Sharepoint Integration Options

Because of the structure of SharePoint and Beekeeper, there are several different ways to integrate the two, offering your organization flexibility in how you share content between the two platforms. These options are: 

1. Marketplace Integration with the Document Library
2. Access via the Navigation Extensions
3. A Beekeeper website embed into SharePoint
4. A Sharepoint RSS Feed Integration into Beekeeper
5. API Integration

Marketplace Integration with the Document Library

Difficulty: Easy

Time estimate: Minutes

The Beekeeper Marketplace now features an out-of-the-box integration that mirrors files and folders from SharePoint directly in the Beekeeper Document Library. Give your frontline workforce access to up-to-date files in SharePoint on mobile, without investing in more Microsoft licenses. Discussed more in this article, the Marketplace option allows for your employees to have the most up to date materials directly to their mobile device through the Beekeeper App. 

For more information on configuring and enabling this additional feature please reach out to your respective CSM or support@beekeeper.io. 

Navigation Extension (with authentication)

Difficulty: Medium

Time estimate: Hours

Navigation Extensions in Beekeeper act as shortcuts that allow your users to quickly and easily access relevant tools, such as other websites, portals, or documents. To set up the initial Navigation Extension link in Beekeeper, refer to this article.

With respect to Sharepoint, you will need to build a stateless application that parses the user context from a JSON Web Token and single signs-on the user into Sharepoint. This way, the entire Sharepoint platform is accessible from Beekeeper's mobile and web apps.

Website Embed

Difficulty: Easy

Time estimate: Minutes

You can embed a Beekeeper stream in one of the articles of your Sharepoint as a web part. To do so please review this article.

RSS Feed Integration

Difficulty: Easy

Time estimate: Minutes

Expose Sharepoint articles as an RSS Feed and post them to Beekeeper either through the built-in Beekeeper RSS integration or via Zapier. The RSS Feed URL needs to be exposed publicly so it is possible to fetch the content. Make sure that you include a long secure token in the URL so the URL cannot be guessed.

The RSS integration configuration is available in the Beekeeper dashboard in the Stream configuration under the Integrations tab. Learn more here.

Learn more about how to create an RSS Feed in the Sharepoint help center:

• Sharepoint 2007
• Creating an RSS feed
• Making an RSS feed public
• Sharepoint Online & 2013

API Integration

Difficulty: Advanced

Time estimate: Days to Weeks

You need to program a stateful application that holds the mapping between the Sharepoint and Beekeeper entities. The state of this application is referred to as App State. The mapping of the data model is as follows:

Sharepoint to Beekeeper

The following actions have to be implemented:

Share Article from Sharepoint to Beekeeper

1. Subscribe to new and/or updated articles on Sharepoint, either by polling or by integrating using any other means
2. Whenever a new or updated post is detected, extract and map all relevant content of the Sharepoint article to the Beekeeper Data Model (see table above)
3. For new posts, Create a new post on Beekeeper and store the resulting post id to be able to link beekeeper posts with sharepoint articles
4. For updated articles update the post on Beekeeper using the stored ID

Share Comment from Sharepoint to Beekeeper

1. Subscribe to new comments on synchronised articles on sharepoint, either by polling or by integrating using any other means
2. Fetch Post ID in App State based on Sharepoint Article ID
3. Create comment within Beekeeper with Post ID.

Beekeeper to Sharepoint

The following actions have to be implemented:

Share Comment from Beekeeper to Sharepoint

1. Periodically fetch all comments of posts from Beekeeper that are stored synchronised and connected to a Sharepoint Article
2. Create all comments that do not exist on Sharepoint yet using Sharepoint API
3. Store created comment mapping in App State