We have a requirement to develop a sharepoint intranet portal with
functionality like employee leave application, employee expenses
application, employee dossier, employee travel info, employee
attendance and all other applications that an company needs to manage
its day to day activities. Along with these applications, We will be
using MOSS OOTB features to implement other functionalities.

Sharepoint(MOSS) does not have any OOTB features to implement these
type of application like(leave, employee expenses etc). So we have
two options here implement this:

Option 1: Implement all these application using the web parts in
MOSS. This could be more complex as each application feature will
involved implementation of multiple web parts and deployed in
different web pages. Also if the portal is not available for some
reason then non of these applications will be available for end users


Option 2: Implement these application in ASP.NET with similar look &
feel as MOSS portal site and give hyper link from the sharepoint
portal or deploy them in _layouts folder. But I'm not sure if there
is any demerits or security issues with this approach?


Can somebody suggest which option would be better and why?