So you have decided to entertain the concept of developing a published CMS (Content Management Systems) website built on the SharePoint technology, and perhaps you are unsure of any pros and cons with the technology or need a good solid place to begin research. If you are just starting with the SharePoint development you do have a long road to travel and the road can very rough at based on a direction that has been chosen. I have been primarily developing in SharePoint for 2 years now and have fought hard for the toolbox library of custom web parts that I have today, but with every step forward more opportunity and understanding of the true power of SharePoint framework, especially using the framework for customized or template CMS websites.
I was at the 2009 SharePoint Summit in Montreal and had the amazing opportunity to listing to Mike Fitzmaurice – Nintex, present a talk on "The Evolving Market around SharePoint Products and Technologies". Within first slide, he had made a statement that completely summed up the SharePoint framework for me and really started to make me think about using the product differently and to that effect, appropriately. The statement was very simple and stated that "SharePoint is an Ecosystem". This statement turned me around because instead of thinking "what is SharePoint going to do for me?" I started thinking "How can I start developing my own ecosystem on top of the SharePoint engine?" And that leaves me where I am today. I have now been building various websites within SharePoint and have a collection of valuable customized web parts that I can deploy and reuse and SharePoint site. Throughout the course of this development blog I will be releasing concepts that represent different tools in our web part library to help make any readers understand the approach and begin using these tools within their development.
Beginning a SharePoint site of any size takes a large amount of understand of the SharePoint hierarchy of sites, sub-sites, content types, folders and list items. Understanding to appropriate approach with this hierarchy and assigning the appropriate relations and metadata, your development cycle will benefit completely. Take the time to plan and understand the requirements in relation to the SharePoint core functionality.
There are a lot of really good articles and blog postings out and from time to time I intend to share links to related topics that helped improve our understanding when developing parts for SharePoint. Being as this is the initial blog post, I will quickly share our recent links to help any up and coming SharePoint developers get started. ENJOY!!
Kyle Pearn,
Akira Systems