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SharePoint usage in my company has exploded in the past few years. Some functionality that would be very useful...

1) Get a listing of sites a specified NT username is a member of (My Sites)
2) Return SharePoint lists with the ability to specify a view
3) Return Document Libraries with the ability to specify a view
4) Add/edit list items via CF
5) Create new sites via CF (I currently do this in CF via SharePoint webservices, but it's clunky and stopped working when we upgraded to WSS 3.0). We have a CF app to manage new site requests, and once a site is approved we just click a button and the site is automagically created. Save a nice bit of time over manually creating sites.

I'd be happy with any integration though, as SharePoint is now a critical tool used at our company (Large Aerospace).

# Posted By Andrew | 3/18/08 11:40 AM

I'm just dipping my toes into the Sharepoint world so I'm not quite sure what I'd like to see, but Andrew - might there be issues with authentication on 3.0? That is the version I'm on and I've set up a small service that is working well (once I got past the NT Auth issues).

See this post on auth issues: http://cfsilence.com/blog/client/index.cfm/2008/3/...

# Posted By todd sharp | 3/18/08 11:46 AM

On second thought, I suppose I'd like to see an interface into the SharePoint user service. The service I set up retrieves the current user list from SP, removes all users, retrieves a set of users from our DB and then adds all valid users back in. Kind of clunky, but the SP site access list needs to be in sync with our organizations structure so that's the best I could think of on short notice. Would have been nice to have a handfull of tags that simplified things - something like:

<cfsharepoint action="retrieveUsersFromGroup" group="myGroup" result="usersFromSharePoint" />
<cfloop query="usersFromSharePoint">
<cfsharepoint action="removeUserFromGroup" user="#name[currentRow]#" />
</cfloop>

<cfloop query="someQueryFromCFDSN">
<cfsharepoint action="addUserToGroup" user="DOMAIN\#userID#" group="myGroup" />
</cfloop>

Would have made the process much nicer then dealing with SOAP requests...

# Posted By todd sharp | 3/18/08 11:54 AM

Todd-
Not sure what you mean. The auth was working in WSS 2 by passing a username/password in cfinvoke. I never really had time to research why it stopped working when we upgraded to 3.0

# Posted By Andrew | 3/18/08 11:55 AM

Might want to check the client-config.wsdd file to see if it's pointing at the proper class as mentioned by Tom Jordahl in this post: http://tjordahl.blogspot.com/2007/03/apache-axis-a...

As I said, I could be off base - but perhaps MS changed the auth between 2 and 3?

# Posted By todd sharp | 3/18/08 12:04 PM

Sharepoint is rapidly replacing our current portal application built in Coldfusion. Our current application competes on many levels with sharepoint, but the one feature that we get beat on is the save option directly to the server.

In sharepoint you can open an Office document and make changes. Then hit Save in Office, and it saves it directly to the server. Not having to re-upload the file is a HUGE plus to a lot of users. If you could add this option to Coldfusion it would be very beneficial!

# Posted By Jared Legg | 3/18/08 12:47 PM

Add / Edit / Get / Search = List Items
Basically make the web services SharePoint exposes much easier. Dealing with Caml is a pain.

# Posted By Kris Brixon | 3/18/08 2:30 PM

The ability to write webparts in CF.

We basically dropped sharepoint since none of our .Net developers could get a grasp on writing webparts. It would be great if you could write webparts in CF and have sharepoint use them. I guess we would need a gateway for sharepoint or something.

# Posted By tony petruzzi | 3/18/08 3:45 PM

While connecting to SharePoint would be nice, there are many other Microsoft platforms that would be really useful to connect to. Connecting to an application middleware, such as BizTalk would give us access to not only SharePoint, but things like CRM, RMS, NaVision, GreatPlains, etc. Of course, I would rather have both, as I realize that BizTalk is very expensive.

# Posted By Nick Kwiatkowski | 3/18/08 5:42 PM

+1 for Tony Petruzzi's comment. A while back there was a small project posted to Adobe Labs for a WebSphere portlet. I'd love to see similar, maybe a little simpler (asking too much??) for webparts! Great suggestion.

# Posted By Adam Haskell | 3/18/08 5:57 PM

We are just starting out with Sharepoint, but my understanding is that one feature allows you to create and manage workflows. It sounds like a lot of groups here want to use workflows, but use them in conjunction with existing data applications. It would be nice to be able to access the workflow engine in Sharepoint as much as possible. I'm guessing there are times we'd want to be able to do all of these things:
- start a new workflow
- read a workflow status
- tell a workflow a step is complete
- cancel a workflow
- others?

Thanks.

# Posted By fgwenger | 3/18/08 6:27 PM

HI,

I worked in a french school in Montreal and I worked since 6 month with MOSS 2007 to build an intranet to connect admin/teachers/students/parents together.

Being able to create custom webpart in CF would be my dream. I am not a .net developer and I don't want to be just for my work in this school.

Since everything in Sharepoint can be view in RSS, I guess I can use a lot of information in MOSS from Coldfusion.

Since I have a LOT of sites in MOSS ( 1 per department, 1 per level, 1 per class, 1 per teacher/class ) I could very much use CF to program a config site to set permission on all those site at the beginning of the year.

I saw that there is a conference at webmaniac on Sharepoint integration, what are the topics covered ?

# Posted By Patrick Desroches | 3/18/08 11:15 PM

Is this really the kind of thing CF needs to be integrating at all? It almost seems like things are being added to CF "because we might as well do it", rather than concentrating on pushing the real advantages CF already has...

# Posted By David Low | 3/19/08 4:17 AM

I'd have to second David's point above. Why should CF be integrating with Sharepoint at all? - would it not be better to improve the language and provide a neat extension architecture so people can then do what they want with it?

I'm aware you can extend with CFX, Java, CORBA et al, but something more accessible to Johnny Coldfusion developer might be more useful

# Posted By Neil Middleton | 3/19/08 5:50 AM

From an Enterprise perspective, this is exactly the type of thing ColdFusion needs to leverage. In our organization, ColdFusion has lost the battle to Java, but has managed to remain useful as a tool for developing small to medium sized applications due to its rapid development characteristics and relatively low learning curve for new developers. However, as Java continues to progress, and new frameworks are developed that take some of the complexity out of the Java development process, it gets harder and harder to justify to our CTO and CIO the need for redundant development languages, staff and infrastructure.

To keep ColdFusion alive and kicking around here, we need to continue to find ways that ColdFusion can shine, and integration with SharePoint would be one. Having the ability to easily develop custom Web Parts would certainly be attractive, as would many of the other items mentioned in the responses above. We have a more robust BPMS in place today, but because of it's size, we may want to leverage SharePoint for small workflow processes. Perhaps there is a place for ColdFusion in the integration between these two? Not really sure, just thinking out loud. Bottom line is, we believe ColdFusion integration with SharePoint is a good thing here and are looking forward to seeing where this leads.

# Posted By Michael Zettler | 3/19/08 8:50 AM

@Neil & David:

I have to respectfully disagree. We've all heard time and again that ColdFusion is the language that makes difficult things easy. Sure there are other improvements that can be made, but leaving behind the true vision should not come at the expense of those improvements. Look at the amazing integration features we got in 8 - *AND* - the performance improvements.

SharePoint is something a lot of companies are embracing nowadays, and if CF can make it super simple by giving us a few tags to handle talking to it on our side then I'm all for it.

# Posted By todd sharp | 3/19/08 9:05 AM

1) Pass user credentials for the logged in user along to Sharepoint, especially when using HTTP Digest authentication, and logged in user password is not available.

2) CFQuery integration with Sharepoint Lists? Some other way of accomplishing "CRUD" on them

3) Ability to list/read/extract URL to/and possibly update Document libraries. Possibly some sort of CFFile integration with Document Libraries.

# Posted By Adam Ness | 3/19/08 10:26 AM

I have no idea how any of this works in Sharepoint, we've only just started using it at my current company, and are really only using out of the box features. But some things I would like to be able to do would be:

- Write web parts
- Query lists and document libraries (perhaps the latter with a cfdirectory-like functionality?)
- As Jared Legg Mentions, the ability to open a document and then save from Office back to the server is really key to SharePoint's value
- Manage and detect alerts. I'm sadly short on details with this one, but the "alert" functionality in SharePoint is really limited and difficult to use. Being able to "watch" a list for changes through some type of gateway and then trigger CF handlers would be awesome.

Lastly, count me in as one more vote towards integrating at all. Yes, I want language enhancements and new features, but SharePoint is increasingly popular in the enterprise, and in my experience it's a big "first step" towards moving to .NET. When all your documents and resources are stored in SharePoint, it becomes vital that other applications can integrate - or they go away. Integration with SharePoint will help keep CF in the enterprise.

Would I rather a CF-base portal solution? Of course. But SharePoint Team Services comes with Windows 2003 Server, and it's really easy to set up and get started with it (not so easy down the road when you want to customize...) so businesses are doing it - it's the path of least resistance. I don't necessarily advocate bundling applications with CF - but on the other hand, if there was another viable option, it would probably get used.

I'm thrilled to see SharePoint integration considered as a possible feature for future versions of CF.

# Posted By Rachel Maxim | 3/19/08 12:07 PM

Workflow is the big clever thing Sharepoint does that CF doesn't, at least not out of the box. The ability to get a workflow temaplte, populate it with data. I'm thinking of the form driven variety of work flow rather than workflows that get attached to docs, though being able to post a doc to sharepoint and attach workflow or workflows to it would be equally useful.

The status query would be pretty easy as you can do that direct form the tables but a nicer interface wouldn't hurt. What would be really rather useful is some method of getting progress messages from the workflow. Sending emails is already supported and I guess you could do that already with some CF code but an MSMQ or a Notification Services interface would be fairly easy to roll in sharepoint and a Notification Services interface for CF would also enble it to tie in to events generated in SQL Server 2005 and potentially Biztalk.

# Posted By Steve Powell | 3/19/08 12:08 PM

The more integration I see with Microsoft server technologies, the more I wonder how long will ColdFusion remain on the Java platform? If I was in charge of ColdFusion and we wanted to integrate with all these Microsoft technologies, I would be asking "Wouldn't it be easier to integrate with dot net technology rather than Java?"

Why would a company that is using Microsoft technologies like Sharepoint be interested in bringing in a Java Application server? I think it might be easier to sell ColdFusion to them if it ran on dot net instead.

Of course, you would then alienate 25% of your developer community who use Macs and would rather not see so much integration with Microsoft technologies since it sends shivers down our spine.

It seems to me that Adobe is trying to find a place for ColdFusion to fit and that in the future what may be good for ColdFusion may not be good for many of its developers.

# Posted By Jeff | 3/19/08 7:44 PM

I'd like to see some kind of strong authentication, maybe something Kerberos based or maybe even PKI. With my corporate clients username/pwd auth is absolutely forbidden.

# Posted By Christoph Schmitz | 3/20/08 6:31 AM

I read/hear all the glowing propaganda about Sharepoint quite a bit, but my assessment of it to date is that it is more of a marketing success than it is an actual IT success story. Micro$oft has indeed done it's homework in creating something that *sounds* like it's the cure-all that IT managers want.... but those poor souls who are saddled with trying to implement it say it is the most unwieldy dog to come out of Redmond in years.

Sadly, the CTO for our corporation has literally swallowed the Redmond kool-aid on this, and has proclaimed we will be moving toward this to the exclusion of Cold Fusion. This is a potential catastrophe for our group, so I would be a lot less concerned about this latest Redmond cancer if we could have some method of integration.

At the very least, we should have the ability to use our existing ColdFusion templates/widgets/functional modules within the Sharepoint environment in the same vein as a "web part", so that we don't have to wrestle with .NET programming. SP and CF need to co-exist, or we are in danger of losing Cold Fusion as our primary intranet development platform.

# Posted By Dale | 3/20/08 11:52 AM

@Dale,

Rather than hoping for some Sharepoint integration with ColdFusion, you should probably look for a new job. I have heard nothing but horrible things about Sharepoint. I wouldn't want to use it even if there was some sort of integration from ColdFusion.

When the managers make the technical decisions, its time to find another job.

# Posted By Jeff | 3/20/08 12:43 PM

We're a member association using CF mainly for our internet site. We just started off deploying MOSS for intranet and extranet - considering its expensive license fee for internet-facing sites, MOSS is rarely used for public internet access. For us, we would love to allow authenticated internet users use CF accessing MOSS content types, lists (with available views), workflow status or even BI reports. As some already suggested, it woud be nice if they can check in/out documents from a document library and, even better, if they are allowed to start a workflow or invoke a feature within CF.

# Posted By Dan | 3/20/08 1:11 PM

Just in case folks don't know, there currently is the ability to do much of what people are asking for with SharePoint today through accessing it's web services. My suspicion is that CF would only leverage those services and make them super easy to use...but there could be more in mind that I don't know about.

# Posted By todd sharp | 3/20/08 1:38 PM

My organization has been involved with SharePoint since early 2005 and we just recently upgraded to MOSS 2007. A few things that we would like to see out of any ColdFusion SharePoint integration would be:

1) Deeper authentication integration - our current security integration depends upon a shared datasource & passing keys within the query string
2) How about a ColdFusion webpart? I'd like to see SharePoint & ColdFusion living on the same box and be able to write CF code inside of a SharePoint webpart to be compiled at runtime
3) Ability to use the SharePoint web services as native CF tags, similar in function to the CFExchange tags
4) Ability to register CF components to custom UI modules as SharePoint webparts - this means I can create some piece of user interface code, such as a widget in CF, but add it to my SharePoint webpart library to be deployed to any site or page
5) Ability to create new SharePoint functionality in ColdFusion to actually extend SharePoint - MOSS 2007 comes with about 40 "applications", I would like the ability to create new applications in CF and deploy them as templates for SharePoint so that other users can use them throughout the portal

This is just a number of ideas, but I'm sure we, as well as the rest of the user community, would have plenty more. We've already tackled creating custom tags and components against the native SharePoint Services, but a deeper level of integration would always be appreciated. Likewise if you're looking for any beta partners, we would love to be on the list!

# Posted By Tim Newton | 3/21/08 9:09 AM

We are a ColdFusion house. Our external website will always be ColdFusion (I hope!), but I have gotten my team to use WSS for several years and we are now looking to upgrade to MOSS 2007 within the month. We will then begin the process of changing our corporate intranet (which is now CF based) to a SharePoint portal. Being in that situation, I would love to see:

1. A Coldfusion webpart for sharepoint where coldfusion applications can act normally within Sharepoint structure. I would love to save some of our current CF applications and utilize them within SharePoint. I believe I've seen a project case study online that mentioned that they had created a custom webpart to display CF.

2. A CF tag that would help add a list item to a list in sharepoint. I think the big stumbling block to adding a list item is some proprietary code that MS puts into a list item record. Determining the appropriate value for the code would be the main thing necessary, I think.

Thanks Ben. I am excited to see an interest in what I thought was a fairly unique situatioon that we were in.

# Posted By David Brown | 3/24/08 5:24 PM

@ David
I would also like to see a CF Tag that would help add a list item in sharepoint.. Great idea.

# Posted By brian cleveland | 3/30/08 10:32 PM

I would like to see a series of tags so you could interact with document libraries (list documents, check out/in a document) it would also be nice to interact with SharePoint lists in general (list items – would return an array of items in the list). I would also like to access the security model listing users, roles and permissions, etc… I think it is critical to be able to access data inside SharePoint from ColdFusion I know companies that want to use SharePoint as a backend for their CMS because it integrates with their windows environment and their infrastructure but would like to be able to access that data for display on the web in an easy (i.e. ColdFusion) way. SharePoint integration would be another good win for ColdFusion.

# Posted By Marc Truitt | 3/31/08 1:04 PM

I think integration is a great idea, or atleast the ability to easily use SharePoint's web services. For me right now I am trying to do some simple things like query a SharePoint list and schedule tasks that will update a SharePoint list from another data source. So far I have not been able to do even what I would think are the simple things.

Maybe you make a tag in CF for each SharePoint web service (or the most common ones). Maybe you can add web services to CFOutput or better yet cfquery then you can use it from cfoutput or cfloop. Maybe there is a special tag to add and edit data in a list.

It would also be great if Coldfusion could be used to make up for several of SharePoint’s short falls. SharePoint is good at getting something up and running quickly, but as soon as you want to start customizing something you run into problems.

# Posted By Dwight Mickley | 4/3/08 3:12 PM

We have been using CFM pages for many years to bring MS SQL Server data to users via Digital Dashboard and the orignial SharePoint. We use it for matter management in a legal environment. It works so well we have never upgraded, but are now about to port to MOSS 2007. The CFM pages are exposed through SharePoint's simple page viewer. We maintain state, interconnect webparts, and develop busines logic in ColdFusion, and produce sophisticated aggregations of data in multiple panes of a tabbed structure with world-class navigation and functions via Dashboard/SharePoint. We script ColdFusion, and use JavaScript to pass variables and connect webparts, while SharePoint does the heavy environmental and navigational lifting -- without coding in .net. We expose highly relational case data, multiple corporate databases, documents subsystems, search, and knowledge management, etc. Look, I'm a lawyer (who really practices law), and even I can do this.

# Posted By GrahamCracker | 4/15/08 3:54 PM

Here is a link to the Case study I mentioned previously:

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/customerev...

# Posted By David Brown | 5/8/08 10:47 AM

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What Would You Want From ColdFusion Microsoft SharePoint Integration?