In Software development life cycle, once project requirement phase is complete, it’s time for technical architecture team to decide what will be the technology we are going to opt in order to achieve the requirements with development ease, meeting the timeline, quality. SharePoint 2010 and Asp.net are widely used technologies and deciding which one to use out of the two is really important in order to achieve the target in deadlines and increase the productivity. So, building web applications in SharePoint 2010 or Asp.Net platform is important decision from client’s point of view and technical point of view.

For the applications that requires below features/points SharePoint is best.

• Collaboration
• Internet facing website
• Social networking such as Blogs, Wikis, Communities, etc
• Applications requiring browser enables forms
• Enterprise Search
• Information portals
• Business Intelligence and Dashboards
• Workflows
• Content Management
• Ms Office Integration
• External Data systems integration via BCS
• Document Management

However, we need to look at different aspects before deciding whether to go for SharePoint or Asp.Net. Below are some of the key points to consider in additional to above feature of SharePoint:

1. What are features we are going to use of out-of-the-box (OOB) from SharePoint (site provisioning, search, version control, roles/groups, easy forms/Lists (new, edit, view pages), collaboration, workflows, content deployment, alerts)?
   • If we are not using any of these features, then it’s not worth using SharePoint.
   • If we need these features, there is no need to think about using SharePoint or not. Just go for it. Think about the effort about building Custom features.


2. What kind of application it is? Is it one off application or this is going to replicated across many teams\sites?
   • SharePoint is an excellent platform where you need to replicate one type of site to many teams. Site templates are excellent feature of the replication.


3. What are the required Scale and Performance objectives of your application?
   • SharePoint may not be able to match the performance of a plain ASP .NET application as it does a lot more work (security trimming, getting files from database etc.) Can your performance targets be met using SharePoint?



4. What’s cost of project? Will be SharePoint Foundation able to fulfill the entire requirements/features? Or Need to go for SharePoint Standard or SharePoint Enterprise. Please consider the additional cost for development along with SharePoint licensing.

5. What skills team developers have? Though SharePoint is based on ASP.net, but there is need to have additional knowledge to develop SharePoint applications. Also, development is SharePoint is not like normal .NET development. Custom development in SharePoint is complex.

The above factors are highly taken into consideration while deciding the technology for web application.

Call us at 484-892-5713 or Contact Us now to learn more about usage of SharePoint and ASP.NET.