Integrating with SharePoint

The question has come up twice since I've been working with PHP and Joomla (which for the latter, is not so long!): can I publish SharePoint content on my PHP website?  The answer is yes. In order to explore this, I created a "sandbox" MS-SharePoint site and populated it with some lists and libraries:

Next, I wrote a PHP SOAP class that consumes the MS-SharePoint web service, which is documented in quite some detail here.

I created a "read-only" SharePoint user (just to be 'safe'! The API is very robust and allows creating/editing/deleting content as well) and configured that user in my PHP script.  The script is very crude, and has almost no styling:

As you can see, the Lists class (and in particular, the "getListCollection method) is a great starting point.  Using getListAndView for a given list allows us to consume the schema information about the contents of that list: 

Finally, I wrote the script so that once a List and View are selected (clicked), the content is fetched, some URL magic is applied, and presto, I have SharePoint content on my PHP site:

So clearly, we can glue MS-SharePoint onto PHP (and thus Joomla) or Java or Ruby or anything that can consume a SOAP webservice.

Why not just write a Joomla plugin/custom component to do this?  Well, grabbing a SharePoint list or two and cross publishing it is one thing, however a general cross publishing solution is something I've been mulling on for a little while now.  The models, and the administration / permission analysis can get tricky.  I could see investing a LOT of time in a Joomla extention of this sort, only to find that it solves about 10% of these kinds of problems out there.

I might write one, but not before some careful analysis!  I'd almost prefer to integrate SharePoint with Joomla a few specific ways before embarking on development of a generalized tool.