Sharepoint 2010 Platform

Dear Friends,

                We will start today with Sharepoint 2010 Application Development and will have series of blogs on the same considering Sharepoint for the beginners. This will be good starting point for what is Sharepoint and how to begin with Sharepoint Development. 

Before we going further on the SharePoint 2010 platform, let have look on some key concepts and architectural details. For example, if we understand what SharePoint 2010 provides out of the box, and the types of solutions that are typically developed on that platform, we can focus your development efforts and not waste time reinventing features that already exist. Instead, you can focus on extending or customizing SharePoint to meet your solution requirements. Additionally, if you understand the technology stack upon which SharePoint 2010 is built, you can use your existing .NET development skills appropriately, and can apply your previously gained knowledge and experience to SharePoint development projects. You can also understand how your solution fits into the SharePoint ecosystem.

Below are some of the Advantages of Sharepoint 2010 as Application development:

1. Easy Data Management
2. Document Management
3. Web content Management
4. Page and Data Rendering
5. Collaborative Framework
6. Search, Fast Search & Enterprise search
7. Metadata Management
8. Business Process Framework
9. Social Framework

Most enterprise solutions are typically designed by specifying functional requirements and how they will be met. For example, storing data is a functional requirement, as is ensuring data can be searched. When you build your solutions on the SharePoint 2010 platform, you automatically benefit from some of the functional requirements that are already met. For instance, if your solution has a requirement for ensuring that users check out and check in documents in a collaborative environment, you would have to design
storage and source control mechanisms if you developed your own solution. However, by basing your solution on SharePoint, you can take advantage of the fact that the platform already meets these requirements. The slide shows many examples of functional requirements that are already met by SharePoint 2010.

              
 Common types of Sharepoint Development Projects:

 Below diagram represents Sharepoint 2010 Technology Stack:

                                         Sharepoint 2010 Technology Stack



    Market research by Microsoft has shown that most development projects for SharePoint can be categorized into one of four major types.

Single Web Part Solutions
These types of solutions can range from something as simple as rendering data from a SharePoint list in an innovative way, to complex solutions such as learning management systems and courseware authoring toolsets.

Collaborative Business Solutions
These types of solutions typically include multiple features of SharePoint, such as lists, workflows, forms, and event receivers that work together to implement a collaborative process. For example, you could build a recruitment solution or a product launch application in this way.

Portals for Line-of-Business Data
Many organizations realize that employees use SharePoint on a daily basis for features such as document storage, collaboration, blogs, wikis, and search. It is a natural progression to want information workers to access, add, update, and delete data in external line-of-business applications directly from SharePoint sites. This is especially important where that external data is used in collaborative business processes within SharePoint. SharePoint 2010 provides powerful capabilities that enable you to implement full read-write access to data that is stored and managed by external applications. For example, you can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to set up full read-write access to external data with a minimum number of clicks. Information workers can then work with that data in a way very similar to how they work with native SharePoint list data. You can also use Visual Studio 2010 to implement scenarios where an external data source has complex rules, and again the result is that information workers can interact with that data as if it were in SharePoint lists.

Customizations to SharePoint Workloads
As a developer, you can customize SharePoint workloads to meet specific business or solution requirements. Examples include creating workflows to implement a specific business process; adding event receivers to lists so that complex data validation can be performed; or even customizing the look and- feel of intranet or Internet sites to reflect corporate branding and styles.


We will start new post following this series on Sharepoint Object Hierarchy on getting started with Sharepoint 2010 development.

For when to use Asp.Net and Sharepoint. Please visit:
When to use sharepoint and when Asp.net


Next in the series is Sharepoint object Hierarchy.
Please let me know in case of queries, comments.............



Thanks & Regards,
Paras Sanghani