WSS 3.0 as Application platform

Question

This is an architectural question.

We are in the process of building a document management site with basic workflow which needs to be external facing.The external facing application needs to be branded and should have the capability to upload and download documents and also support versioning.We have decided to use WSS 3.0 as the collaboration tool as it has all the features we need.We are planning to support multiple clients with custom branding for each client.

My question is should we expose WSS to the client for external facing or build a standard ASP.NET application using WSS in the application tier and let the ASP.NET app interact with WSS using the WSS API/Web service.This makes it easy to customize the ASP.NET application without having to make any changes to the WSS.The internal users doesnt need any branding and hence could go to the internal facing WSS site to do workflow activities. Building features and getting to brand has been a challenge since I started WSS development.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Answer 1

If you don't know a lot about SharePoint, creating and exposing a UI is going to be difficult. Can you do it? Absolutely. Should you do it? That depends on your requirements, and your level of expertise with SharePoint. In my opinion, the easiest path would be to create an ASP.NET application and have that interface with SharePoint, but I spend 90% of my day working with ASP.NET and only do SharePoint development about once a year.

In my experience, if you have to ask whether or not you should build a new product etc. with some tool, the answer is generally know. If I can't answer it myself with maybe some looking around on the tool, I try not to use it on a major project, because that means, that I don't know it well enough to get myself out of bind when something unexpected arises.

Answer 2

SharePoint is big. Really big. As a result, if you plan to develop a home-brewed middle layer between your customers and SharePoint, be prepared to do a lot of work unless you plan only to expose a tiny piece of the SharePoint interface.

I recommend exposing WSS, and building your application within, instead of adjacent to, the WSS framework by creating Web Parts, pages, and lists that meet the requirements SharePoint alone cannot. This should reduce your workload to something manageable.

Take a look at tools such as VSeWSS or WSPBuilder to ease your WSS 3.0 development (should you use Visual Studio), and take advantage of SharePoint Designer where it is appropriate.

Answer 3

If you do a custom coat over WSS underneath, you are essentially writing code that already comes with the platform, especially with SharePoint. I assume that price is a factor in your decision making or you would not use WSS alone. In that case it can be tempting to leverage WSS as a code layer, but I would expect that it would be extremely difficult to make that work smoothly.

Depending on your business model I would look at what hosted SharePoint solutions can do, especially if you can host a custom SharePoint site definition on their platform.

It would take a very strong IP or financial requirement to make me consider wrapping asp.net over top of WSS.

I have worked with a solution that does that and it does work for our externally facing site, but it is a maintenance 'mare.