MOSS 2007 Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server
Besides using Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server hosts many of my custom web applications, Sharepoint has been instrumental in helping us get organized and more efficient in a difficult market. Sharepoint serves us by improving collaboration, hosting custom applications, tracking issues, using wiki's to document knowledge worker processes, and creating a centralized point of managment for intranet services.
Hosting Legacy Applications in MOSS 2007
Many of the odler applications were brought in easily using the MOSS page viewer web part. In my case these are actually free-standing web pages on another server that are viewed in the sharepoint interface but are actually independent programs in asp for a variety of data sources including microsoft sql, microsoft access, windows directory structures, windows active directory, excel spreadsheets, and even text files and PDF files.
Custom Sharepoint Development
You can also build applications write into the interface integrating ASP.NET code with database queries, workflows, user entered data, and reporting. You can transfer data from one webpart to another, use built-in reporting features like KPI's, host Excel documents, create a business data catalog, and even query sharepoint itself.
Sharepoint Integration
Integrating Sharepoint with our existing accounting software, Spectrum Construction Software, is going well. Many of the reporting webparts are queried directly from Spectrum's SQL database to build our dashbords. I have also included queries from the accounting software with those of our estimating software, network shares from the windows file system, and active directory for security and user context sensitivity. For example if you were a project manager and you went to your sharepoint page it would only show you the invoices that have been routed to you, how long they have been in your inbox, and what the status of the invoice is. You can even click on a link and see a stored image of that invoice. I know I am just scratching on the surface on what sharepoint will mean to our company but so far the development has paid for itself.
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