Introduction

The STageR BDC Plug-In for SharePoint 2013 will enable SharePoint 2013 to absorb documents into its index through a .Net Assembly BDC Connector. 

Features

Some of the features of the STageR Plug-In include:

• Tried and tested approach of using a .Net Assembly SharePoint BDC Connector as means of integration
• Encapsulated functionality.  SharePoint is agnostic of the underlying implementation within the plug-in
• Secure communication with STageR via SSL certificates
• Flexible configuration of fields that get ingested into SharePoint.

Restrictions

Important limitations and assumptions of the plugin:

• Installation of the plug-in requires administrator permissions to run the deployment scripts from the SharePoint Management Shell (PowerShell).
• While a single installation of the plug-in's .wsp file is necessary, a separate execution of the model deployment script is needed for each different Content Source that was published into STageR.

Architecture

SharePoint 2013 Components

StagerBDCPlugin

The plugin is deployed as a .wsp file that gets deployed as a global farm solution.  It implements the SharePoint's BDC standard for custom connectors and gets executed from a SharePoint content source to extract the contents from STageR and hand them to SharePoint for indexing.

Security Trimming

Security trimming is available within SharePoint 2013 itself. To make this work a SecurityTrimmerPre interface must be created, see [security trimming for Search in SharePoint Server 2013]. 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 always to add results to the result set, not remove them. In this sense, it is the opposite of a security trimmer.What is critical to understand is, if the ISecurityTrimmerPre interface malfunctions, you get no secure search results. If it were doing "classic" security trimming, and it malfunctioned, then you would get back 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 ...)