Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Apr 09, 2010

Today we release two new libraries from the safe XAOP stable into the wild.

At XAOP we are constantly faced with the need to interface with new systems, and new to our repertoire are SharePoint and CMIS.

SharePoint is Microsoft’s take on content management. It is a collection of products and software elements that includes web browser based collaboration functions, process management modules, search modules and a document-management platform. We decided to add Sharepoint to our repertoire as we experience more and more businesses integrating Sharepoint in their information sharing environments.

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a new set of standards and web services ,backed by industry giants such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, that ensure interoperability among different content repositories. Almost every large organization has a collection of legacy ECM repositories, closing those down or migrating content out of them can be cumbersome and expensive, sometimes near impossible. Building a CMIS interface and federating access and viewing may well be the best option.

ActiveCMIS provides you with an object-oriented Ruby library to access any CMIS compliant repository. Let us dive right into some code:

  o = repository.object_by_id("some id")
  o.checkout
  o.set_content_stream(:file => "TODO", :mime_type => "text/plain")
  o.CustomString = "todo data file"
  o.checkin

The code is released under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub.

If you want to talk to SharePoint in particular, then ActiveSP is your best bet. Without further ado:

  list = connection.root / "My Site" / "My List"
  list.items.each do |item|
    p [item.Title, item.Description, item.ContentType.Name, item.Author.LoginName]
  end

At the moment, ActiveSP only provides read access. Write access is on the way.

The code is released under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub.