Web3 and Concepts for SharePoint 1.0 Releases Now Available
We are very pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 1.0 release of our Web3 Platform and Concepts for SharePoint products.
The Web3 Platform is our "next-generation" structured information server built on the foundation of topic maps but with support for Linked Data standards including RDF and the SPARQL query language. The Web3 Platform provides a fully-featured REST API making it possible to create applications in almost any programming language and to quickly and easily integrate structured information into existing applications and websites. The Web3 service provides full support for the topic maps data model and support for browsing content as Linked Data RDF as well as providing a SPARQL endpoint that implements support for querying topic map data as RDF as well as querying at the detailed topic map data model level.
Concepts for SharePoint is simply the best way to organise, search for and find content on a SharePoint 2010 server. It integrates with and extends the taxonomy features of SharePoint 2010, allowing users to create richly interconnected data models that reflect the business in which they work. Unlike the tags in a standard SharePoint 2010 taxonomy, the concepts in Concepts for SharePoint can be made available as published pages complete with links to other concepts and to related content across the whole SharePoint server.
Both products are available for evaluation. Download them now!
Using HTTP Verbs to describe Server Side Transactions
One of the challenges of putting together a REST service is how to let clients make transactional updates that involve two or more resources. One approach to this problem is to create a resource that is 'a collection of transactions'. A client can post a representation of a new transaction to this resource. The transaction becomes a 'child' of the 'transactions' resource and can be accessed via a returned URL.
Making the transaction explicit is good as it allows the transaction to be addressed and its status checked, it also allows for the service to return immediately and process the transaction in the background.
This basic pattern is good but it has a drawback in that for each different system you build you need to define the transaction language.
Our solution to this is to use HTTP verbs, URIs and resource representations as the building blocks of our transaction language. A transaction representation contains a number of operations. Each operation contains information about its Method, e.g. POST, PUT, DELETE, the resource URI to operate on and the request body.
<transaction>
<operation id="a1" method="POST" Resource="http://...../somecollection">
<body><!-- resource representation --></body>
</operation>
.. more operations
</transaction>
The server processes a transaction by looking at each operation construct and operating on it as though the request has come from a client. The only difference is that all of the operations listed occur in a single transaction.
Each operation has a local id. When an operation completes the return URL from the operation is bound to that identifier. The identifier can then be used later in the transaction. This is especially useful when you want to create two new resources and then associate them together all in the same transaction.
After a transaction is processed the representation can be retrieved. The representation contains the URLs of newly created resources, as well as an errors information that occurred when processing the transaction.
This is a very powerful model that removes the need to create a domain specific transaction language for different applications, can reuse existing resource processing code and is very descriptive.
For more information about this approach, download and review the REST service documentation for the Web3 Platform
New NetworkedPlanet Support Forums
We have added new discussion forums for support questions about NetworkedPlanet products. We hope that by having more questions answered on these discussion groups we can help our customers find the answers to common issues more quickly. The old route for support (email to support@networkedplanet.com) also still works but we would encourage people to post questions to the forum wherever possible.
The forums are available at http://support.networkedplanet.com/
SharePoint Module 3.2 now available
NetworkedPlanet are pleased to annouce the release of version 3.2 of the TMCore SharePoint Module.
The TMCore SharePoint Module is a tight integration between Microsoft SharePoint and the TMCore information management server that greatly improves the way information is organised, classified and located with Microsoft SharePoint solutions.
This new release includes all the features and enhancements of the SharePoint Module 3.1 hotfix 6, and is packaged to be installed on either SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010.
Any future hotfixes to the module will be released for version 3.2 and no further codebase changes will be made on version 3.1.
The new version is available as an upgrade for all customers with a current maintenance contract. For more information and download details please email us specifying the version of SharePoint that you will be installing the SharePoint Module on.
