Saturday, February 8, 2014

Search integration for (on-premises) SharePoint and Yammer - coming soon?

Every now and then I have an idea that sticks in my head and does not go away. When this happens it is often good to talk to people about it because that can bring you back to earth fairly quick.

I am currently preparing for my session at Collaboration Days Zürich which is about "Custom Indexing Connectors - How to integrate external system into your SharePoint Enterprise Search". Thinking about a good use case to demonstrate the power of Indexing Connectors I came to the conclusion that Yammer integration would a perfect showcase. Cloud-only, separated from SharePoint, yet marketed as replacement for the Newsfeed. There is currently no search integration between SharePoint and Yammer.

So why not use the Yammer API to get my hands on its content and feed it to SharePoint? Sounds great, doesn't it? Of course there are challenges - to name two: API limitations and security mapping. But you don't know it for sure until you tried it. There even is a .NET wrapper for the Yammer REST API on Steve Peschkas blog. Great!

But wait a minute - the project on his site is called YammerCrawlSync. This unfortunately thwarted my enthusiasm a bit because it sounds like somebody else might already have something up his sleeve. And maybe something will be presented at SPC 2014 anyway regarding the Yammer-SharePoint search integration.

So what do you think? Will there be an announcement about search integration of SharePoint and Yammer at SPC? And will it include on-premises scenarios?

My bet is: integration is coming, but for now it's cloud-only (apart from a hybrid prototype from Steve Peschka).

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