Microsoft apps on the web

Question

I'm a database manager in a growing company. My boss is pretty savvy with data too. He occasionally creates spreadsheets or Access databases. These would be better with collaboration. We need total CRUD power over these databases. And we need the interface to be online, so we can access it from anywhere.

So far, we have taken existing applications and rewritten them in the LAMP model. While this approach leads to versatile online applications, it's kind of slow, and since I'm the only person in my company who is a coder, all that work ends up bottle-necking through my office.

I am considering Share Point Server as a way to publish our MS applications. I'm hoping this would allow some of the other people in our organization (who are skilled in the MS suite) to create applications, publish them, and have remote users read & update our data.

Does anyone know if Share Point makes this possible? Any advice or personal experience with Share Point would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You should definitively give a try to SharePoint 2010 foundation which is the free version that you can safely deploy on on x64 Windows 2008 (ideally R2) server.

You can even use your existing access databases and make them available from SharePoint through the Business Connectivity Services which is also part of the SP Foundatation package.

You'll enjoy creating your data model straigh within SharePoint and that will give you much more freedom than a custom LAMP solution, mainly regarding extranet scenario, ensuring proper security schema for the CRUD operations and scalability in case you start having a bunch of users accessing & collaborating on theses databases.

Hope it helped.

Answer 2

You may want to take a look at SharePoint Workspace 2010 (part of the MS Office 2010 Professional Plus edition) which integrates with the MS Office Suite and also SharePoint servers.

Update: Another alternative to consider is the hosted services of Office 365 which offers both Office & SharePoint benefits.