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KB Connector to SharePoint repository

Brian_WinterBrian_Winter Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
in Analyst Portal

Our company has adopted SharePoint as their Document Repository. 

1)  Is there any way to extract documents from SP into the Cireson KB?
if not,
2) Any way to make a Cireson DB sub with a linkage to the SP document?

Dual entry will not work and I don't want to abandon the Cireson KB potentials!

Thanks!

Best Answer

  • Brett_MoffettBrett_Moffett Cireson PACE Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    I've heard this sort of request before and I've never seen a good answer to it.

    The issue I see is with your statement of "I don't want to abandon the Cireson KB potentials!"
    It would be possible to just show the SP site in an iFrame or View within the Cireson portal, however you lose the functions that you want to keep such as the ability to link KB articles to Work Items.

    Being in Word format is a tricky one as even if you automated the updating process and somehow got Word to convert the document to HTML, the Word HTML code is "nasty" to say the least and the KB articles would be very slow to load due to being so large.

    Having the Cireson search engine reach out in to other databases such as SP sites, may be able to be achieved with some custom code, however, this would still lose the ability to link these with Work Items.

    A solution I can envision is a "TAG" of some description in a KB article that would be recognized by some custom Java script that would then load the SP result in the KB window. This way the KB name and indexing would be in the Cireson DB but the content would be in SP. The one draw back here would be the inability to index search the content of the Word document which would severely limit the search functionality.

    Final idea would be to get a better Word to HTML converter and automate it in PowerShell or Orchestrator.

    Good luck

Answers

  • seth_coussensseth_coussens Member Ninja IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭
    While we've not done this yet, there is a high probability of success. Sharepoint being a HTML based system and our KBs using HTML. As they are both in a SQL DB and I know for sure it's possible to import HTML articles into the Cireson DB, you should be able to work up a process to pull and convert the Sharepoint KBs.

    Most likely the best method here would be a powershell workflow of some sort that pulls the articles from sharepoint and imports the value into Cireson. You could also go the other direction depending on what properties you are trying to maintain.
  • Brian_WinterBrian_Winter Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
    Of course to add a level of complexity, we're using Word docs.  However they have a standard format, so if I could digest the Word doc, then perhaps SQL insert into the Cireson tables.
  • Rick_HancksRick_Hancks Customer Adept IT Monkey ✭✭
    Instead of importing the SharePoiint documents into the Cireson KB, would there be a way to point to a SharePoint site and index the contents?  That way you wouldn't have to worry about keeping the files in sync.  Other tools I've worked with had this functionality.  
  • Brian_WinterBrian_Winter Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
    Good idea - so how would we link a KB article object in Cireson to the SharePoint doc?
  • Rick_HancksRick_Hancks Customer Adept IT Monkey ✭✭
    In a perfect world the Cireson crawler would index all of the documents in the SharePoint site and return those other documents intermixed with the Cireson knowledge articles based on the search relevancy.  The Cireson crawler would need to be enhanced to index more than just the Cireson database, it would need to be able to index other outside repositories such as SharePoint or other file repositories.
  • Brett_MoffettBrett_Moffett Cireson PACE Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    Answer ✓
    I've heard this sort of request before and I've never seen a good answer to it.

    The issue I see is with your statement of "I don't want to abandon the Cireson KB potentials!"
    It would be possible to just show the SP site in an iFrame or View within the Cireson portal, however you lose the functions that you want to keep such as the ability to link KB articles to Work Items.

    Being in Word format is a tricky one as even if you automated the updating process and somehow got Word to convert the document to HTML, the Word HTML code is "nasty" to say the least and the KB articles would be very slow to load due to being so large.

    Having the Cireson search engine reach out in to other databases such as SP sites, may be able to be achieved with some custom code, however, this would still lose the ability to link these with Work Items.

    A solution I can envision is a "TAG" of some description in a KB article that would be recognized by some custom Java script that would then load the SP result in the KB window. This way the KB name and indexing would be in the Cireson DB but the content would be in SP. The one draw back here would be the inability to index search the content of the Word document which would severely limit the search functionality.

    Final idea would be to get a better Word to HTML converter and automate it in PowerShell or Orchestrator.

    Good luck
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