Read more about the eight reference architectures.
In this model the ECM system stores the only copy of the actual payload of an object, (the document, spreadsheet, image, etc.), however the object can be managed, consumed and deleted from within SharePoint.
A shortcut is created in SharePoint, the shortcut points to the object in the ECM system and mirrors all of the appropriate object metadata. Assume that you have a Word document called "widget_spec.doc" being stored in the ECM system. The document was created by me on 04/20/2008, I have full access to it and the rest of the world has read-only access. A shortcut would be created in SharePoint that has the appropriate access controls, the object name, title, author, creation date and also the location of the real file in the ECM system, (but not the actual file).
Any actions applied to the shortcut object are redirected to the ECM copy when appropriate. If you click on the shortcut and open the document that action is redirected to the ECM system which grabs the real document and streams it back to SharePoint. The user doesn't know, (or care),that the file came from the ECM system.
Both the SharePoint object and the ECM object are protected by event triggers so that changes to the properties, location, etc. can be synchronized and when either is deleted the other will also be disposed of. This is important because you need to allow the object to be managed from either within the ECM system or from within SharePoint without the shortcut and the original object getting out of sync.
Note that this RefArch works for content that already exists in the ECM system, is being created by a 3rd party process or is "published" from SharePoint. What does this mean? It means that you could move content from SharePoint in to the ECM system and leave a shortcut behind, (kinda like HSM for SharePoint isn't it), you could ingest content in to the ECM system from any source and in real time expose that content in to multiple SharePoint document libraries or you could take existing content in your ECM systems and make it available to one or more SharePoint sites. Attractive proposition isn't it? We call this architecture 'projection'.
I am not going to delve any deeper in to the technology behind this solution for similar reasons to reference architecture #6 but needless to say, this is a very interesting area for ECM vendors right now.
The end...
That's it for the reference architectures for now. Committing these to Blog has been a great therapeutic exercise...thanks for sticking with it!
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