For those of you that couldn’t make it to the SPUGs I thought I would start out with a quick post on what I mean by Composite Applications. There were two pretty good quotes I mentioned at the SPUGs:
“A Composite Application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources within a service oriented architecture (SOA).” - wikipedia (9/30/07)
“Interactive tracking, reporting, and data management applications [built] using Office SharePoint Designer 2007 ‘no code’ features.” - Microsoft Office Online
The first quote is a little generic but definitely fitting. The second quote is a little closer to what I’ll be posting about over the next few weeks. I think of Composite Applications (within the context of SharePoint) as being sites or pages that have one or more of the following qualities:
· Data - SharePoint List, XML file, Database, Web Service, etc
· UI that supports interaction - filters, queries, data management forms, etc
· Reporting - dashboards views, charts / graphs, etc
· Workflows / Actions - sites or pages that do stuff
The next few posts will focus on what you can do with SharePoint out of the box. After that we’ll throw SharePoint Designer into the mix and really have some fun.