The future of deeply customised SharePoint

At the recent Build 2017 conference, Microsoft announced new customisation capabilities for SharePoint. With these new abilities, organisations will be able to better tailor SharePoint to their needs. But there are also risks involved with using a customised SharePoint environment. Here is how we can help.

Deeply customise SharePoint

One of the most powerful features of SharePoint is its capability to be extended and customised as desired – and beyond. Many organisations choose SharePoint only because of its ability to tailor it exactly to their needs and processes.

This, however, comes with a price of being at risk of incorrectly implemented customisations. In the past, developers used a variety of approaches to customize SharePoint, spanning from structured and repeatable deployments using farm solutions to ad-hoc customisations relying on specific UI elements of SharePoint.

With every new version of SharePoint, chances are that one or more of these customizations could break because of deprecated features or changes to the very development model used in SharePoint.

New means of customising

Enter the recently released SharePoint Framework. Its main intention is to standardise and modernise the way organisations customise SharePoint. Initially only addressing building web parts, the latest announcements around the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) refer to new ways of customising, allowing SharePoint developers to build solutions that add even more value to organisations and its users.

Yet, various reports show that many developers still need to adopt the new development model. In our very own industry report on the state of SharePoint and Office 365 development, we found that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that the SharePoint Framework is significantly different to any other development model available to date: it uses open source toolchain and is based on client-side development.

New means of governing customisations

The new ways of customising SharePoint require a broadened approach to assuring the quality, security, and adherence to organisation’s policies. With the latest release of SPCAF, Version 7 of our SharePoint Customisation Analysis Framework, organisations can benefit of SharePoint Framework customisations and ensure that these customisations add the most value for their users at the same time!

Developers using SPCAF are able to build SPFx solutions more efficiently since our tool provides them with a dedicated set of rules and best practices. Development teams are able to enforce customization quality and compliance to policies throughout the organisation by integrating SPCAF Quality Gate into their continuous integration build system.

What is more, organizations using SPCAF Farm Protection can verify that web parts not only are performant but also secure before they get deployed, by integrating into an organization’s deployment processes and tools.

Conclusion

SharePoint is cool again. At Build 2017, Microsoft underpinned its newborn trust in SharePoint as a platform by encouraging developers to customise SharePoint like never before. And with the SharePoint Framework, organisations now have a development model on their hands that will not go away anytime soon for a change. Microsoft SharePoint is cool and will stay cool for a long time to come! You can read the full Microsoft announcement here.

Is an old SharePoint version keeping your organisation from benefiting from all this? Then you might take a look at SPTransformator, our unique tool to significantly ease the move to SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint Online by allowing you to keep old customisation’s and save prior investments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Waldek is a Microsoft Office Development MVP and Product Owner Customisation Governance at Rencore. He reinforces our product development adding loads of business experience from working as a SharePoint consultant for more than 10 years. Waldek is passionate about what he does and shares his enthusiasm through his blog and as a regular speaker at conferences and community events all over Europe. Recently, Waldek joined the SharePointr Partner and Practices (PnP) Core Team to help developers make better use of the SwharePoint and Office 365 platforms.

References:
Mastykarz, W. (2017). The future of deeply customized SharePoint – Rencore. [online] Available at: https://rencore.com/blog/future-of-deeply-customized-sharepoint/ [Accessed 21 Jul. 2017].

Share this on...

Rate this Post:

Share: