SharePoint has been around for years and has gained incredible popularity in last few years in a time where many products, including some of its competitors, vanished quickly after reaching a peak. So how does SharePoint, or any product for that matter, remain persistent in an ever changing technology world? How it successfully evolved from separate products, SharePoint portal server 2001 and content management server 2002 to a true enterprise product?
I started contemplating SharePoint in retrospect after watching a more than 2 year old presentation by Mike Fitzmaurice. I stumbled upon it when I was randomly browsing thorough videos on channel 9. The video was so thought provoking that I decided to jot down some of the thoughts.
Extensibility
Before I answer the questions I asked earlier, here is one more: What is SharePoint?
- Content management system?
- Portal?
- Rapid site building tool?
- Repository of documents?
Perhaps it’s the cross of all of these and many other capabilities. It may not be the best at each of these, but it still offers a level of functionality that meets most needs and situations, and it has extension points to offer when it doesn’t. Perhaps the magic of its success lies in its ability to cater itself as a platform. Hacking the product is completely different thing though. It may be preferred in some circumstances and it works but it is not the best way of achieving something. Many of us tried to extend SharePoint by hacking it such as modifying out-of-box application pages, extending undocumented classes and accessing its content databases without object model.
Coming back to the original point, let’s talk about evolution. Many animals evolved over thousands of years, including homo sapiens and developed distinct abilities to adapt to their living environments. For example, the cheetah is the fastest runner and can achieve running speeds of 69 mph. The shark is the fastest swimmer and the elephnat is the heaviest animal on the earth. But, surprizingly, humans dominate all of these spaces. Why? Because of agility and the ability to extend a human’s abilities.
Agility along with ability to augment makes a difference. SharePoint’s agility is not only because of a multitude of features it offers, but also due to a number of augmentation points it offers.
1. Declarative development – Everything you can achieve with features, modules and CAML can be implemented using server object model. Then why introduce additional complexity with features? Solution development is much simpler to implement, and ideas and logic within are much better visualized. But it lacks the flexibility and dynamics of the declarative solution. Ability to add/remove capabilities to your site/solution by simply activating and deactivating feature is immensely powerful.
Also the ability to acquire other capabilities such as getting an asp.net application by configuring InfoPath services, making spreadsheet data available through excel services and connecting to cubes built by analysis services decoratively makes any SharePoint solution agile.
2. Surface and incorporation of information from foreign systems – SharePoint can bring in external data from a variety of external systems and present it in a way that they are native SharePoint data. For instance, search can crawl through these systems and then with managed properties that are mapped to crawled properties, data can be presented in a meaningful way.
3. Scale itself across geography – SharePoint based solutions can easily be scaled across site collections and farms across geographies. It can run on several servers and more front end and application servers can be added anytime.
Perhaps agility along with the augmentation makes SharePoint persistent and successful! Thoughts are welcome!
