MashZone NextGen Add-On for SharePoint User Guide

Mashups and apps enable your sites in SharePoint to display dynamic, up-to-the-minute, integrated data that is specifically relevant to your organization, suppliers, customers or other partners. SharePoint Web Part Pages allow you to construct dashboards from many different types of content to give viewers a coherent and multi-faceted source of information.

Users easily create mashups and apps using simple, graphical tools in MashZone NextGen that build on many different information sources such as web services, web feeds, databases or existing systems in your organization.The MashZone NextGen Add-On for SharePoint allows you to easily incorporate these mashups and apps as native Web Parts in your SharePoint sites, providing deep integration with other SharePoint content using SharePoint’s Web Part communication framework. For mashups, you have additional integration options to publish them directly as native SharePoint Lists or integrate them dynamically as external Lists using the Business Connectivity Service (BCS).

Mashups provide a powerful way to gather relevant data for research and analysis. You have three choices on how to publish mashups that affect the features available in SharePoint:

Mashup Published	Shows Dynamic Data	Users Can Change Input Parameters or Properties	Accessible to SharePoint Services
In Web Parts Mashups published in Web Parts allow you to use mashup data on a Web Part Page in an easily readable table format, similar to a list view. See Publishing Apps and Mashups to Web Parts.
As native SharePoint Lists See Publish Mashup Results as Native SharePoint Lists.
As SharePoint External Lists See Publish Mashup Results as External SharePoint Lists.

With Web Parts or External Lists, changes in mashup results are visible in real-time in SharePoint. With native Lists, the data is just a snapshot of mashup results when the mashup was published.

With Web Parts, users that have edit permissions have added flexibility to change input parameters for the mashup and see different data. They can also edit Web Part properties for the mashup.

With native or external Lists, data within the mashup results is handled just like any SharePoint List. Users can search through the data or use this with other SharePoint services, such as Performance Point.

Apps combine mashups or other information sources with one or more views of that information including charts, tables and maps. Different views can convey information in more accessible, effective, and memorable formats.

You can also use apps to connect to a remote web service to view, update, add, or remove data. For instance, you could input travel expenses in a simplified form.

Apps can also be combined to work together in dashboards or workspaces. Apps are also easily shared with others in the MashZone NextGen Enterprise AppDepot, Enterprise Java Portals, SharePoint or any web page.