There’s a lot of buzz nowadays about moving to Office 365 and using the App Model to extend and customize the platform. However, I know a lot of folks aren’t even considering Office 365 just yet, so I was wondering how are you developing “Apps” internally?
Are you using Full Trust Farm solutions? Or, are you starting to create Apps internally? I am guessing the decision points will be based on the fact that Farm Solutions are far quicker to develop, but harder to migrate in the future. Whereas “Apps” are slow to develop but set you up for a potential move to Office 365…
Love to hear your thoughts…
Hi Mark,
We migrated from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 (on-prem install) in January 2013 and, I believe, we were one of the first organisations who started using it in financial industry in the UK. Initially it was all about doing things old server side way. Almost two years later 80% of all our time is spent developing apps (both SP and provider hosted). SP hosted apps are much quicker to develop if the skill set of developers is right. They’re also much easier to maintain. Provider hosted apps are much harder to set up because they require a lot of pre reqs (certs, DNS changes, potentially dedicated app host boxes) and, as in any big company, it takes time for relevant teams (infra, security etc.) to complete their work before dev, staging, and prod environments are ready. CSOM and JSOM are not as powerfull as server-side API and we have to provide custom implementation for missing features using server-side WCF service. Having said that, app development is definitely the way forward in our case as it opens up the platform to other parts of the business who start developing their apps with our help.
