Sharepoint: how long would it take to add document management to an ASP.NET site?

Question

Hi

I am an experienced ASP.NET C# developer who is investigating using Sharepoint for document management for one of my clients. They want an intranet site with blogs and other stuff in addition but this will need to adhere to their brand guidelines.

Apart from the faff of setting up a working development environment to what extent do you get document management 'out of the box' with just using Windows Sharepoint Services? (the client understandably would rather not line Microsoft pockets further if possible)

Or put another way, how long would it take to add document management to an ASP.NET site?

Thanks

Oliver

Answer 1

WSS will give you all the document management capabilities that you need. If you pair it up with Search Server Express (which is also free), youget a complete solution for zero investment. We've even based a company portal of a major corporation on that. Doing it yourself in ASP.NET is a waste of time to say the least. The SharePoint platform gives you an enourmous value and the learning curve is actually not that tough

Answer 2

You definitely don't want to go and implement something like this yourself when a freely available (and powerful) solution like Windows SharePoint Services already exists. For most requirements I'd say the features in WSS are enough, but it really depends on what your client is looking for. For example you get:

• Support for versions of documents
• Exclusive check-out
• Management of content types
• Integration with Office applications
• Meta-data

If you need to support records management scenarios, then you'd need features found in the SharePoint Server product. I'd start with WSS and see how far that gets you.

I would highly recommend looking at SharePoint Foundation 2010 over Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. It's the latest version of the basic SharePoint infrastructure (with the obligatory name change!).

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is a lot easier to work than WSS in terms of deployment, management and, especially, development. Plus there are new features in Foundation that you can start using.

Don't forget that SharePoint Designer 2010 is also free and is a great tool for customizing SharePoint.

Some links to get you going:

• Download SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Get Started Developing on SharePoint 2010