JoelBlogs - Joel Jeffery's Microsoft 365 Blog

Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams and Office 365 Architecture, Development, Administration and Training

SharePoint Thing a Day – 017 – Architecture. The Big Picture pt 2.

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The Big Picture pt 2

SharePoint is an excellent knowledge management platform to consolidate all your document needs. Especially with guidance and governance.

SharePoint, and Office 365, work best when they are the focal point for information in your enterprise.

There are many worthy, and not-so-worthy contenders, vying for your users’ attention. The good and the bad.

File shares, Egnyte, DropBox, Box, GDrive, Documentum, Filenet.

Some of these support metadata, and some don’t. Of the ones that do, some support metadata better than the rest.

And then there are custom line of business applications that exist outside all of these.

If your corporate policy is to spread your information across many different technical stores and applications, it can be incredibly disorienting for users.

Instead consider bringing everything into a navigable place of work.

SharePoint and Microsoft Teams make the ideal way to bring the applications the users need into the context of where they work. (http://1jj.uk/spcasestudy1)

SharePoint Thing a Day – 016 – Architecture. The Big Picture.

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The Big Picture

In the past, developing line-of-business apps with SharePoint was largely split into two camps: systems bolted together by power users using a tools like SharePoint Designer or InfoPath and systems built by developers using full development tooling like Visual Studio.

If you’ve been involved with those projects long-term, you may well have become jaded with those as a viable option.

I urge you to take another look.

SharePoint as a development platform has metamorphosed immeasurably over the last couple of years, to become truly enterprise class.

Modern SharePoint Online development consists of front-ends and full customisations built with SharePoint Framework (or SPFx). Current best practice is to build serverless back-ends using services from Microsoft Azure, such as Function Apps, Logic Apps with many, many database options.

Also, advanced users and developers alike can use Microsoft PowerApps and Flow to build business apps, in a structured and manageable way. (http://1jj.uk/clouddev)