Extending MOSS for Content Lifecycle Management

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jun 18, 2009

You may be one of the many organizations who uses SharePoint on a daily basis for collaboration and document management. But not everything you need to do your job is located in the SharePoint content repository, nor should it be.

The days of a single content repository are over. Now come the solutions that enable you to leverage a central interface to manage and work with content from multiple repositories. ASG Software Solutions (news, site) provides you this ability using SharePoint as that central interface.

The ASG Total Content Integrator

The solution is called the ASG Total Content Integrator for SharePoint (ASG-TCI). What it provides at a glance is the ability to integrate any content repository with SharePoint to manage and share documents from a central location and includes the ability to archive those documents once they are no longer needed on a day to day basis.

Sounds like Content Lifecycle Management doesn't it? That it certainly is. And at its core is the ASG ViewDirect Archiving Repository and MOSS.

ASG-TCI: Presenting content in SharePoint

So what are the capabilities included with ASG-TCI?

Access all your corporate information from a centralized location - MOSS. Content is integrated without the need for coding.
Include non document type information such as ERP data, dynamically generated reports, images, etc, in your views.
Utilize Federated search in SharePoint to pull together content from many different locations.
View content archived in ASG ViewDirect inside SharePoint
Archive SharePoint content to ASG ViewDirect or another archiving repository

The ASG-TCI for SharePoint is built using the SharePoint BDC — Business Data Catalog and a number of Web Parts. It's based on the ASG Total Content Integrator, an out of the box content service bus that brings together in a single view content from any number of repositories.

Total Content Integrator

Making SharePoint the Central Interface

It's not surprising that ASG is providing a solution that makes SharePoint the central interface for collaboration and document management in an organization. And they certainly aren't the first to provide content lifecycle management capabilities. Open Text and Merido (now owned by Autonomy) are two others.

The ASG solution is actually developed by Mobius, an ASG company. If you remember your history you will know that Mobius has been working on records management solutions for SharePoint since 2004. Now that's with a few different versions of the platform, but interesting to know.

How much will this solution cost you? Hard to say, ASG doesn't offer pricing on their website. And of course, depending on what else you need to get an end to end records management solution, that price will differ anyway.