Suitable platform for complex workflow site
I have a client that needs to build a complex, workflow/form driven intranet site with multiple roles and about 20 wo开发者_JAVA技巧rkflow processes, document management features, and email/fax notifications.
What would be a suitable platform for such a site?
Is SharePoint Foundation 2010 suitable for this, or sould I use SharePoint server enterprise? Alternatively is there something else that fits the bill?
A suitable platform will depend largely on the specific needs of the client. I've spent the last couple of years developing a Workflow/Form driven web application on ASP.NET. It's worked out pretty well, especially once we started switching to ASP.NET MVC. We have demographic-driven role-based access control, demographic-driven portal layouts, rules, and email notifications. We now have probably half a dozen workflows set up for a few different clients, and now that the infrastructure is established, creating new workflows and reconfiguring existing ones can be done almost entirely from an admin UI.
The .NET Framework now has a Workflow Foundation framework, but we ended up deciding our needs didn't coincide with its feature set very well. With a few good developers, ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework give us all the features we need.
now I'm just guessing, because it doesn't sound much different from the usual portal customization requirements, but perhaps someone can find it useful
I've just opensourced a solution that utilizes IronPython in SharePoint - scripted event receiver, timer job, page, workflow, console - and allows for easy deployment, saving, editing and configuration of scripts all in one place - https://github.com/kerray/NAVERTICA-SPTools
this is partly a stretch, it's currently not that flexible in the workflow department and it's not in any way a polished product, but it could be rather easily extended
the main benefit of it, besides keeping us sane when faced with SharePoint API, is that it allows us to implement solutions that are heavily customized, and yet the entire codebase is comprised of a single common solution - the customizations is done in implementation, using IronPython scripts
there's also some other potentionally interesting stuff in C# for someone willing to dig in (or willing to wait until I finish at least a general overview)
and although I was only allowed to opensource a rather limited part of what we otherwise use to build custom portals for our clients, I remember myself starting with SharePoint, and I know I would have killed for tools like these (not that they're perfect for everyone, but still)
and not to forget, it works 100% with just SharePoint Foundation 2010
You can use SharePoint Foundation 2010 to host Windows Workflow Foundation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms414613.aspx).
Windows Workflow Foundation hosted on SP Foundation 2010 is pretty robust and in my opinion is a good fit for your requirements.
You might look at some commercial platforms out there such as Iceberg which blends UI tools with a point and click workflow designer and is based on .net
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