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…
” It actually makes my skin crawl to think that no-one had the balls to stand up to the marketing spin doctors and say, “no we are not going to rebrand a SharePoint list as an ‘app'” just to make it seem as though we are not being left behind.”
+ 100 internet points for this alone! 😉
Sounds like it will be a lively beer call next Friday in Sydney! Look forward to meeting up.
Haha, Colin, we gonna meet at SharePoint Saturday Sydney the following week. You and me gonna present (LOL!), so let’s have a closer look on the topic highlighted. I’d be more than happy to help as much as I can. Btw, I am just presenting on the “provisioning” topic massing up with PnP/SPMeta2 🙂
As for polarising people, that’s fine. Let’s have a look what ideas we have on the table, maybe you know something I don’t, and maybe I do something you don’t. That plays well 🙂
>>There is lack of leadership here which actually makes me somewhat disappointed in Microsoft.Â
Well, how about uservoice/yammer groups? They are literally BOOMING providing so much help and outcome that people around have a “WTF” moment wondering “Hey, is that Microsoft? Really? That do SUCH an amazing job provising support, hearing us, making things happen via Yammer/Uservoice”. Some people literally can’t believe that MS is doinng such turn around, but Yammer/UserVoice just shows it – they truly do AMAZING push, they really do amazing improvements. So, not sure what’s the lack of the ledership is meant – UserVoice/Yammer is there. Tons of things are open source now. PnP is growing at github. Jemery and Vesu are making such a terrific uplift that people are amazed to be on MS stack nowadays 😉
Anyway, that’s discussion about apps. Yes, we do use, yes, we see it as a good things, yes, it s not something fully polished, but the benefits and value provided might make a final call.
Let’s just have a closer look on pros/cons of farm solutions/apps and see what we can take out of that, shall we? This time, please, would be nice to include client’s benefits along with developer’s benefits. They come along and it’s a bit tricky to mention only developers cons, and avoid clients’ benefits. What’s you think of it?
I thought my post might polarise people and I make no apologies for that – discussion is healthy right.
I would just like to come back on a couple of points, the first regarding my comment about “the current cloud app model offering will do nothing for end users“. Please don’t think I am anti CSOM, actually I use it a great deal and it’s a wonderful thing in my view but CSOM is not the app model it’s just an API that can be used in the cloud app model as it can equally be used elsewhere.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that for end users there is not obvious benefit, that I can see, of delivering solutions via the app model rather than the traditional way. There is nothing I can do in the app model that I can’t do with a wsp solution but sadly the opposite is not true (the obvious exception to this is O365 where I can’t deploy a farm solution but we are talking on-prem here and not O365). Someone please put me straight if that last statement was wrong.
As for Facebook/Google/Amazon and other platforms who do things the open scripting way well I don’t think that it’s a like for like comparison. The crown jewels of my business data does not sit on Facebook.
There is lack of leadership here which actually makes me somewhat disappointed in Microsoft. In my view they should do what they have always done best and not be scared into thinking their empire is danger of collapse if they don’t follow suit. It actually makes my skin crawl to think that no-one had the balls to stand up to the marketing spin doctors and say, “no we are not going to rebrand a SharePoint list as an ‘app'” just to make it seem as though we are not being left behind.
It seems Microsoft have already decided that the whole world is going to the cloud and that on-prem is a dinosaur nearing extinction. Personally, I think that this a flawed conclusion. There are whole sectors out there (I used to work for NATO and security/defence are certainly one) who will never outsource to some data centre in some country which was chosen because the government offers good tax breaks.Â
And of course there is the ongoing saga of foreign government data access. Its one thing having my county’s government legally mandate that I hand over the keys to my company data but I’m really not going to run the risk that Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) will hand over the keys to some other country’s government because they are told they have to – no way!
What sets Microsoft apart (for the moment) is that they do offer on-prem. If they do away with that then there is nothing to set them apart from the competition. Why would a company in virtually a monopoly position do away with the very thing that gives them that monology. It don’t make no sense to me!Â
Thanks for the heads up, do you have a link handy?
Imagine we have a SharePoint-Hosted App in the App Store and that app needs to provision a whole chunk of artefacts, doc libs, customized lists, workflows etc.. If you do it via code only, where does the code run? Â
