Introduction

The Publish to SharePoint 2013 publisher will post documents to the SharePoint 2013 index through  HTTP posts.

Features

• Customization of the feed for the SharePoint 2013 index by editing the XSLT file
• Is connector independent
• Specify the SharePoint 2013 endpoint
• Security with Windows Authentication using NTLM
• XSL Transformations
• Mandatory fields specified, in order to facilitate SharePoint BCS functionality:
  • Title
  • Author
  • Display URL
  • Description

Restrictions

• This component was made to work within the same domain as the SharePoint Server. If the Publisher and SharePoint 2013 do not share the same security domain, document security does not work. This will be addressed in a future release.
• This component was made to run on a Windows environment

Architecture

IIS and SharePoint Components

Publish to SharePoint installs several components into Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and SharePoint. 

IIS Services

The publisher installs one service into IIS:

Aspire BDC Service (WCF)

• It reads XML files from batches found in the publisher file share (Intermediate Repository).
• It acts as a data source for the External Content Type (ECT) created by Aspire, returning lists of new, updated, or deleted documents.
• It provides individual documents for indexing. 
• Timestamps for all Content Sources are managed in a separate timestamp file (TimestampStore.xml).

This service is protected using NTLM authentication mechanisms. Any user accessing the service must be member of the AspireUsers Active Directory or a local Windows group.

SharePoint Services

The publisher installs two services into SharePoint 2013:

1 - Aspire Notification Service (SOAP)

This service is deployed as a Farm Solution and is responsible for creating:

• The Search Service Application Content Source
• The External Content Type (ECT) in SharePoint Business Data Connectivity Services

It also receives and forwards requests for crawling the Content Sources created by Aspire.

2 - Security Trimming

Security trimming is available within SharePoint 2013 itself. To make this work, a SecurityTrimmerPre interface must be created. 

The ISecurityTrimmerPre interface adds claims to the query, prior to the security trimming, so it executes “pre” the security trimmer. With the exception of deny ACLs, the function of the ISecurityTrimmerPre module is to add results to the result set, rather than to remove them. In this sense, it is the opposite of a security trimmer. It is critical to understand that, if the ISecurityTrimmerPre interface malfunctions, you will get no secure search results. If it was doing "classic" security trimming and malfunctioned, then you would see extra unauthorized results. On each search request, the Security Pre-Trimmer is invoked to enhance the search query with ACL information. This information is retrieved from an Aspire Group Expander (LDAP, Lotus Notes, etc.)

Workflows

Aspire is involved in both indexing and search workflows.

1 - Indexing

The Aspire SharePoint 2013 Publisher performs two steps:

1. Writes batches of XML files into the Intermediate Repository. These XML files are created from Aspire documents using an XSL transformation.
2. Triggers a Content Source crawl via the Notification Service.

Optionally, Aspire enhances the SharePoint 2013 document processing workflow by calling the Aspire Content Enrichment Webservices (CEWS) listener.

2 = Search

Each search request issued using the Search Service Application is routed through Aspire to add ACL restrictions to the query via the Security Pre-Trimmer.