We’ve reached a crossroads for SharePoint development. With SharePoint Online, the possibility of creating cloud-hosted applications is almost within reach.
The cloud has the potential to make development easier while offering more choices than we currently have on-premises. Using Microsoft’s cloud app model, you could build an app once, with the source and destination in SharePoint, then access it from your phone, SharePoint and across the Office productivity suite.
That’s really the end state that Microsoft is looking for. But we’re not quite there yet.
One reason we’re at a crossroads is that Microsoft has retired InfoPath, its form services platform introduced in 2003. While Microsoft hasn’t provided a clear planning roadmap for InfoPath users to follow, it has promised to come out with a new solution quickly. According to some Microsoft sources, potential replacements are actively being tested in Microsoft’s Office 365 environment, which would create a new SharePoint-based form interface. If you wanted to create a printable form you would use advanced features in Word templates to create such forms or reports.
A second factor to consider is the move toward using Access Services to create robust but power-user driven forms. So there’s still the concept that SharePoint Online provides the means for power users who are not full-fledged developers to create business solutions.
Thirdly, there’s the Microsoft cloud app model, which has become more refined over the last year-and-a-half. In essence, the app model breaks your application’s full dependency on SharePoint, giving companies more flexibility with development. In the long run, this would provide greater flexibility for deciding how to support applications.
Microsoft is building this model so that developers have the option to reuse apps in multiple ways throughout its ecosystem. In the near future, if you build an app for SharePoint, it could be used with very few changes (if any) from your phone, with the same user experience.
The app model could be considered a cloud development model because what Microsoft is really doing is driving the cloud capabilities of hosting these apps. Again, the app model isn’t dedicated to SharePoint, but it has to be hosted somewhere, and Microsoft would recommend for ease of access that it be hosted in the cloud — for example, in SharePoint Online.
We’re at a crossroads because the app model is not fully refined. It’s a work in progress — still being improved and authored — and the power-user capabilities of SharePoint Online have not been released yet. The promise of SharePoint development in the cloud is very high because Microsoft has shown that, with the cloud, it is getting into a much faster cycle for deploying features.
On-premises coding won’t go away entirely, but Microsoft is going to keep pushing for a cloud development environment, and it’s not alone. It’s a trend across the entire IT universe, with Amazon trying to host as many applications as possible, for example, and Salesforce.com creating as many tools as possible.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage custom SharePoint development capabilities by contacting Portal Solutions.
