Rapid Application Development with ITaP’s MOSS
This blog post was written in preparation for the November Sharepoint User’s Group meeting.
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) is a great platform for rapid web application development. Over the past year Science Administration has decommissioned a number of kludgy, legacy LAMP web applications with simpler, lower-maintenance and more functional custom lists in the IT@P hosted Sharepoint environment.
Unlike most enterprises that use MOSS for web application development, we do not have administration access or control to the Sharepoint servers. We’re limited to administering our Site Collection. This severe limitation has dictated our usage and development patterns towards a bias of primarily only using in-browser customizations and configurations. We have not yet had the opportunity to develop custom web parts or work with application pools or even site collections within this hosted environment. Our development methodology is lean and agile and our decision process agnostic. I believe that this is a good thing: we’ve successfully added Sharepoint to our toolbox without being overcome.
We strive to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various application development environments from which we can choose. Having this understanding with Sharepoint is particularly important. Given the dirt-cheap and praise-worthy hosting model from IT@P, their MOSS environment is excellent at two specific things:
- Small, secure, MS Office document repositories for users on Windows desktops
- Custom lists linked together and used by multiple users
There are many opensource and cheap best-of-breed discussion applications, wikis and blogs that are vastly superior to Sharepoint’s offerings. Simple, cheap and high-quality document repositories are harder to find.
We’ve had great success by intelligently creating linked custom lists in Sharepoint where in the past we would have seen an VB/Access/FileMaker/FoxPro database with its unique problems and limitations or a full-fledged web application with a sizable time requirement, maintenance overhead and requisite commitment of stability.
Many of the administrative (non-student facing) applications that we’re asked to develop serve a relatively small number of faculty and staff and implement local business processes. Having Sharepoint in our toolbox gives us the option to rapidly develop and deploy a simple and maintainable system once we’ve decided that the business process can be squeezed into the stock Sharepoint configuration. We can piece together and deliver a custom “application” with ease and speed.
A few of the disadvantages of Sharepoint:
- It works best in IE/Windows.
- Sometimes it only works in IE/Windows. (This is a critical problem for a computing environment as diverse as Science’s.)
- It’s non-trivial to make it look like anything other than Sharepoint.
- IT@P hosting – you don’t have the access level that other Sharepoint developers have.
- Often, the only way to fix something is to delete a site or list and start over.
- …
Future or advanced usage of MOSS largely rely upon IT@P enabling features and/or integrating with other Purdue enterprise applications – business intelligence/PerformancePoint, custom web parts, portal, federated portals, the Business Data Catalog, …
Other work is: implementing the Purdue M&M web template as a Sharepoint master page.