We currently have a product that uses Sharepoint and a number different Web Part libraries to display realtime data to customers. The way this has been set up is that each customer has a custom login (Active Directory), a custom site with their specific data hooked up in the web parts. That means for every customer we have a completely separate site. Eg:
- Customer 1 -> www.site.com/sites/customer1
- Customer 2 -> www.site.com/sites/customer2
- Customer X -> www.site.com/sites/customerX
As you can imagine, this is impossible to maintain as any small change that we make has to be manually propagated across all of the site, a task that has become impossible.
We are also developing separate ASP.NET MVC application that live on the same server under their own Virtual Directories Eg. www.site.com/App1/
I've been tasked with investigating how to best redesign the system to provide a more integrated and "application platform" type architecture.
Personally I would love to just ditch the Sharepoint as I think we are using it incorrectly (not as a CMS at all), but my manager wants to keep the Excel Services for customers who pay extra (a customising service).
We currently embed the MVC applications in Sharepoint using the Page Viewer Web Part, but this gives us less control over the layout of these applications
My next thought was to have a standard ASP.NET masterpage across all MVC sites and sharepoint so that they look the same, whilst still providing the functionality required, but investigation and testing seemed to be that Sharepoint master pages are horrible beasts that barely resemble a clean master page.
Basically I'm stumped, and I'm getting a little disheartened about Sharepoint and it's god awfullness.
Does anyone have any experience with this or could provide some ideas/tips?
Very much appreciated.