Which is the best platform to develop an external corporate website - .Net or Sharepoint.

Question

The website needs to be equipped with a content management system and should provide for social media integration and localization.

What are the pros and cons of each technology platform and when should we opt for sharepoint?

Answer 1

This isn't really a question that can be completely answered on an Internet forum. First, it's a given that pretty much any web site can be built with either; secondly, building most websites with ASP.NET is also mostly a known quantity - ASP.NET is generally linear, in that developing any feature with it is simple function of developer time.

So the real question is SharePoint - and would you save developer time by leveraging it's power, or spend more time working around it? Only an architect in your organization can fully answer this by:

1. Understanding the requirements;
2. Turning those requirements into questions;
3. Standing up a test instance of SharePoint and spend some proof-of-concept time answering the questions.

SharePoint does indeed offer great capabilities that would take hundreds or thounsands of developer hours to deliver from scratch, and it can be enriched with very small amounts of custom development - if you can align your requirements to its featureset. If not, you'll spend 3.5 years and 25,000 developer hours bending it to your needs (not that I have any experience doing such a thing :D)

Answer 2

If you need content management capabilities SharePoint actually does not require custom code. Moss 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 come with web content management out of the box. It 'only' requires you to customize the site to give the look and feel your customer wants. Social media definitely requires custom code. A good starting point might be the community kit on codeplex.

If you do not need any of the functions that SharePoint delivers out-of-box - fully or partly - you will be better off with a ASP.NET site. It will mostly likely be faster in development. But as soon as you can leverage some of the SharePoint features it will save you a lot of time. Some of the time saved you will surely spend on weird SharePoint issues and getting to know the product.

Still developing SharePoint is always developing ASP.NET in the end as it is an extension of ASP.NET. So you can do all the stuff such as building web controls, ASCX user controls and web parts in SharePoint as well and at the same time take advantage of the SharePoint deployment mechanism and farm setup that scales well.