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SharePoint: All About the Apps
A portfolio of apps customized for your environment is the key to maximizing SharePoint's benefits.
In this world of global enterprises and mobile workers, collaboration is a critical business activity. SharePoint is one of the more prominent collaboration platforms. According to Microsoft market research, 78 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are SharePoint users. In 2009, SharePoint was a $1.3 billion business with more than 100 million users, and it continues to grow. Every day for the past five years, 20,000 workers have joined the ranks of SharePoint users, says Jared Spataro, former director of SharePoint product management. Spataro reports that one in every five knowledge workers now has access to SharePoint.
Implementing such a complex collaboration platform can be a challenge. If your organization is using SharePoint or planning to, you can learn more about developing and deploying custom SharePoint apps at SharePoint Live, as part of Live 360, happening this November 18-22 in Orlando, FL. Paul Schaeflein's session entitled "Apps for SharePoint – The Next Level," will cover application planning and deployment, as well as security and access management.
You can install apps for SharePoint throughout a SharePoint farm, so you must ensure those apps are capable of supporting SharePoint workloads. However, many SharePoint app developers often focus on the core functionality their business requires instead of what an app needs to function in an enterprise environment. Schaeflein's workshop session will cover those less glamorous yet critical areas of SharePoint application code including:
- Error planning and providing a path to recovery
- Securely storing credentials and certificates
- Automate building and deployment for easier administration
- Ensuring your code can co-exist with earlier versions
Naturally, security and access control is always a factor. This workshop will also cover securing your apps with single sign-on (SSO) and connecting to SharePoint following "least privilege" principles, among other security considerations. This workshop will also touch on monitoring and troubleshooting factors like logging and instrumentation, transient fault handling, caching and performance, and expired certificates and passwords. It will also cover packaging and deployment issues like Web assets, Content Delivery Networks, deploying to on-premises and hosted server farms; and upgrading and versioning considerations like upgrade packaging, deployment steps and multi-version runtime considerations.
About the Author
Lafe Low is the editorial liaison for ECG Events.