Professional K2 blackpearl®

Chapter 12. Working with SharePoint

Igor Macori

Mike Talley

Microsoft characterizes SharePoint as one of the fastest-selling Microsoft products in the history of the company. Sometimes it's qualified as the fastest-selling server product. In 2008, sales of licenses for SharePoint hit the magical number of $1 billion per year and joined Windows and Office as a heavyweight champion of software sales.^[9] Over 100 million SharePoint licenses have been sold. The bottom line is that SharePoint is popular.

It's popular because it allows people to easily collaborate. It's popular because SharePoint, like many Microsoft products, provides the day-to-day functions that many information workers need. It's popular because it's relatively inexpensive, especially if you only need the free Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). It's popular because there's an entire industry that sells templates, solutions, training, and custom development services on top of SharePoint. It's popular because it's powerful.

The K2 blackpearl integration with SharePoint is extensive. If you have only WSS, you get a powerful in-browser interface to build workflows. You also get a mechanism to use data from SharePoint in other applications through SmartObjects. You get list, library, site, and user management. And you get search results that can be used later in the process. K2 blackpoint, which can be thought of as the subset of K2 blackpearl features that integrate with SharePoint, is available if you don't need the other ...