Is SharePoint an Application or an Application Framework?

Last night I was working on another chapter for the SharePoint '07 book and I remember writing a small paragraph that mentioned that SharePoint is an application framework. I have often been asked, "What exactly is SharePoint? Is it an application, is it a programming tool, is it middleware, what the heck is this thing???". Its actually a good question. SharePoint provides so much functionality that it is often extremely difficult for clients that have little to no experience with it to determine its true nature.

Usually after providing the client with an hour or so of solid demos, they start to figure out what SharePoint is (and more importantly - what it isn't). However, I think I've come up with a fairly concise description that should help explain things:

SharePoint is an Application Framework that ships with a default implementation

ASP.NET is an application framework. It is a set of tools and infrastructures upon which developers create applicaitons. Certainly ASP.NET exists at a much lower level than SharePoint, but the analogy is still valid. Think of SharePoint as a core set of infrastructure and base code with a set of tools designed to allow developers to create customizable, extensible collaboration applications, portals, and sites that ships with a default implementation. By the default implementation, I am referring to the set of functionality that you get out of the box - the stock site templates, features, lists, document libraries, search functionality, and shared services.

If you feel like it, you can run SharePoint with no modification and simply get by with what comes "in the box", but if you do that you're not truly harnessing the real power of SharePoint. The real power of SharePoint is in its ability to integrate just about anything else you already have in your organization to provide a single, unified, consistent means of accessing important information and enabling collaboration among site users.

The other thing is that if there was any doubt about SharePoint's role as a tool or framework as opposed to a complete, shrink-wrapped application in the 2003 version, the 2007 version completely cements its role as an application framework with the following new features:

• Features and Solutions - Finally SharePoint gets an enterprise-class deployment and configuration story for reusable bits of functionality
• Business Data Catalog - Quite possibly my single favorite feature of MOSS '07. This thing is fantastic and if you aren't jumping for joy with its availability, you obviously haven't played with it yet :)
• Improved data store - Finally storing real data in a list is no longer a stupid idea. You can now exceed 1,000 rows in a list without breaking SharePoint open with a sledgehammer. Lists are now properly indexed and way more efficient than they used to be.

In short, SharePoint 2007 is, as far as I'm concerned, the online web-based collaboration application framework for many, many reasons. You'll see a lot of those reasons in my book (hint, nudge, wink, poke, prod, NUDGE) and if you keep reading my blog I'll be posting a lot of really cool stuff about SharePoint in the coming months.

tags: sharepoint  moss  wss  sps  beta  

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