Is Sharepoint the right platform for large ERP applications?

Question

I have been tasked with developing some large ERP applications (some legacy apps being rewritten and some new apps) in Sharepoint. As I've come up to speed in Sharepoint, I see the value and ease of creating team sites, and the examples I've found online and in books are all tailored to intranet department portals, or simple line-of-business apps for companies that don't have large legacy ERP systems. I have begun to believe that if one is going to create a large application that interfaces to several different legacy systems and spans several departments, that building custom webparts in Sharepoint just isn't the way to go.

Is Sharepoint a viable application framework for creating and hosting large ERP applications?

If so, can anyone please point me to references describing the architecture of such a system?

If not, can anyone please point me to references that I can cite as arguments for not using it?

Answer 1

As someone who has spent the last 15 years writing ERP applications I would say Sharepoint would be an extremely bad choice upon which to build an ERP product.

• The Sharepoint table structures would be very ineffective for producing reports.
• There is very limited capability for validating data.
• There is no native support that I am aware of for maintaining the integrity of relation ships between documents.

Sharepoint works well as a portal into existing LOB applications, not as a platform to build a data-rich application on top of.