SharePoint development in the viewpoint of a developer

As a business platform, the first duty of a SharePoint developer is to solve business issues in a professional manner. Developing SharePoint solutions is a complex one. As a matter of fact it is not even a profession, but a class of professions that to some degree are defined by the tools used. SharePoint is a very complicated content management system with plenty of nice BSS or business support system features.

In the viewpoint of a developer, the foremost reason to choose SharePoint is the versatility of storing various data. It is not a system to opt if a business is planning one million transactions every second even if the performance could be upgraded well with various servers in a farm. In a developer’s point of view, the platform is pretty much all about the lists. This is because it is where data is stored. How to choose to develop and set up the platform is up to the developer. There are developers who love their XSLT, some are into custom built web parts directly deployed into the GAC.

The most common task for a professional working with a well-known SharePoint development company would be integrating the platform with an external CMS, such as Joomla or EPIServer to set up integration where visitors could send messages from the web directly into the platform. Moreover, there is also an extremely powerful API if a developer is into integrations. For a developer, one should be really good at solving problems. When developing solutions, often one finds doing things nobody has done before, which is particularly true for SharePoint development for many reasons.

There are not many SharePoint developers and the more advanced the issue, the lesser people are doing something the same. The sheer scope and size of the platform means that there is plenty of undocumented and unexplored territory. Moreover, every now and then a developer will have to search on some aspect of the platform and find zero hits on the web. The business platform seldom exists in a vacuum. Always, there are little quirks and integration points unique to the organization deploying the product. Often, these center around legacy systems, network irregularities, business processes or cultural concerns within the company.

For a SharePoint developer, it is important to get some real-world problems to solve. Real-life solutions in the platform are rarely as streamlined as demo or training scenarios. It is managing the quirky idiosyncrasies strange to the customer’s way of doing business that differentiates the competent developers from the pretenders. Workflows in particular have the tendency to be really tricky when one tries to automate real-world business processes. Hands-on laboratories are great to get introduced to a topic. However, they should be applied to the way things would actually work in the environment.

SharePoint is a funny platform and in a lot of ways it provides a lot of freedom but punishes those who take too much of that freedom. A developer is building an unnecessarily complex solution that could lead to bugs, maintenance cost and more burden on the administrators. Developers should learn to do things the SharePoint way as well as knowing how to push back when the requirements are out of line with the platform’s expectations. A developer should seize these opportunities to educate clients on the SharePoint way.

Ritesh Mehta is the Sales Director at TatvaSoft Australia, a Software & mobile app development company. For Over 15 years, he has been professionally active in financial management, software development.