Vancouver TechFest Presentation

I recently presented with Brian Edwards at the Vancouver TechFest on the topic of SharePoint as an enterprise application platform.  I often get asked about SharePoint's role in the enterprise, so I figured I'd post the slide deck up for everyone to check out.

http://grahamsibley.typepad.com/thoughtfactory/files/TechFest-SharePoint.ppt

The basic premise of this slide deck is to illustrate that SharePoint offers many excellent features that allow it to act as a convergence point for business applications.  Features such as security trimming, content management, document management, search and user profiles provide you with functionality that can make your business applications more effective.

One thing this slide deck does not address is when to use SharePoint as a platform for your enterprise applications.  Through my experiences architecting business applications that leverage the SharePoint platform, I have found that SharePoint's strength is acting as a front-end for back-end business systems.  SharePoint should *not* be your back-end system.  Critical business data or processes should be architected using enterprise design patterns such as SOA, service broker, etc.  SharePoint should simply tap into those system and expose the data in a way that users can interact with.  SharePoint truely shines as an enterprise application convergence point.