I have a feeling this is the wrong forum, but perhaps Wrox doesn't have one completely appropriate for this thread -- mods feel free to move this.

We've got Windows Server 2003 running on a new server. Our intranet which I wrote in ASP is running on IIS5 on a Windows 2000 server. I want to move things over to the new server, and looking at Sharepoint it would be pretty sweet to tie it to that somehow. Looking at the code and the way Sharepoint works though, I'm not sure if this is a stupid idea or not. Should it be relatively simple to use Sharepoint as my 'home' and simply link my custom pages that produce company specific reports and such to it? Or do people customize everything with Sharepoint, IN Sharepoint. Ideally I'd like to make my pages look like they are part of the Sharepoint site, even be able to use web parts and the template Sharepoint uses.

If anyone has any thoughts on this process, or links where I can get more info, it would be greatly appreciated.

pm

I am currently working on a similar project- moving our company intranet to sharepoint.

If you want to use web parts- your going to have to re-do the whole site in sharepoint. WHat I'd suggest- for your background information is to visit http://www.msd2d.com and go to the webcasts area- they just finished up (but they have them archived) a series on sharepoint that is very informative for the new user to Sharepoint 2003.

There is two books out at the moment on sharepoint- neither from Wrox. I think they have one in proccess. (I wish I was part of that Tech Review team... I'd love to get a peek at the book). But in any case, I'd look at MSD2D first for that information. There are some things thay don't cover, and I think are critical..

I should write to Jim and see if he can make a sharepoint forum. I'll do that now.


Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee

Thanks for the reply Hal. I'll check out those webcasts this morning and see where they lead me. I played with Sharepoint a lot yesterday and found it quite complicated -- will take a while to get familiar with the code MS uses there. I had hoped that I could create a new page within Sharepoint, and use that as a basic template I could build new pages with. Unfortunately when I attempted this I discovered new pages created from within Sharepoint are just database entires in SQL Server... the content is pulled from there and then thrown into a template.

I'd be curious to know how your project is going... and what your strategy is for the overall structure. Are you making Sharepoint the 'home' and then simply linking your custom applications to it like a hub? Or customizing more fully than that...?

patrick

ok- first thing you ahve to know about sharepoint- there are templates. those templates are stored on disk and must be modified directly. Do not use Front Page on a "site" or any other tool, you break "Ghosting" to the templates. (The technical reason you had this happen). You should create new templates in the file system.

I have a "dev" and "Prod" envioornment up that we are playing with- so far it's going slowly but fine. Stage one is to replicate our intranet- for simple pages this means entering content into the proper content holders or web parts. We will include any complex functionality using the "Web Page" web part that will contain the other sites within an IFRAME on sharepoint. As we move forward, we will be re-writing the UI layers of the systems to actually live in sharepoint as their own web parts- thereby increasing integration. The ease of doing this is all going to depend on how you developed your systems. If you REALLY seperated the UI from the business logic then you just need to create a new UI that uses that logic.. if you, instead, have business logic in your ui files, it's going to be more complex.


Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee