The document discusses key questions to consider when deciding whether to build an application in SharePoint or ASP.NET. It lists features available out-of-the-box in SharePoint and whether the application would utilize them. Custom development efforts in both platforms should be compared. Other factors like required scale, performance objectives, database complexity, user base, timelines and budgets must also be evaluated to determine the most suitable option.

1. Should I Build my application in
SharePoint or ASP.net
When you start any project and you have SharePoint team and ASP.net
team, this’s the first question come on your mind

2. SharePoint VS ASP.net
It’s not a straight forward answer for all types of applications. You need
to look at different aspects before deciding.
Now we’ll put high level list of questions that help us to make such
decisions

3. Questions
• What are the features that you are going to use out-of-the-box (OOB)
from SharePoint (site provisioning, search, version control,
roles/groups, easy forms (list edit, new, view pages), collaboration,
workflows, content deployment, alerts ) )
• If you are not using any of these features what’s it that you’d gain from
SharePoint?
• If you need these features, why are you thinking of not going with
SharePoint? What’s the effort if you custom build those features?

4. Questions
• What are the features that I’m going to build custom (for example,
reports for some applications would be custom and need relational
tables with transactional support)
• How much effort is required for custom development in ASP.net vs. in
SharePoint? Is the difference huge?
• What kind of application it is? Is it one off application, or this is going
to replicated across many teams. SharePoint is an excellent platform
where you need to replicate one type of site to many teams.

5. Questions
• What are the required Scale and Performance objectives of your
application
• SharePoint has some boundaries, most of these can be avoided with adjusted
design or workaround. Would the adjusted design or workaround be
acceptable to your users? Examples:
• 2000 security principles for a securable object – a lesser known limitation, but this can
create problems when users in a site collection grows more than 2000 – there are
workarounds for this (such as using AD security groups) – are those acceptable?
• SharePoint may not be able to match the performance of a plain ASP.net
application as it does a lot more work (security trimming, getting files from
database etc.) Can your performance targets be met using SharePoint?

6. Questions
• See how complex your database model can be.
• It is easy to define and manage data structures in lists as they don't require
intervention of a database admin. However, If your application has complex
DB design, It may not be feasible using SharePoint. Check out this as
well Using SharePoint Lists vs. Database Tables
• How many employees would be using these application? How many
requests you can expect for customization from different teams.
Remember, SharePoint provides a pretty good platform for
customization and personalization.

7. Questions
• How much time do you have to build such apps? Can you use some
off-the-shelf solutions?
• What’s the cost you can afford. Remember, you need not buy any
separate license, if you are only using SharePoint Foundation.

8. Answer
You need to fill this slide, and start working 