Introduction

More and more organizations start using SharePoint as a content management system because it supports document management, records management and collaboration functionality. In this context, content that has formerly resided in traditional environments, e.g. on file shares or in e-mail systems, is gradually moved towards SharePoint. As SharePoint has become more popular over the last years, many vendors have started offering solutions which connect directly to SharePoint. These solutions inevitably all use the SharePoint API to place their data inside SharePoint itself. In this process, however, the storage burden for document-centric content is placed on SharePoint’s data tier, i.e. the content databases hosted by the Microsoft SQL Server. In addition to that, field data (literals) can be added and combined with this data.

Although the SQL Server (database application/service) is optimized for performance of structured, relational data, where records are less than 8 kilobytes (KB) in size, Microsoft first decided to store all of the binary data inside it. Reasons for this initial decision were scalability, single point of administration and ease of use.

The release of SharePoint 2013 represents a significant shift in Microsoft’s strategy for further development of the product. Microsoft’s focus is now concerned with improving how SharePoint works in the cloud, especially with Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s primary investment in SharePoint 2013 has been to add features and functionality that work equally well in the cloud as they do in on-premises farms.

The applications for SharePoint (SharePoint Add-ins) provide a new method to deliver specific information or functionality to a SharePoint site. An application for SharePoint is a small, easy-to-use, stand-alone application that solves a specific end-user or business need. Site owners can discover and download applications for SharePoint from a public SharePoint Store or from their organization's internal app catalog and install them on their SharePoint sites. These applications for SharePoint integrate the best of the Web with SharePoint 2013. SharePoint Add-ins are self-contained extensions of SharePoint websites that you create, and that run without custom code on the SharePoint server. The applications for SharePoint have a simple lifecycle - they can be installed, upgraded, and uninstalled by site owners.

There are two basic kinds of SharePoint Add-ins:

  • SharePoint-hosted: all business logic uses JavaScript either directly on a custom page or in a JavaScript file that is referenced from a custom page.

  • Provider-hosted: distinguished from SharePoint-hosted add-ins because they include at least one remote component that is hosted externally from the SharePoint farm. This could be a server in the same corporate network as a SharePoint farm or a cloud service.

The external components can be hosted on any web hosting stack, including Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP). The ImageMaster SharePoint Connector (ImaSPC) is a provider-hosted add-in, which stores data from SharePoint inside ImageMaster. In addition to the raw binary data, this solution also saves field data inside ImageMaster.

The following topics are presented in this system manual:

There is a dedicated user manual for the Content Services for SharePoint [UM SharePoint], which describes the views related to ImageMaster that are available to end users in SharePoint.

Topics related to the configuration on ImageMaster side are covered in the AdminClient user manual [UM AdminClient], see section SharePoint.