Things to be aware of when considering using Connect for SharePoint

All things mentioned in this blog post applies to the 2.0 CMS5 R2 version. I haven’t checked if the same issues exist in newer versions so it can be a good thing verifying that this isn’t the case if one of the things below could be an issue.

All things are also related to the file integration which is the only functionality we used in this particular case.

1. You can only have one VPP that uses Connect for SharePoint.
   
   This is no biggie but having only one VPP and a large folder structure could get messy.
   
2. Possible problem with not all files are visible to the editors.
   
   It’s important to now that the EPiServer filemanager uses the SharePoint views object limit (default 100) when displaying files and folders. Uploading documents beyond that limit will not be visible to the editors.
   
3. Misc problems
   
   We have experienced problems with errors when trying to replace files, slow loading and other small annoying things that we never had with a normal versioning provider.
   
4. No permanent links
   
   Last but not least we found out the hard way that the links are not permanent. The links are internally stored as normal paths just like a native provider.
   

If the customer doesn’t have a lot of files in Sharepoint already I would really think twice before choosing SharePoint as a document store in combination with EPiServer.

In an upcoming post I will write a guide on how to move a SharePoint VPP to an versioning VPP.