I need to migrate a ASP legacy web application into MOSS 2007. Is there any tool that can be used for migration? if so please specify?
Not that I've ever heard of. I'm afraid you'll have to rebuild. It depends on what the ASP app does though; SharePoint may cover its features out of the box.
An a best-case scenario you might be able to copy some documents in and be done with it.
Of course classic ASP can be made to work on a SharePoint server and you can always frame the app in in an IFrame.
Related
To my knowledge, web parts have the ability to display portions of other Web pages.
Is it possible to integrate SharePoint 07 with Project Server 07 and display portions of a Web page from the Project Server via a web part that's on a SharePoint site. If it's possible, how difficult is it to do?
I found these pages (Integration with Office SharePoint Server 2007, and SharePoint Integration) explaining a bit about the integration but I'm no SharePoint expert, I'm actually new to SharePoint, so much of what is mentioned there doesn't help me much.
You may already be aware that Project Server actually is SharePoint, with additional components. A Project Web Access (PWA) portal is a SharePoint site collection that is aware of both the SharePoint content database and the four Project Server databases, and contains a boatload of web parts and pages that present Project data and manage processes within the SharePoint site collection
The simplest out-of-the-box web part for showing pages within a SharePoint page is the Page Viewer Web Part. Under the hood, it drops an IFrame on the page to give the effect of looking at a page within a page.
I'm not familiar with Project Server but I am familiar with SharePoint. Web Parts in SharePoint can contain any arbitrary code and are more or less identical to regular ASP.NET web parts - in fact SharePoint web parts inherit from ASP.NET web parts.
From the second article you mentioned, it looks like Project Server contains its own set of SharePoint web parts, so you are likely to get better integration with SharePoint using these than simply by displaying a web page inside another one (sounds to me more like an IFRAME).
As a quick SharePoint overview, there are 3 versions of SPT 2007 - Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, which ships alongside Windows Server 2003; Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Standard, which adds portal, content management and enterprise search features; and MOSS 2007 Enterprise, which adds other tools for line-of-business app integration, including the Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC is meant to be an easy way of getting line-of-business data into SharePoint. It uses an XML definition file but don't try cutting one by hand!
However, SharePoint 2010 has now been released (I'm not an expert). SharePoint 2010 Foundation is roughly equivalent to WSS 3.0. SharePoint 2010 is 64 bit only. It looks like quite a nice step up from WSS 3 / MOSS 2007. Don't forget though that SPT 2007 is already 3 years old, so it's already well advanced down its support lifecycle.
We've been asked to create a web application. One part of the specification is that in future, it can be integrated into Sharepoint. The last version of this app was written in PHP and "integrated" by means of an iframe embedded into Sharepoint; not ideal.
I'm looking to understand the use of Sharepoint in this context. I believe that you can write Sharepoint Applications which are more "native" to Sharepoint than the rough-and-ready iframe approach I discussed before. How easy is it to take a standard ASP.NET MVC application and fully integrate it into Sharepoint?
Does anyone have any thoughts, experiences, or resources on this matter?
I think the first question is what kind of integration with SharePoint are you trying to accomplish? The simplest is to use the Page Viewer webpart (i.e. iframe) method. You can also write custom webparts that show data from your custom application. That's a form of integration. The ultimate form of integration, of course, is to make your application run inside of SharePoint. That leads to my next point.
SharePoint (as of version 2007) is essentially a giant ASP.NET framework. So you can theoretically use it to host any ASP.NET web application. I have actually done it before and it works. However, that was a plain old ASP.NET webforms application (not MVC). If this is what you are trying to do, you definitely would need to rewrite your php application in ASP.NET.
In Sharepoint there is a Page Viewer webpart using which you can load a different url. This way you can easily "integrate" your application to sharepoint site ;-)
But if you are really looking at Re Engineering the application in SharePoint then its a different story. You have to study the current application and then develop it in SharePoint.
This fellow has an approach to writing PHP for SharePoint. A key statement:
There are two big tricks – getting the
XML right and using NTLM
authentication.
I am used to building java web applications.
I am used to MCV.
As I learn how to build a Sharepoint site, is it ok to think of building Sharepoint sites similarly, particulary where there is business logic layer, that, for instance, would grab data from various DBs, do some logic, then go to a certain page?
SharePoint and MVC do not play well together, not in a supported way at least. This isn't going to change for 2010 either. It's an ASP.Net Web Forms app, and so acts accordingly.
There is a Open Source Project for SharePoint MVC but you need to understand the plataform first, with some SharePoint for Developers tutorials.
We build CMS's with ASP.NET using tools such as Umbraco and DotNetNuke etc
A client is asking us if we can build a site in WSS which I think is Windows Sharepoint Services.
Are there any experienced MOSS people out there who can tell me how hard we would find this?
Would it be just like learning another CMS?
Or will it be a nightmare?
Also, what software do we need to build the site in house for testing?
We don't have a MSDN subscription and use free Microsoft tools (Visual Studio Express and SQL Server Express)
Sharepoint is great for use with its own document management features, and it integrates well with Office products.
It's not such a good platform for development. The API is a nightmare, web parts are incomprehensible, and the database has a terrible structure (fields are named NumericField1, TextField2, etc. Yuck).
If you eventually need a web-facing server, MOSS is very expensive.
I will preface this by saying I am currently finally wrapping up a more-than-2 3-year project building one of the largest WCM sites deployed on MOSS in the world. We're talking thousands and thousands of content editors, nearly a million pages, millions of hits per day.
Depending on what you need, it could be moderately painful or extremely painful. MOSS is never a pleasure to use, so at the very least it will be an unpleasant exercise to deploy an out-of-the-box WCM site and make it look kinda like the design you want. However it should not be too terribly time-consuming or overly difficult.
If your needs look more like ours - do you need complex cross-loaded content on your pages? Content syndication and connected content? Flexible editor-controlled layouts? XHTML-compliant markup? Pixel-perfect design? If so, trying to use MOSS will absolutely be a nightmare.
Take note that WSS is not MOSS. WSS is the free version of SharePoint and MOSS is the paid version. MOSS is also the version designed for public facing CMS web sites.
With a bit of reading you should find MOSS relatively straight forward to develop a CMS site on top of. JP's link is a good one and I also recommend reading Andrew Connell's book Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Depending on your requirements, in most cases you can work out-of-the-box with MOSS and SharePoint Designer. If you find you need more than what these can provide your learning curve will jump by quite a lot so tread carefully!
For development you will need at least a MOSS and SharePoint Designer license (as JP suggests MSDN is better and also gives you the option of using Visual Studio). Your client is going to need to fork out the licensing costs for MOSS. I think there are additional costs for public facing web sites but check with your Microsoft account manager.
See some cool stuff you can with public-facing web sites for the product at Top SharePoint.
It's not that hard. I don't find it as easy as DotNetNuke, but it's still fairly straight forward once you have some of the concepts down. There is a really great intro to CMS on MOSS at Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007. You are going to need least the lowest level subscription to MSDN because CMS is part of MOSS not WSS. Search around for deals on MSDN.
Actually if you are aware of the share point technology , then wont find it difficult to built CMS using it. Designing content management system using share point is actually possible.
I have a series of reports served by SSRS. They are great and the users like them.
That being the case, upper management wants to throw a wrench in the works and serve the reports from the Sharepoint server.
Is there a realtively painless way to let users access the reports from sharepoint? How would somebody go about doing such a thing? Or do I just need to bite the bullet and try to stop the madness?
I'm not sure which version of SSRS or Sharepoint you're using, but there have traditionally been both a Report Viewer and a Report Explorer web part shipped with Sharepoint in the RSWebParts.CAB file (at least since SQL Server 2005 SP2 I think). You can start there, but if you wanted quick and low-tech you could put in an IFRAME web part and point it to the Reports folder on your SSRS Server. Since you're using Sharepoint, that's also making the assumption that you're using Windows Authentication, so that wouldn't be an issue there.
Here's a link that might be of some use:
Viewing Reports with SharePoint 2.0 Web Parts
The most painless is going to be to run SSRS in Native mode, which it sounds like you're doing already, then install the SSRS web parts on your WSS/MOSS server.
You will have to manage security and report source control using some other methods besides sharepoint, however you don't have to deal with installing WSS/MOSS on your SSRS box and adding it to your SharePoint farm.
The more painful option is to run SSRS in Integrated mode. This allows you to use all the SharePoint document management stuff for your reports and share the same security setup however, the server configuration can be lengthy and difficult to setup.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677365.aspx
Hope this helps!
Ben