Connectbeam - SharePoint Connector

Connectbeam, founded in December, 2005, is a leading provider of enterprise social software applications and the first company to integrate concepts of social bookmarking and tagging with those of social networking. Connectbeam's new Spotlight Connect for SharePoint provides SharePoint users with a single destination for discovering and sharing rich enterprise social bookmarking and tagging information. Spotlight Connect for SharePoint also extends and enhances the native collaboration and discovery capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007.

Spotlight Connect for SharePoint -

Spotlight Connect for SharePoint is deployed as a series of customizable SharePoint Web Parts, including:
• Social Search and Related Content
• Social Graphs
• Bookmarks
• Tags
• Groups
• Connections

Suggested Improvements -

SharePoint Document Library - Connectbeam integration

• Incase user would like to share information in the document library at the enterprise level, option to publish the information to Connectbeam

• SharePoint List (Announcements, Custom List etc. ) - Connectbeam integration
  

  In case users would like to share announcement or a part of it with Connectbeam groups or corresponding Enterprise, it would be a good functionality to have.
  

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Populating and Creating Business Entities from SharePoint List

Patterns and practices has released a new version of guidance for building collaborative applications.

One of the new functionality provided by the Microsoft group is very useful and generic, w.r.t creating and saving business entities. Concept is based on List based repositories by following below steps -

1. Business entity class E.g. Customer
2. Static class that contains the SharePoint field IDs for the list to be used.
3. Repository class which creates instance of the ListItemFieldMapper class and adds mappings that associate the field IDs to the corresponding property of the business entity
   

   Please refer - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee413898.aspx for more details

4. After business entity and mapping classes are defines, generic functionality could be used to retrieve and save the business entity directly with SharePoint.
   

   Sample Code -

• Creating collection for Customer Business Entity:

  public IList<Customer> GetAllCustomers()
  {
  // ...
  
  
  using (SPSite site = new SPSite(customerWebUrl))
  {
  using (SPWeb customerWeb = site.OpenWeb())
  {
  SPList customerList = customerWeb.Lists[Constants.CustomerListName];
  CAMLQueryBuilder camlQueryBuilder = new CAMLQueryBuilder();
  camlQueryBuilder.FilterByContentType(CustomerContentTypeName);
  SPListItemCollection items = customerList.GetItems(camlQueryBuilder.Build());
  
  IList<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>();
  foreach(SPListItem item in items)
  {
  Customer customer = listItemFieldMapper.CreateEntity(item);
  customers.Add(customer);
  }
  return customers;
  }
  }
  }
  

• Save a Business Entity to a List

  public void AddCustomer(Customer customer)
  {
  using (SPSite site = new SPSite(customerWebUrl))
  {
  using (SPWeb customerWeb = site.OpenWeb())
  {
  SPList customerList = customerWeb.Lists[Constants.CustomerListName];
  SPListItem customerListItem = customerList.Items.Add();
  this.listItemFieldMapper.FillSPListItemFromEntity( customerListItem, customer);
  customerList.Update();
  }
  }
  }

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