It is a great time to be a web developer, with dozens of new libraries hitting the main stream, new processes to build solutions, and new types of databases rapidly changing how we store data. With all the talk of NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Azure Document DB, no one seems to be talking about leveraging SharePoint as a platform and backend. Let’s review some of the benefits of using SharePoint as a data store for internal applications, or at the very least for creating proof of concepts.
Your application can take advantage of existing or new SharePoint user groups and, by proxy, Active Directory groups. On top of that, administrators have a means of managing security via these groups. That is quite a bit of application plumbing you get for almost nothing, even ignoring the effort involved with the integration.
Fig. 1 application security
If your application leverages documents and files in any way, SharePoint seems like a no-brainer. You can immediately leverage Office Web Apps to allow users to edit and save those documents within their browser; this is functionality that you would not be able to build yourself in a timely manner. If you need to keep a history of the Documents, SharePoint has versioning that can be enabled on Lists and Libraries. End-users can also manage their files directly via the out-of-the-box SharePoint views. This also allows users to setup alerts on documents to be notified when someone adds, removes, or updates the content.
Fig. 2 document management diagram
On top of the basic document management feature set you get by utilizing SharePoint as a platform, you’ll also get higher level functionality. Search, whether it is flat data or document data, is quite difficult to implement and scale. FAST search is available to users on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise and all 2013 Farms. Not only will FAST crawl the metadata of your lists and libraries, but it will crawl and index the content within your PDFs, Word documents, Excel workbooks, and a few other computer readable file types. If the documents being managed are of legal importance, SharePoint offers two additional mechanisms to assist. The first is eDiscovery, a glorified search engine that allows record managers to find documents and place holds on them. Second, documents can have a retention policy defined, which can be used to destroy or move the documents once they reach their end of life. Continuing the theme of automation, developers and power-users can build workflows to help manage and manipulate the List and Library data your application produces.
There is a fair amount of functionality you can provide your development team and end-users by leveraging SharePoint as a platform, much like you would any other content management system (CMS). But like any other application or framework stack, you need to consider the benefits and cost of doing so. SharePoint may not be the best platform for public applications or high performance problems, but it should be more than capable of handling the typical business application.