Exporting collab to a non-portal environment

Question

Our organization recently developed a web based application that isn't integrated with the portal at all.
They would like to display some collab messages (without any functionality) within their application.
Their app requires authentication but doesn't use AD - which we use for the portal.
Any ideas on how we could do this?

Answer 1

Our organization is divided into East and West, which have corresponding Collab Projects (East, West).
They would like to display the titles of the first 3 messages in the East project's Q/A Discussion, to the East users.
and the titles of the first 3 messages in the West project's Q/A Discussion, to the West users.
The app already knows which region they are from and can handle displaying the appropriate content.
So the goal really is to display the most recent 3 discussions outside the out-of-the-box portal.
The idea of going right at the DB does sound pretty easy.
I opened the CSFORUMMESSAGE table and it appears to have everything that is needed.
It looks like I could just do something like:
Select NAME (Name is the title field of a message)
from CSFORUMMESSAGE (this is the table that stores all discussion messages)
where
DEPTH=0 (this would show the first message of a thread)
PROJECTID= 123 (whatever the code is for the East Project)
FORUMID = 123 (whatever the code is for the QA Discussion in the East Project)
Knowing this, any reason to use API's vs going right at the table?
Edited by: Geoff Garcia on Jan 14, 2009 2:02 PM