Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS and Sharepoint

I was wondering if anyone had any experience of integrating OpenACS with Sharepoint. The main functionality is as a document storage device to maintain documents between a few locations and systems.

I asked that question myself a few months back, and I realized that it comes with the default installation. You need to go to the file-storage admin parameters,there is a flag that turns on the WebDAV support for each instance of File Storage.

Once it is enabled, a URL appears at the bottom of the file-storage HTML page which is what you have to use to access it remotely with a WebDAV client.

I tried to use FS remotely both with Msoft and KDE Konqueror. With MSoft you may open a file remotely, and every time you save your file, it creates a new version in FS. With Konqueror, I needed to save the file locally and then send the new version back (plus the URL given by OACS is not exactly what you need to enter in konqueror to reach the folder), but it was a problem of the client, not in OACS.

I did find a glitch though in the oacs_dav package (see https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=1201217). It affects the way the date a file was last modified is stored in the database. For simple one-user read/modify/write sequences, it is not critical, but I was trying to synchronize the content of two directories, and this date was the reference I used.

Hope it helps.

PS> After playing with this, it occurred to me that It would be a great help to have an additional "object" in the File Storage which would be a URL pointing to a subversion module. You could then program the frequency by which such URL would refresh the content from the SVN repository. That way you could mirror an entire SVN module automatically into OACS FS (I'm thinking about authoring processes in which a large number of small changes are produced quite frequently.)

I was interested in something similar - using OACS to front several Novell DAV collections - several months ago but never got around to investigating very deeply. The WebDAV spec appears to support the idea of remote collections, which is what I was focusing on (in fact, it seems central to the original writers' vision of DAV). I no longer need to integrate these two systems but would be interested to hear about what you uncover.

We are looking at replicating similar functionality.

However, when I spoke to Gustaf about using Xowiki as a document management utility and perhaps some sort of frontend for FileStorage and other things, he mentioned that for their users they do something interesting.

They thought that WebDav didn't scale too well so what they decided to do was use GIT to replicate local files to FS and then go from there.

For our needs, we will be looking at this very seriously because GIT scales massively, it's fast and we don't have to worry about connectivity as much.  Of course users are always using local files then which also has benefits if the files are exceptionally large.  

The downside is that windows users complain there is no git gui but we could have a simply python frontend with a button that says SYCNHRONISE running in no time - a user gui client would not haveto have more than a few basic features to make this work.

Anyway, not sure if anyone thinks this might be usefull to them, just thought I would share.

We would be interested in collaborating with whoever might be working on something along those lines and seeing if we can first pitch in and second maybe see if some of this stuff already exists so we can pull a solution together.