Customizing Asp.Net 2.0 application to look like a SharePoint 2007 Portal: Approach 1

In any organization you can find plethora of application implemented, which are dependent /independent of each other. When such organization decided to move the portal way then the “AIM “ is to provide one “Window” for information for complete organization .This can be achieved by integrating the existing application with the portal application .In such case one important rule while implementing portal is to maintain “Consistent UI” across organization portal . The “consistent UI “site receives better acceptability by the end user. I got this requirement and wanted to share the simplicity of achieving this in SharePoint 2007 portal.

For showcasing this I have taken a web application which is a virtual “Financial application” for an organization .We will go forward and give this application “MASK OF SHAREPOINT”, doing that we achieve the important principal of portal acceptability “CONSISTENT UI”. There are number of approach which can be implemented to achieve. We will see both the case.

Let’s see how our application looks before we start our makeover:

As we see our application is a plain app which does basic computation.

First Approach:

In case we have independent application and just need a share point MASK in such case we can use “Page Viewer web part” .In Order to implement this , create a new SharePoint page in your SharePoint site .Site Actions->Create Page.

Name : Finance Application

URL : financeapplication
Page Layout: Blank Web Part Page

Press “Create”, you will get the page as shown below:

Click on “Add New Web Part” and select “Page Viewer Web Part” from the list.

Click “open the tool pane” in the web part to specify the finance application URL, and click apply.

You will get the “Finance Application“ page inside the “Page Viewer web part”, you might get the frame as the “Page Viewer Web part “ width and height is by default set to fit the web part zone .Feel free to modify the dimension of page viewer web part . Result page looks like:

This approach can be used in following situations:

• When the application is completely independent and don’t need any information from the portal site i.e. it’s not required to run the Asp.Net application in context of the portal application

Second Approach:

This approach is advantageous when the application needs to “Run in the same context of SharePoint portal “

e.g.

• Developing SharePoint administration custom page

We will see this approach in the next blog ;-). BREAK