NOTE: For more on this topic, please check out this episode of the Office 365 Developer Podcast where I discuss these topics with Microsoft’s Jeremy Take; it was a great discussion!

For many years, Microsoft and others in the SharePoint community promoted SharePoint as a Platform. The idea was to develop business applications within SharePoint sites, and thus to gain access to all the rich services SharePoint brings to the table such as document management, search, user profiles, enterprise content management, and more. Another promise of this approach was that IT could support one big application (SharePoint) and deliver may smaller applications to business users, and thus deliver on the “long tail” of application needs.

Microsoft invested in features like Business Connectivity Services and the Secure Store (identity mapping) service to make SharePoint a capable platform for building business solutions that integrate with other Line of Business applications. Yet this approach wasn’t all we had hoped it would be.
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