Development of Sharepoint Data Entry Site

I am in the process of developing several data entry forms that the client has asked to be accessible through the SharePoint interface (2007 WSS version).

The forms will, among other requirements, consist of multiple drop downs that have to be loaded from tables in SQL Server. These lists of data are updated frequently through a process that s开发者_C百科ucks data in from Great Plains.

My inclination is to create a Web Part Page with a Page Viewer Web Part and go full screen like this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/malag/archive/2008/09/15/story-of-a-mischievous-page-viewer-web-part.aspx

...and then to do the pages in ASP.NET MVC3. Is there a better story than this? The integrated SP development paradigm seems like waaaay more overhead.

This sounds like a common issue with developers new the SharePoint paradigm, especially for 2007. The short answer is that your solution will be the quickest way to get to where you want to go but isn't the "cleanest".

The other option is to create a SharePoint Solution and publish an application page to the _layouts directory. A quintessential "hello world" example can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb418732(office.12).aspx.

New SP developers will find the hardest transition with deployment. The WSPBuilder codeplex project http://wspbuilder.codeplex.com/ has become the industries default solution for doing this. An example of using this can be found at http://www.greggalipeau.com/category/sharepoint/wspbuilder/.

For you I would say the key words are Application Pages and WSPBuilder.