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…
I totally agree with the point made by Denis in that setting up an Apps friendly environment for on-prem is simply way too painful. You have to do a lot to convince people that the pain is worth the gain. One of the main benefits of the Cloud App model is the stability it brings to SharePoint but to me this is not the point. It doesn’t stop developers writing crappy code it just means that the problem is moved elsewhere and Microsoft can shrug their shoulders and say “not our problem”. Users are only really interested in whether the tools they need to do the job are available when they need them. They couldn’t care less whether the problem is in SharePoint land or elsewhere!
Over and above the complexity and expense of setting up the environment we are still way too constricted in what can be done with the available OMs and the problem is we (as developers) don’t really know how constricted we are until we hit a road-block. More risk and uncertainty.
You also have to completely re-engineer things. Most of us who have solved the same sorts of problems for many different customers are generally not starting from ground zero but rather starting from a similar solution done for another customer a few months back say in SP2010. The task is then a much more simple update and adapt exercise rather than a complete re-architecture. It is difficult to convince customers to adopt the Cloud App model when you tell them it will cost twice as much, carry more technical risk in the development cycle and cause heart ache and pain to sys admins.
Finally, and I know I am a heretic here, I just cannot get over the idea that JavaScript and iFrames are the future of SharePoint development. I know others may disagree but from me JavaScript is a horrible hacky thing that simple fails to provide a robust way to develop manage and debug code and should be the last resort of any developer’s arsenal- it’s just horrible. And to be honest I think Microsoft know this, why would they bring out stuff like Type Script in an attempt to mitigate this otherwise?
So the bottom line is that for on-prem (not 365, that’s a different story) the current cloud app model offering will do nothing for end users, will bring added uncertainty and therefore risk to projects will cause ‘real’ developers to toss and turn at night and will cost customers more. That’s a tough sell!
Finally, finally how certain are we that this really is the future? A few years back the future was Silverlight, no wait the future is Sandbox solutions, no wait… it’s the Cloud App Model. So for me there still not yet enough good reasons to embrace the faith – sorry 🙁
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.
Hi Mark,
I am working in a product based company. Before app modal our product get installed as a farm based solution on SharePoint with Full Trust. Now with Office365 and App Modal a lot of our customer are willing to Migrate to Office 365. So we have manages to Architect out software in a way that same code base can be deployed as a Farm based solution / App model on Premise and App modal with 365 with the App Server beinf Inside domain or can be on Azure. there are lot of buzz in customer to migrate to Office 365 with AD sync or ADFS. So We have a lot of potentials and market open up with new Modals.
I agree Robert – it’s a trade off. Dev time vs portability in the future.
I am developer of SharePoint based solutions in a small (300 people) state agency. Our SharePoint solutions are primarily internal departmental scoped and use client side js and workflows. I have been very interested in the app model, but for our agency it simply seems to be overkill and not necessary.
