We’ve all probably worked on projects in the last 5 years or so that have involved reworking applications that were once built in MS access, in my case it was an access system that stored important safety testing information that was captured in an engineering workshop. It was originally designed and built by a mechanical engineer, who didn’t know much about database design.
The system was redeveloped for a number of reasons including:
- The data couldn’t be shared, it was locked away on a PC in the workshop, no analysis of the data could be performed.
- It didn’t scale well, only one user at a time could access it.
There are lots of other reasons why MS access shouldn’t be used for this type of information, but my point was that Access is a pretty poor tool for critical business information because it was difficult for the business to access this information. I think most people would share this view.
Lets compare a couple of scenarios with SharePoint as the tool, so all the information would be stored in a list:
- The data can be shared by webservices and RSS, with effort.
- It can scale, multiple users can access it at the same time.
But is the business data in a SharePoint list really easier to work with?
Can it:
- Be used in SQL Server analysis cube?
- Easily used in Reporting Services?
- Joined with other business data to see correlations?
- Perform complex real world queries?
- Do you really want to model your business data based on the limitations of SharePoint?
The answer is no.
I still think that business data needs to live in a system designed for business data, i.e. A database: SQL Server.
From here it can be queried, joined and more importantly shared, whether that be back into SharePoint or any other tool that supports a database (Reporting Services, Performance Point, Analysis Services etc).
So now that brings me back to my comparison with MS Access, we are now doing lots of work moving systems away from MS Access, will we be doing the same thing in 5 years time, moving our SharePoint lists away from SharePoint?
I think SharePoint lists have their place, no question, but not for line of business data. Keep the SP lists for trivial data that is not important to the overall operation of your business.