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How would one go about connecting sharepoint to an Enterprise Service Bus(ESB). The service bus being used is Polarlake.

I'm presuming it requires a .NET web service to be created but essentially what is required is to read from a DB2 database through the service bus and write back to the DB2 through the service bus.

This is in relation to DOCUMENT read/write

Any advice greatly welcome.

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The actual mechanism would vary considerably based on the intended usage of the data but the basic choices are:

  • leverage Business Connectivity Services which would expose the DB2 data to Sharepoint almost as if it were a built-in list.
  • create custom Web Parts that query the database or the web services.
  • use javascript to fetch the data directly on the client
  • create a separate web app that exposes the data and then include that page in SharePoint via iframe
  • If this is SharePoint 2013, you could build an App that would expose the data (very similar to the previous point but is integrated into SharePoint 2013 for easier deployment and integration)
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  • thanks. I'd like to keep the sharepoint functionality on the documents ideally aswell e.g. edit in browser, view in browser etc. it would be retrieving the documents as a list just not from the sql but through a service bus to our db2. if possible
    – topcat3
    May 9, 2013 at 16:43
  • I'm not sure if that is possible as that particular functionality is limited to documents within SharePoint itself. BCS and the other methods are meant more for data than documents. I did find this for SP2007 (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440954%28v=office.12%29.aspx) but I can't find anywhere that it is still available beyond 2007. You might want to update your question to make it clear that you are referring to documents rather that data as that is a significant distinction
    – Dave Wise
    May 9, 2013 at 16:58
  • I'm presuming even if I get the external document repository connected as a list that I will lose alot of the functionality e.g. edit in browser, view in browser etc. Also the BLOB files in our DB2 are in sxw and odt format. Office 2013 doesn't open sxw as far as I know. I'm going to propose recreating the templates in word.....which brings me to another question. Can we still use our service bus and DB2 to store the new documents in word format and keep sharepoint functionality? thanks
    – topcat3
    May 10, 2013 at 9:00
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    My guess would be that if the binaries themselves are not stored in SharePoint that they cannot be accessed using any of the SharePoint standard features. It is always possible to include a link to the original document in DB2 as an HREF (assuming it is http accessible in some form) and then expose other metadata in SharePoint.
    – Dave Wise
    May 10, 2013 at 14:26

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