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…
>>Provider hosted apps are much harder to set up because they require a lot of pre reqs
What exactly is hard? Automated install powered by SPAutoInstaller helps a lot, so SharePoint farm installation nowadays is not a big deal with the right tooling and planning in place. Not a dramatic difference. Some people fine with it, some are not – that’s fine too.
Having said that, how “apps” infra is “bad” and hard to install, please don’t avoid mentioning how “easy” is farm solutions upgrade, what is the impact on farm performance, stability maintainability an future upgrades. Somehow people “forget” about that and that are fine with “IISReset” thing ruining the farm in the middle of the day 🙂
CSOM is limited, true. It has also a positive thing – no one would go deep and ruin the farm or produce something which hard to support and migrate to the next version.Â
Sum up is simple – no farm solutions are to be done as well as no clients should ever consider farm solutions. Apps are the only way to get to the bright future according to the recent PnP, PLA (Platform Line Architectire) and nice portability across on-prem and cloud.
One more time, it is not about personal preferences anymore, but about stable farm and open way to get custom functionality work on both onprem/cloud.Â
