Why is it that developers new to Sharepoint development have such a difficult relationship with the product initially ?
Those who have just been born into the amazingly powerful world of Sharepoint can be easily overwhelmed by the complexity and to some extent the requirement that we are now born into a world where we as developers are not the sole masters of our own destiny. This leads to the inevitable "Why don't we just do this in asp.net ?". This can be roughly translated as why dont we go back to something where the developer had complete control over the site and can be left alone to develop in relative isolation i.e the developers comfort blanket.
Sharepoint doesnt allow us to do this. It is a platform that comes with preconditions you have to learn much more about the architecture and administration aspects of the product to augment your development efforts. Like newborns we spend most of our time trying to do something we think is easy but is frustratingly difficult in Sharepoint until we learn the platform and all its complexities.
Sharepoint by its very nature demands that we have to be very clear on the business cases and objectives that are driving our development. We need to have a much clearer understanding of our Stakeholders and Target Users as we need to make choices such as power user content creation that just aren't issues for many asp.net web development projects. These are areas that developers will not be particulary accustomed to.
Another stumbling block is that we always try to equate Sharepoint to what we already know and if that is asp.net web site creation then we look at Sharepoint and cannot see what additionally it brings to such an arena. Our perspectives need to be as broad as the Sharepoint capabilities and product offerings.
I have tinkered with Sharepoint on and off for many years and on of the first things I realised is that you have to persevere with the product to unlock some of its deeper benefits. Alot of what Sharepoint offers can be delivered by other means so that you can easily become demoralised without perseverance.
To be succesfull in the Sharepoint arena you need to
1) Persevere - nothing good comes easily.
2) Understand why you are using Sharepoint.
3) Connect your development efforts to wider concerns such as business drivers, and audience concerns.
4) Ditch the comfort blanket of trying to relate everything back to what you are comfortable with.
In this blog I am going to examine the best ways in which to make you and Sharepoint a succesfull team.
