When is Sharepoint 2007 / Sharepoint 2010 suitable for Line of Business Applications?

Question

From my experience, this is adding minor features at increased implementation and maintenance cost in comparison with using just "pure" Microsoft.Net, ASP.NET and IIS application.

Sharepoint 2007 = ( no concept of deployment version control etc, narly css/skinning, weird cms features, sp webparts not recommended, very limited worfklow features)

Sharepoint 2010 = ( is everything fixed? )

The generic feeling I have is to stay away from Sharepoint, implement in pure asp.net using proven patterns and practices, architecture etc. And just consume Sharepoint services when suitable.

Is Sharepoint 2007 or 2010 ready for real line of business applications running extranet with thousands of users, or should we just go for asp.net?

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no clear cut answer to your question, I guess the proverbial "It Depends" is the best answer.

SharePoint 2010 is a big improvement over SharePoint 2007. But, most of these improvements are in the plumbing for Shared Services. So the functionality that is provided with typical collaboration sites is more or less the same.

Not to say that MS did not make major investments in everyone of your concern areas (deployment versioning, skinning, content management, etc).

My guess is if you were not happy with SharePoint 2007, you will probably still be unhappy with SharePoint 2010.

Answer 2

Considering that I've built several externally-facing Internet applications on SharePoint 2007 with thousands of users, yes, I'd say that 2010 is ready.

Answer 3

In addition to what the guys have already said:

Just like anything, you get what you pay for. Unfortunately there are a lot of cowboy SharePoint developers out there who keep repeating their wrong approach which causes problems in the long term. This then forms a bad vibe about the the product.

I've been working with SharePoint 2007 since its betas. I did lots of cowboy development myself (not that I realised at the time). I had the same opinion you did at the start but now that I know what I know, I've changed my mind about it. SharePoint 2007 is an absolute monster. Once you understand what it does well and what it doesn't do well, you'll realise that is a great product. Its only let down by a documentation and understanding. My team and I have managed to roll out many SharePoint sites and the clients are very happy with them.

The question is, is SharePoint 2010 going to be well documented?!

The other major question for me is, will it have better Error reporting (some meaningful errors instead of the non-sense it currently displays)

I have a few colleagues looking into 2010 right now as well as some MVP's I've previously worked with, they're reporting 2010 is great. There are some tricky bits to it e.g. the Ribbon but nothing that a good developer won't overcome.