Many organisations over the years have built business applications on technology options that were relevant in their day but have to now continue using such outdated technology simply because of the time and costs involved in migrating to more modern technology options. Such business applications are called ‘Legacy’ applications due to their nature of being based on outdated technology. In most situations the issue is not in the Data layer typically SQL Server or Oracle which are easily upgraded to the newest versions. The real pain is in the front end forms technologies that read and write to these databases like VB6, Classic ASP, PowerBuilder etc. The challenge in maintaining such systems has been finding resources with these legacy skillets and the lack of documentation and knowledge of the source code behind many of the applications.
AppForms for SharePoint allows an organisation to migrate outdated legacy applications to an easier to maintain platform by retaining the same existing Data layer in SQL Server, Oracle etc., but migrating the front end forms to SharePoint by recreating the applications User Interface and forms using the AppForms product within SharePoint. AppForms can continue to work with the existing Database schema while the front end functionality can be recreated exponentially faster in AppForms because it is done via configuration, not writing code. Once a legacy application has been migrated to SharePoint using AppForms, the ongoing changes and maintenance are done via configuration, not hard coding which is very supportive of quick change.