I think that the DVWP is a great part and the WYSIWYG xslt functions
that frontpage can do is great. Combined, everyone knows that you
can do a lot with data in and out of sharepoint.

However, I see two major issues with using it in an enterprise
environment. Do others see these same problems? What work arounds
have you done?

1) The deployment capabilities in sharepoint are never very good.
When I develop a DVWP in my test environment it is pointing to test
data. Lets say that I am using a webservice in my data catalog. In
test I want to point this to one service and in production another.
I have not done so but I imagine that you could get around this by
some type of list that held the service url. But we have just been
changing the parts before we move to production.

2) Lack of Control. When I create a DVWP and export so that it can
be used on other pages I lose the control over that part. It is a
cookie cutter per say that has been cut. If the service call
changes or I just want to change the look of the part, I cannot do
so without finding every place that it is and replacing it with the
new part.


I have made the decision to use our own web parts so that we have
the control we need. But it was a hard decision to make as the DVWP
is powerful and can do a lot of what we are doing manually.