Disaster strikes the seven reference architecture model...

Dateline Hopewell, NJ. Early today disaster struck the seven reference architecture model as an eighth contender emerged as a late entrant...dozens of Andrew Chapmans will be dispatched to try to change blogs, presentations and reports...

I had a great conversation today with Erin Samuels the EMC SharePoint Product Manager about a customer use case and realized that the proposed solution did not really fit in to the seven reference architectures. Even though it was a great idea, I was keen to bury it just to maintain the little credibility that my seven architectures have but she would not let me. Try as I might, I cannot squeeze this new reference architecture in to the existing seven. I was going to pretend that it was just a derivative of one of them but it is too important to not have standing alone.

The advantages of RefArchs 6 and 7 are that SharePoint is working with native SharePoint objects; this means that you do not need to suppress any of the standard SharePoint functionality. RefArchs 1-5 all potentially compromise the functionality supplied out of the box by SharePoint. What if you could have an architecture that had native objects in SharePoint and also native objects in the ECM system. Ladies and gentlemen I give you "Reference Architecture 8: Synchronized, Intelligent, 2-way Shortcutting..."

Reference Architecture 8: Synchronized, Intelligent, 2-way Shortcutting

In this model the ECM system stores the only copy of the actual payload of an object, (the document, spreadsheet, image, etc.). A shortcut/stub/proxy/pointer is created in SharePoint; this points to the object in the ECM system and mirrors all of the appropriate object metadata. Actions applied to the pointer object are redirected to the ECM copy when appropriate. Both the SharePoint object and the ECM object are protected by event triggers so that changes to the properties, location, etc. can be synchronized and when either is deleted the other will also be disposed of.

Note that this RefArch works for content that already exists in the ECM system, is being created by a 3rd party process or is "published" from SharePoint.