SharePoint establishes a new paradigm for enterprise application development and implementation due to its variety of developer-friendly features. The web-based collaboration and document management platform offers many advantages to the developers, including easy reconfigurability and seamless integration with Microsoft Office. SharePoint development allows users to gain access to a swathe of improvements in the application development ecosystem.

Access to a SharePoint server is prerequisite for SharePoint application development. Two SharePoint server editions are available:

Standard Edition

It offers a variety of intuitive features, pre-built workflow templates, governance tools, and secure store service. The tools include content types, feature framework and list columns. Reusable collection of settings helps users to organize the content in a meaningful way. Content types can be used to manage and reuse the metadata and behavior of an item or data type.

Site columns can be used by the developers for a reusable model for the column definition. As each list gets the same column definition, there is no need to reproduce the column in each list. Feature-framework packages pre-set elements to help the user accomplish a particular task with ease.

Enterprise Edition

It is superb compared to other ECM software. Majority of content acquisition and aggregation functions and attributes are covered. 95% of workflow management functions are covered. There is support for personalization management, portal, search and indexing management, version control and management, and output and content presentation. Enterprise Edition comes with many additional features such as better search results from rich web indexing, deeper integration of business intelligence, and integration of Visio, Excel and PerformancePoint.

SharePoint Services 3.0 offers many out-of-the-box templates for the creation and development of new websites. One can create custom templates and build a new site based instance based on them. SharePoint Designer can be used to create the necessary lists and user groups.

Below four essential lists are available in SharePoint:

• Project Lists
• Project Tasks
• Project Issues, and
• Project Milestones

Four SharePoint development approaches are available:

1- Farm Solution

It contains custom-managed code deployed to the SharePoint farm servers and communities. The code for XML, assemblies and extensions is bundled into a single file, known as a solution package. The assemblies of the Farm Solution run with full trust but can be deployed with custom code access security (CAS) system policy. The code is hosted in the IIS worker process.

Pros: It is the best solution to access server-side API in SharePoint Server. Security remains intact as only the Farm Administrator can deploy the solution.

Cons: It can only be used for on-premise servers. If there is any loophole in the code, the whole SharePoint Farm is affected.

2- Sandbox Solution

This SharePoint development approach authorizes the site collection administrator to install custom solutions with ease. It is stored in the solution gallery of a site collection. Components run under resource access restrictions and a significantly restricted Code Access Security (CAS) policy. It can include code that runs against the SharePoint client-side object model.

Pros: Sandbox Solution can be used for both on-premises and onsite, and if there is an error, it will only affect that site collection and not the whole of the SharePoint Farm.

Cons: The solution is not compatible with cross-domain sites and cannot be effectively used for multi-lingual approach.

3- SharePoint Add-ins

These self-contained extensions may include cloud-based logic and data but not custom-managed code that runs on SharePoint Server. Two types of SharePoint Add-ins are available:

• SharePoint hosted add-ins, and
• Provider-hosted add-ins

The approach is centered on SharePoint components including lists, workflows and web parts. The business logic makes use of JavaScript either on custom SharePoint pages or the referenced JavaScript file.

Pros: New functionality can be easily added to SharePoint Server SharePoint Online. As apps are executed outside the environment, loopholes in the code do not affect other site collections.

Cons: It relies heavily on JavaScript and REST API calls. Any customization of the master page is not feasible.

4- SharePoint Framework

All components are hosted outside of SharePoint Farm and has at least one remote component hosted externally. Managed code SharePoint Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) is available. It can handle SharePoint list and list-item events which is not possible with SharePoint-hosted add-ins.

Pros: SharePoint Framework provides mobile-friendly and cloud-friendly solutions and can be easily customized in the modern UI SharePoint Online sites.

Cons: Functionality in one version may be deprecated in the next update, and there is no storage for customized web parts and extensions. MS Azure or some other dedicated server is needed to host the services in the applications

Easy-to-use collaborative tools

The easy-to-use collaborative tools offered by a SharePoint development company provide the developers with unmatched scalability and flexibility for developing enterprise applications in SharePoint. The tools provide the developers the ability to achieve deep personalization. They can also add and remove web components from the mix, making use of a modular approach for this purpose.

Customization in SharePoint needs to incorporate the extent in terms of workflows, dashboard, action flow and more. Developers have extensive discretion for customization in the website interface to come up with a design as per the client’s requirement. Custom forms allow for capturing user input in a variety of ways.

Determining the development needs

Make sure to define user rights for the created lists. This will ensure that only the authorized users are able to access sensitive information when the site becomes operational. Workflows allow for attaching the business process to the items in the lists and libraries. This way, you can easily control almost any aspect of an item as it helps in simplifying the complicated programming tasks on the server.

Developers should determine if the development needs to be done using server-side code. Microsoft SharePoint provides the developer a variety of options for creating and developing applications for on-premises, hosted and cloud deployments. To create new and immersive applications, the developers must be able to infuse quality, testing and application lifecycle management (ALM) in their development process.

Applications spanning on-premises services

HTML and JavaScript can be used for user experience layers while OAuth and OData offer better choices for server-based access to backend servers. Developers can deploy an application that spans on-premises services deployment such as MVC, WebAPI, Microsoft Azure and ASP.Net while being able to test the application components to determine quality. An effective ALM strategy is central to SharePoint application development and should consider how to leverage TFs for various development environments.

These environment choices include:

• Office 365 development tenant
• SharePoint developer site template, and
• Virtual machine-based development

SharePoint is by no means the only way to develop enterprise apps. However, opting a trusted SharePoint development company offers some distinct advantages to the developers involved in enterprise application development. With Flexsin Technologies as your SharePoint Development partner, you can develop enterprise apps on the fly and get full functionality right after installation. As an experienced and trusted SharePoint technology partner, Flexsin can help in adding critical functionality for your business to upscale and grow at an accelerated pace.