Help me understand Sharepoint

Question

We've been asked to create a web application. One part of the specification is that in future, it can be integrated into Sharepoint. The last version of this app was written in PHP and "integrated" by means of an iframe embedded into Sharepoint; not ideal.

I'm looking to understand the use of Sharepoint in this context. I believe that you can write Sharepoint Applications which are more "native" to Sharepoint than the rough-and-ready iframe approach I discussed before. How easy is it to take a standard ASP.NET MVC application and fully integrate it into Sharepoint?

Does anyone have any thoughts, experiences, or resources on this matter?

Answer 1

In Sharepoint there is a Page Viewer webpart using which you can load a different url. This way you can easily "integrate" your application to sharepoint site ;-)

But if you are really looking at Re Engineering the application in SharePoint then its a different story. You have to study the current application and then develop it in SharePoint.

Answer 2

This fellow has an approach to writing PHP for SharePoint. A key statement:

There are two big tricks – getting the XML right and using NTLM authentication.

Answer 3

I think the first question is what kind of integration with SharePoint are you trying to accomplish? The simplest is to use the Page Viewer webpart (i.e. iframe) method. You can also write custom webparts that show data from your custom application. That's a form of integration. The ultimate form of integration, of course, is to make your application run inside of SharePoint. That leads to my next point.

SharePoint (as of version 2007) is essentially a giant ASP.NET framework. So you can theoretically use it to host any ASP.NET web application. I have actually done it before and it works. However, that was a plain old ASP.NET webforms application (not MVC). If this is what you are trying to do, you definitely would need to rewrite your php application in ASP.NET.