geekSpeak webcast – Dan Attis and SharePoint as a DataStore
J. Dan Attis is delivering a “geekSpeak” presentation tomorrow (May-20, 3PM EDT/Noon PDT) about using SharePoint as a datastore. Dan says that he’s going to talk about how SharePoint wraps your need for a datastore with CRUD forms, security, workflow, etc.
At first, thinking of SharePoint as a datastore had me wondering about why this couldn’t be done with just Azure. There’s got to be (soon, if not already, I expect) a whole library of .Net tools that will provide great rendering and visualization of Azure data services, with a capability to auto-discover what is described in Azure.
Then, it dawned on me that Dan probably isn’t talking about just using SharePoint as a datastore, but maybe he’s talking about how thinking about SharePoint as a datastore provides yet another dimension of access to your data.
One of the aspects that I’ve always liked about database-oriented storage systems is the variety of ways that you can programmatically get access to your data. I’m thinking only on the surface here, but we’ve gone full circle. It used to be that we built applications to surface our data and then looked for GUI front ends to wrap around them. Now, we’ve got a GUI front end and we’re looking for a way to access the data via a programming interface!
I’m looking forward to Dan’s presentation. I’m sure it’s going to be much better than my random thoughts.