Adding SharePoint screen to legacy c# application

2
votes

We have an Enterprise application written in C# that we well to customers. The server runs in our data center and the customers connect via a windows application also written in C#. Pretty standard.

Management would like a dashboard added to our application. I was told to look into using sharepoint to somehow add a sharepoint dashboard to the main screen of our client application (winforms).

Is this possible? The client application would have to somehow show a web page from the sharepoint server which I guess is no problem using a html componenent. But I'm more worried about getting sharepoint to work with our existing data (sql server 2008).

I suggested just writing the dashboard ourselves and avoiding sharepoint. But management would like to add more 'Business Intelligence' to our application. I know that is the way of the future but I'm worried about the complexity of integration with sharepoint.

2
c#sharepoint
Which SharePoint version and which .NET framework for hte C# application? – Russell
It's sharepoint 2010 I believe with .net 3.5 . – LegendLength
Ok that will be fine - just note that SP 2010 is not compatible with .NET 4. – Russell

2 Answers

1
votes

There are various options for integrating SharePoint into a windows forms application. The simplest is embedding a web browser control and point it to the page with the dashboard set up.

Alternatively you could use the SharePoint client object model (2)(make calls to the SharePoint server) and retrieve data (and potentially pages) from SharePoint to put into your dashboard.

I would recommend to management that we can display SharePoint through our current application, and we can demonstrate with a simple dashboard part (eg chart control) to demonstrate how we can make the dashboard integrate more naturally over time piece by piece. This would minimise risk by displaying from SharePoint, while being able to show the potential advantages of using the SharePoint data and creating a customised windows forms dashboard.

0
votes

SharePoint does a good job of going either way with information via BCS, assuming you would want to show LOB data in a SharePoint deployment.

However, since you want to go the other way, the Client Object Model works well with this. Seeing as how it is a .NET application, I can site specific times where we have used the built in REST services to get information from lists in our enterprise SharePoint deployments.

Security will need to be addressed as well, so don't forget about that. If you have AD groups already set up for your enterprise application, you can most likely reuse some of those in SharePoint. If you don't, you will have to now manage how data will be secured. You may also end up getting prompted for a log in to SP which is never a good user experience.

Good luck!