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ProjectWise Design Integration Forum Integration With a SharePoint Site?
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    Integration With a SharePoint Site?

    jcallicott
    Offline jcallicott over 14 years ago

    Greetings-

    I'm a relative newbie when it comes to things ProjectWise (PW), so please forgive me if my question seems out of place. 

    Because we are soon expecting some work that will involve users in several different offices working on the same data, we are most likely heading toward a PW V8i deployment in the coming weeks. 

    On one of these projects, we are a sub to a Firm A.  Because we expect to have staff at Firm A's physical location from time to time, we are planning on having a small, local server there.  That way, any of our staff that is there may work locally off of that server.  That server will also double as a PW caching server, and PW will make sure any updates from that site get mirrored back to our PW integration server/main file servers. 

    However, that is only half the equation.  Firm A is in turn a sub to another firm running the project in SharePoint, so Firm A will also host a SharePoint site.  We want to be able to get the files from our server into Firm A's SharePoint site, and we want to avoid doing it manually - it takes time and is prone to errors.  We want PW to be able to do that for tus on his project. 

    As I understand, PW StartPoint can integrate into SharePoint... will PW be able to mirror the files to Firm A's SharePoint site?  How might that work, and what is required?  If PW can not do this "out of the box", what options exist to alow such functionality? 

    Thanks very much,

    Jeff 

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    • Kevin van Haaren
      Offline Kevin van Haaren Fri, Apr 10 2009 6:52 PM

      First a clarification: when you have a cache server, that cache server is only for keeping copies of files as they are copied from the master server, when a changed file is checked in it is immediately written to the master location, not the cache first and then mirrored to the master server later. it isn't really a "mirror" situation.

      There are 2 projectwise/sharepoint integrations:

      - startpoint is a standalone product that integrates with sharepoint. it is not a part of the standard projectwise software and it can't use things like the projectwise caching. Basically this product allows Sharepoint to deliver reference files along with a master file when opened from sharepoint.

      - projectwise web parts for sharepoint. These components give you a "portal" into projectwise from sharepoint. The documents are not stored in sharepoint, they are still in projectwise. Basically sharepoint is acting as your ProjectWise Explorer Client.

      Neither of these solutions appear to be what you are after, instead what I believe you want is an automated way of copying files from ProjectWise to Sharepoint.  Distributions services can handle this, but you need a ProjectWise to Sharepoint connector for distribution services.  I'm not sure how much that costs or the licensing on it.

       

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    • jcallicott
      Offline jcallicott Fri, Apr 10 2009 8:56 PM in reply to Kevin van Haaren

      Kevin,

      Thanks for your reply!

      Kevin van Haaren:

       Distributions services can handle this, but you need a ProjectWise to Sharepoint connector for distribution services.  I'm not sure how much that costs or the licensing on it.

      When you say "Distributions" or "a ProjectWise to Sharepoint connector for distribution services", I'm not surewhat you mean.  Is this a server-based app?  A service?   Would it be standalone, or intergrated (i.e. be a plugin or extension) of ProjectWise or SharePoint?  Is it something kind-of-standard or would it involve completely custom coding?  Lastly, who might be a typical provider of something like this?  Could it be Bentley,  or would it be a third-party provider?   

      I am definitely a newbie at this... hence all my questions.  Any insight anyone can provide is greatly appreciated! 

      Thanks very much,

      Jeff

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    • Gary Cochrane
      Offline Gary Cochrane Fri, Apr 10 2009 9:55 PM in reply to jcallicott

      Hello Jeff,

      Bentley provides a number of "Connectors" for sharing data to other repository systems. Those connectors are purchasble through Bentley Professional Services as what we call "solutionsware", which is something between a production application, and completely custom code. With solutionsware, it is typically developed by our Professional Services group for a specific customer, and then  generalized to be applicable to a larger audience.

      A connector is a final-stage plug-in to the Distribution System. We deliver the Distribution System and ProjectWise Connector with core ProjectWise. With that, you can distribute documents from one PW system to another (or even to a different folder within the same PW system). This is typically done at milestones in the lifecycle of a document. The Distribution System on its own, will distribute copies of the original documents, in their original format. If you also have ProjectWise InterPlot in your configuration, then the DS can call InterPlot to generate PDF's (or other formats supported by InterPlot) and distribute those to the target system.

      Now to the subject of SharePoint. We currently have connectors available for Documentum, FileNET, and OpenText. We do not yet have a connector for SharePoint, but I know our Professional Services team has prototyped some code. And again, we deliver the pw-2-pw Connector with core ProjectWise, but we don't deliver the other connectors. Those must be purchased separately.

      In closing, they key differences between "solutionsware" and "products" are:

      • Internally Solutionsware code is owned by our Professional Services group, not core Development
      • Solutionsware has no release schedule. We develop the code for a specific customer, and compile/test against their specific environment. For instance, with Documentum Connector, each Documentum customer could be running a different version of PW, and a different version of Documentum. Rather than try to certify against all possible combinations (yikes), we certify against exactly what the customer is running. If a different customer wants the connector, then we compile/certify against their configuration. So the code is "in the can" and ready to go, but not released on any schedule. It may require tweaking, but it's not like we're starting from scratch.

      If you are interested in a SharePoint Connector, please contact your Bentley Sales rep and let them know.

      Hope this helps,

      Gary

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    • jcallicott
      Offline jcallicott Mon, Apr 13 2009 5:30 PM in reply to Gary Cochrane

      Hi Gary-

      I appreciate you clarifying this for me. Yes, we have interest; I will contact my Bentley sales rep.

      Thanks again,

      Jeff

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    • Scott Soper
      Offline Scott Soper Mon, Apr 20 2009 9:44 PM
      Gary, I think you just answered the question I posted under the Distribution Services topic.  Thanks for clearing this up.
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