Just a little bit of SharePoint functionality on PHP…

While Alfresco is for Java and Knowledge Tree is actually for PHP, both of these “open” products are available in a very strong closed, commercial context. This means that one very important part of the “open” nature of technology development and integration is missing: the “customer” or “user” (or developer) is not provided with the option of authentically discovering what they need by using exactly what they need knowing they can add more.

I just want just little bit of SharePoint functionality on PHP. In a “perfect world,” it would be great to install exactly what I need from some suite of components—and what I need now is the ability to see directories of files and then stream the contents of these files on demand. Here are my simple subtleties:

• File system information can be “imported” from a remote server into the “reporting” server aggregating this information.
• The “reporting” server can also be the file server, streaming data from these remote servers (and locally as well).In Microsoft terms, what I am asking for is the ability to “crawl” remote machines. But what Microsoft does for “free” in WSS is offer to suck those remote files into a SQL Server database as binary BLOBs. In fact, the important bit to remember about SharePoint is that it does not really ‘care’ very much about the file system—apart from its own, proprietary, SQL-Server-based file system.

In terms of security, what I am asking for is a potential security risk. In the ASP.NET universe, I ran into some serious security locks trying to get IIS to respect credentials and stream a file from a remote machine (without getting into server delegation issues). In the PHP universe, there is a reason why your friendly neighborhood ISP disables fopen(). Nevertheless, I am looking into this by looking at plain-ol’ PHP solutions like:

• PHPfileNavigator, the web file manager

• PHP Navigator But even this feels like too much. I think I would need:

• An ‘agent’ that can periodically generate XML data sets of selected directory information and store these at some conventional location (like the reporting server). An agent would be needed for Linux and Windows—so writing this once in Java might work.

• A platform-neutral protocol to stream a file securely. This seems easier to do in Linux than in Windows. It disappoints me to see that people are still installing third-party Open Source tools on Windows Server 2008 to use SSH.This means that something like OpenSSH would have to be on every Windows machine involved in my poor-man’s-SharePoint-on-PHP scheme. The way around this problem is to build one (or three) “share point” Windows box(es) that can read all the Windows servers of concern and then an “agent” on that machine can help the reporting server.

Now I know why “open source” solutions to these problems are so aggressively closed and commercial…

rasx()