How to decide if you should develop an application within SharePoint.

Question

We currently have a fully developed web forms application, basically its like WordPress using .net for multiple users to publish content. It does more than that but thats the simplest way to describe it. Our "webmasters" (I work in the gov) want everything put inside of SharePoint. We currently have SharePoint 2007. I have no experience developing within SharePoint so I don't know much about it.

My question is how do you decide when to develop your application in SharePoint and when to develop outside of it.

Answer 1

It depends on several things.

Is there any reason to use SharePoint features (lists for data storage, document libraries with versioning, groups for security, etc.) in your application? If you're just hosting ASP.NET pages within SharePoint but aren't using any of its features, it's not really worth the hassle.

However, if you would be adding the application to an existing SharePoint site, it might still be a good idea. Organizing everything in one place might be more convenient for users than setting up a separate web application.

Answer 2

If it is a requirement to re-architect your application to work with SharePoint, that is one very big reason to develop with SharePoint. Beyond that, the people influencing your architecture decisions may have good reasons of their own.

SharePoint provides security management, search and navigation to name a few relevant pieces to your web puzzle. If you are already creating dynamic web applications in .Net, a lot of what you've learned in the process will apply, but you have some learning to do.

Your orginization is not the only one moving most web applications to SharePoint. If you don't learn it now, you risk getting behind the curve.

Answer 3

You could also just 'show' your existing applications inside of a SharePoint web part (Page Viewer?). That way, your application remains the same, and it is 'shown' inside the SharePoint environment. This is somewhat a hokey solution, but in your particular circumstance, it could be viable considering development time, learning time, and control.