SDL Tridion Connector for SharePoint

Question

I am new to SharePoint and have been asked to look into the possibilities of integrating SharePoint with SDL Tridion. I am running SDL Tridion 2013 SP1. Reading the documentation at sdllivecontent.sdl.com suggests that "SDL Tridion Connector for CMIS" can be used for this kind of integration, but it suggests integration of only multimedia contents. Below is an excerpt from the online documentation.

SDL Tridion Connector for CMIS allows you to add multimedia stored in an external system that is accessible through CMIS to Web pages in SDL Tridion. You can perform these actions in the Experience Manager and Content Manager Explorer.

Is the CMIS connector really limited to multimedia contents or can it also be used to fetch other contents from SharePoint (for example: Press Releases managed in SharePoint)?

Answer 1

ECL connectors always assume that the content you're fetching is a binary. The use case for ECL was primarily DAM integration, and it makes sense this way.

Now, you would not be the first one that would read a stream into a structured format (xml?) if you would prefer to do it this way...

I don't actually know if the CMIS connector will expose only binaries, that may need some testing, but in my early implementations of ECL (pre-CMIS connector) I had no problems loading XML from Documentum and then parsing it in my template and extracting the relevant information I needed.