SharePoint as a Development Platform

cbortlik — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:54:40 GMT

While preparing to present my 2 sessions at the “Maximize Your SharePoint Investment: Leverage It as a Development Platform!” events that we’re doing for Northeast enterprise customers in Waltham, MA (November 19) and Rochester, NY (December 9) I continue to be amazed at how rich and robust SharePoint is for configuring and developing custom solutions.

I’ve been involved in architecting and developing browser based applications for well over 10 years – both on Microsoft and other technologies. My technical evolution over the years has been consistent with what many others have experienced:

Static sites: HTML & JavaScript using tools like Notepad, FrontPage, DreamWeaver
Dynamic sites : C++, ISAPI extensions on IIS, Java
Wrapper applications: ASP
Frameworks: ASP.NET, AJAX
Platform: SharePoint

As with previous evolutions, using SharePoint as an application platform enables you to get out of the business of writing plumbing functions and focus on building applications that add unique value to your business. For example, why should you spend time writing workflows from scratch or building forms based solutions when SharePoint has out of the box capabilities and tools to automate most of that? Why should you write complex web controls, search, business intelligence and sites when SharePoint has so many out of the box site templates, features and web parts that you can configure and extend?

SharePoint provides a great layer of abstraction, services and functionality on top of ASP.NET This helps you accelerate your development cycles, lower project risk, reduce costs and get to market faster.

I’m very excited about many things that are coming in SharePoint 2010 to further improve the development experience on the SharePoint platform. In future blog posts I’ll dive into these areas deeper. However, if I’m pressed to outline my top 5 items in these areas they would be:

Development on a non server environment. In SharePoint 2010, you can now develop on 64-bit client machines that are running Windows 7 or Vista SP1 (or later).
SharePoint as a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. Great improvements here that any ASP.NET developer would love including, integrated debugging, visual designers, project/control templates, WSP deployment/packaging and tracing. There is also rich integrated Application Lifecycle Management through Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.
Silverlight web parts shipping out of the box to enable you to quickly add rich Silverlight capabilities to your SharePoint site.
Composite applications that include round tripping, packaging and distribution of tasks between business analysts, power users and developers. Significant improvements such as Visio 2010 for designing workflows; SharePoint Designer improvements (including exporting to reusable WSP packages); Access Services; InfoPath Forms Services; Word Services; Visio Services; PerformancePoint Services; and Excel Services.
Business Connectivity Services for creating reusable read/write data connections to external data sources (e.g. Active Directory, ERP, CRM, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) that can be exposed and used across SharePoint and the Office clients, including off-line usage via SharePoint Workspace.

There is so much more that we’ll get into at the local events and in future blog posts. For now, I encourage you to check out some of the links and resources highlighted in my earlier SharePoint 2010 blog post.

Excel 2007 – Your Business Intelligence Client Solution

cbortlik — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:50:00 GMT

Many of my customers are evaluating business intelligence (BI) solutions. There are often many business drivers behind this trend including the need for analysis, reporting, planning and forecasting.

Prior to the release of Excel 2007 many customers would purchase a variety of different BI tools each with their own user interface, licensing costs and set of functionality. With Excel 2007 we have sought to bring BI to the masses while eliminating the need for a number of different tools and lowering the overall total cost of ownership for BI solutions.

Here is a summary of my top 10 favorite aspects of Excel 2007 for BI solutions:

Excel has become the rich BI client front end for PerformancePoint, SharePoint, SQL Server and any external data source or system. This allows users to easily aggregate, slice and dice many disparate data sources and get a consolidated view of their business.
By supporting 1 million rows and 16,000 columns of data in the same workbook, Excel 2007 allows you to work with more data. This addresses a critical business need expressed by many Excel users and overcomes previous product limitations of 64,000 rows which often resulted in the creation of multiple workbooks and extensive macros and programming to link the data together.
Excel Services enables you to easily publish an Excel workbook to SharePoint and then allow other users to access that data with just a web browser. This is of tremendous value when you want to make sure that everyone is looking at the latest version of data (aka a “single version of the truth”) and cases where you want to suppress hidden formulas, data and secure other sensitive data.
Conditional formatting adds powerful data visualization capabilities to Excel. You can easily add data bars, color scales, key performance indicators (KPI), and other icon sets to spot trends.
Pivot tables can now be created and used by anyone to organize and report on data. You do not need to be the “Excel guru” to be able to work with and change pivot tables. The redesigned pivot table capability and wizards streamlines the process.
The graphics engine for Office has been significantly improved with Office 2007. Charting and SmartArt produce professional looking graphics in very little time. These graphics can be shared and reused across Excel, PowerPoint and Word and eliminate the need for many 3rd party services and tools.
Tables in Excel automatically add common tools for working with related sets of data. For example, the filter and sort features have been improved and are automatically enabled now for Excel tables. You can apply multiple selections and even filter and sort by color (e.g. rows highlighted in green) and conditional format (e.g. by KPI).
Advanced built in formulas automate the creation of even the most complex calculations. Using Excel tables you can now even refer to cells based on user defined column and row names (e.g. Northeast, Southwest, etc.) rather than having to figure out the cryptic cell/column numbering (e.g. A1).
Data tools for identifying and removing duplicates, consolidating data and performing what-if analysis improves how you work with large sets of data and obtain meaningful insight from it.
Custom Office Business Application by partners and customers for building solutions on top of Excel. These could range from advanced Visual Studio .NET applications to basic macros. Since Excel uses the Open XML industry standard file format, Excel documents can be programmatically built and accessed from various tools.

Want to learn more? Check out the Microsoft Business Intelligence site and review customer case studies.

Chris Bortlik's Blog : PerformancePoint

SharePoint as a Development Platform

Excel 2007 – Your Business Intelligence Client Solution