information worker’ type employee that Microsoft talk about so often. Depending on you organisation you probably have people who aren’t ‘information workers’, perhaps people who use a Accounts Payable (AP) system 8 hours a day, or a helpdesk using a case tracking application etc. etc. These people still use tools like Word, Outlook etc but it’s not their prime application to work in.
Portals can help these workers by integrating between these different types of data. If their AP system can be exposed as a webpart, and you can put this in a page for AP Clerks next to a view of a shared document library, calendar etc. then they can work in the same place all day. Features like webpart connections could also allow context to be passed between separate system. When a user selects a supplier in the AP webpart a document library could sort to show letters sent to that supplier.
Most major applications come with their own Portal offering. SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle all have their own products, but don’t have the deep integration with Office applications that Microsoft provide. These vendors will not write in support for SharePoint themselves as it would take away from their sales of their own portal products.
This is where standards come in. Customers see benefits in standards, once I’ve agreed that an application should produce output to a particular standard I know I can change that application and as long as the support of standards is the same. Vendors tend to adopt standards, often trying to take the high ground over the competition by explaining how they don’t lock you in to their technology.
The WSRP standard defines a way in which a webpart can be delivered from a remote system (it stands for Web Services for Remote Portlets). One example of this would be a portal which supports publishing WSRP could communicate with a different portal which can subscribe to WSRP, and a portlet/webpart which was only written for the publisher could then be shown in the client.
Continuing my example, if my AP system had it’s own portal, but supported WSRP, I could then take any of their portlets and show them within webparts in SharePoint.
The published examples provide both publishing and subscribing to information through SharePoint. This means you can integrate a WSRP portlet into SharePoint, or use a SharePoint webpart in another vendors portal if it also supports WSRP. Both examples are a little rough, it would be better if Microsoft made this functionality part of the supported product rather than providing developer examples, fingers crossed for SharePoint v3.
Microsoft now join IBM, Fujitsu, Apache, Oracle, Plumtree and Sun in having products that supporting WSRP. BEA, Citrix, Vignette, SAP, and novel have also made noises that support will be coming. It will get more interesting next year when the rather limited WSRP 1.0 standard is updated to 2.0, and introduces concepts such as webpart connections.