SharePoint Connector 1.1 Release Notes (v 1.9)

18 January 2009

Atlassian released the Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.1.

This release of the SharePoint Connector supports federated searches of Confluence content in SharePoint. This replaces the original index search feature, which 'crawled' through cached content in Confluence. Federated searches use Confluence's own search engine to retrieve up-to-date and relevant matches, providing more accurate results than index searches.

You can now configure the SharePoint Connector to access a SharePoint site via an alternative URL, such as a URL that is only available from behind a firewall or VPN. This URL may therefore be different from the SharePoint address that is publicly available.

The SharePoint Connector requires Confluence 2.8.0 or later.

The new search allows SharePoint to conduct improved federated searches on Confluence content. It completely replaces the old 'integrated index search' feature in previous versions of the SharePoint Connector. The new search brings several improvements:

• More accurate and relevant results: The old index search feature performed searches on Confluence's cached search indexes. Now the federated searches use Confluence's own search engine to conduct 'live' searches, resulting in more accurate, better ordered and more relevant search results.
• More comprehensive searches: Federated searches include Confluence metadata such as page labels, author details and comments.
• Improved Confluence performance: The old index search feature 'crawls' through Confluence's cached search indexes, which can impact Confluence's performance significantly. The new federated search feature only requires Confluence to perform a live search when a search is issued in SharePoint. This has much less impact on Confluence's performance.
• Confluence permissions respected: The new federated search function 'trims' search results more accurately than the old integrated index search feature. A 'trimmed' search result shows only Confluence content that the current user has permission to view through their Confluence account. This feature works across multiple Confluence installations too.

You can now configure an 'alternative access URL' for SharePoint. This allows the SharePoint Connector to access a SharePoint site via an alternative URL, such as a URL that is only available from behind a firewall or VPN. This URL may therefore be different from the SharePoint address that is typically available to users or is publicly available.

The alternative URL also resolves problems where the SharePoint installation uses an authentication protocol not supported by Confluence, such as NTLMv2 or Kerberos. You can configure SharePoint to run on a separate port that bypasses the unsupported authentication protocol, and then allow Confluence to communicate with SharePoint via this alternative URL.

For more information visit the Atlassian Marketplace.