Most of you in this IT World must have been building applications/solutions for Transactional Systems (Insurance/Banking/Retail) using a various Development Tool (e.g. - .NET/ASP/VB/Java) and a RDBMS (e.g. - SQL Server/Oracle/DB2).
Is SharePoint capable to build such applications?
Recently, I was going through this Thread and got the above doubt.
Please leave your expert comments.
PS: Moderators, please excuse me for putting a link to external SharePoint forum.
This is a very good question.
In the past I have worked on these kind of systems in combination with SharePoint. What we did was the following:
Use SharePoint as the front end. Leverage Web Parts, Event Receivers, workflows, deployment, uploading of files and user security.
Don't store any transactional data in SharePoint. It just doesn't scale well, external (reporting) applications don't know how to deal with it, lack of transactions and other typical RDBMS behaviour. You can still use SharePoint lists for application specific data / configuration settings / announcements etc.
This worked very well for us at the time, but depending on your exact needs you may be better off with an 'old fashioned' ASP.NET application.
