I was wondering what everyone’s proudest moment with SharePoint is? I think mine was possibly when someone used my colour calendar solution in a project, the wrote to me to say thanks as it had impressed their boss so much they got a promotion 🙂
It is a massive toolset that can solve all sorts of problems for people, it could be when you easily built a brilliant dashboard for your pointy haired manager boss or maybe you quickly created a tracking system which took you 2 days to build when the old system took 6 months and half a million pounds…it could be the first web part you developed or maybe you were responsible for analysis and realised SharePoint was a beautiful fit, whatever it is, let’s hear about some of your best SharePoint moments.
Good question Mark and it’s got me thinking! I have been working on different SharePoint projects for the last 6+ years.
Each project has been challenging because of the nature of the requirements like migration, SharePoint customisation, Integration with the external system etc. I have been luckily enough to have worked one of the UKs busiest sites (www.nhs.uk) which is still on SharePoint 2007 and is a fantastic resource for the people in the UK. However, after a long think, my proudest moment has been working with Mark and Hugo on the DocRead and DocSurvey applications at Collaboris.
Here’s the reason why…
Most of the time, as a SharePoint developer / consultant you have to work on projects where the target deployment environments are known.
i.e. you need to Design / Develop/ Implement a solution for a known platform (SP 2007 or 2010 or 2013), with known libraries and server specs.
However, my time at Collaboris has shown me how different it is for a SharePoint vendor. I have not only had to write an application that can work on *any* SharePoint Farm in the world, but also on any version of SharePoint! This is a very big challenge and makes you think about how you write your code every step of the way. Testing also becomes a much bigger part of the effort than at a single client solution.
To summaries, here are some of the daily challenges :
–Â How do we keep the code base the same for different versions of SharePoint?
– How do we make sure our artifacts Jquery version, CSS etc don’t’ effect, or overwrite what is already installed in the client site ?
– How do we keep the build process simple, consistent and repeatable for different version of SharePoint ?
– How do we make sure that the product can be upgraded from one of many different version installed by the client ?
– How do we patch in fixes ?
– How do we do automate testing ?
– How do we document the installation so the customer is happy every step of the way ?
– How do we test different version of product on different version of SharePoint and its sub-components (Jquery, css etc) ?
– How do you write an installer that has to self-sufficient ? No Powershell, just a silent install working on all environments ?
There’s been a lot think about, but all in all, I am really proud of what I have achieved because as you can imagine, the pace and complexity of development in an environment like that is extremely high.
