Too many times I hear at clients that people are building SharePoint applications. They tell their users that they are getting a SharePoint application. Users Bing (Google) SharePoint and imagine what they find. Stop, let’s think about this for a moment and change the technology to prove a point.
If we were building an application to manage inventory for a client could we say, we are building a “.NET 3.5 application, using SQL Server 2008 R1, with a web services interface to ….”, or would we say, we are building an “Inventory Management Applications”.
Which would the users get? Which makes more sense?
Then, why are we saying “We are building SharePoint applications”, we are not! We are building web sites to manage documents, we are building a web site to manage projects, we are building a web site to collaborate. And, by the way we are using SharePoint to facilitate the technology, if anyone is interested.
ok, but SharePoint ootb is built on the API that us SharePoint developers use to build applications on top of. If you look at that API as an extension of assemblies and namespaces that are in addition to the ones provided by ASP.Net, we can say we are building SharePoint applications just as we say we’re build asp.net applications.
I see your point technically, good information for the developers, but users don’t need to know, or want to know.
I am driving home in a car today, also known as a four wheeled vehicle, propelled by a reciprocating internal combustion engine which uses 87 octane fuel.
Totally, totally agree!
It drives me mad whenever I hear someone talk about their ‘SharePoint Collaboration Space’ or the ‘SharePoint Intranet’! SharePoint is the technology, the intranet is what you use.
I compare it to email. The server team are concerned with Exchange, the user is concerned with Outlook. One is useless without the other, but the user is just concerned with sending and receiving email, they don’t care how it got to them or what happens when they press send.
Absolutely right!
Sharepoint is not one product. It’s an Ecosystem for creating particular solutions for particular problems. It’s a group of products under one platform knows as SharePoint.
I cannot agree more with the example you gave.
SharePoint provides its own management system with each product we build using this technology. Just like WordPress does.
Some clients have expectations regarding the CMS when they ask for a WordPress website, and some do when they ask for a SharePoint website. Either way, the choise of infrastructure and web platform greatly affects the management console, which, in my opinion, can be considered as part of the product.