Building Custom SharePoint Apps? Read This First
When building SharePoint business apps, consider these top five challenges for more successful deployments:
Applications are undeniably the new language of business. No matter your business need, from data management to employee onboarding to customer lifecycle management, and anything and everything in between, applications can streamline and improve workflows by orders of magnitude. What once took piles of paper and hours, days or months to achieve can be achieved almost instantly with no physical footprint, thanks to the efficiency of applications. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a business world without apps.
It’s also hard to imagine a business world without SharePoint, which, in its ubiquitous manner, has set a new standard for productivity and connected workplaces.
“We’re seeing a huge shift in the way enterprises define and enable efficiency,” said Adriaan van Wyk, CEO of K2, a Bellevue, Washington-based provider of business application software. “It’s no longer about deploying uniform business solutions across departments, but rather letting go of the reins and allowing employees to discover and use independent solutions on their own. More often than not, this means ad hoc development of apps.”
While this newfound worker empowerment to innovate and solve problems in-house is by and large a very positive trend, this independence is not without its concerns. In the age of information anxiety, both IT leaders and individual business workers are increasingly worried about the vast quantities of business content, records and information spread out across various legacy services and systems.
To its credit, Microsoft has made major SharePoint improvements in recent years in an attempt to enable businesses to build custom apps to meet the needs of both IT departments and business workers. In SharePoint 2013, the “app model” provides a framework for building custom SharePoint apps while still maintaining the integrity of the SharePoint environment. While the app model provides some great capabilities, many businesses find it difficult and/or cumbersome to use and are still searching for a better way to build apps in SharePoint 2013.
If you find yourself at a crossroads when it comes to building and deploying SharePoint apps, consider these common challenges so you can get ahead of the curve. As the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and, that concept rings very true in this case!
Moving to the cloud. Odds are, your organization is already in the process of moving to the cloud, if not fully cloud-based. According to recent cloud computing research, 73% of the world’s data will reside in the cloud within the next two years. To ensure that you have access to all the information your users need to make great decisions, you need to make sure your apps are built to integrate with your data, regardless of where it lives. Add in the additional security concerns your organization may have with accessing data in the cloud and your application can quickly go from simple to complex.
Staying secure. Security breaches in organizations that handle consumer data are making the headlines right now, but even if your company doesn’t handle large quantities of sensitive information, it’s important to make sure your SharePoint applications are secure. Safeguarding your organization’s data so that it is only seen by those users who have the right to access it can add significant time and effort to your development cycles, so be sure to add adequate time to the schedule.
Staying flexible. Today’s business world moves at the speed of data, and to be successful, your organization needs to be agile enough to adapt to changes quickly. With more businesses running critical applications in their SharePoint environment, it’s important to be able to build apps that can adapt quickly as well. While it’s possible to include flexibility into your SharePoint apps today, it’s not as easy as it could be, and often results in code that has to be maintained and updated for every change that comes along. It sounds like an oxymoron, but upfront planning to be flexible can be a significant advantage.
Scaling across the organization. While many companies start small with their SharePoint app development in one or two isolated areas, if initial apps are built well, it doesn’t take long for the rest of the organization to jump on board. While building scalable SharePoint apps can be challenging, the bigger issue comes from not planning for it at all. For best long-term performance, scalability must be considered upfront.
Planning for the future. It’s easy to get stuck focusing on the “now” when looking to build business apps, but it’s important to take a step back to assess what your needs may look like in the future. A simple workflow-based app on SharePoint today may not be able to help you with mission-critical applications that span SharePoint and multiple other systems. Taking the time to think about potential future growth needs will save time and money in the long run.
If you consider these five challenges when planning your next custom app, you’ll be much happier with the deployment and overall performance in the long run, enabling your stakeholders to reliably use their apps for years to come.
SharePoint by the Statistics
68% of current SharePoint customers are planning to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 in the next two years.
52% of all SharePoint customers are building, or plan to build, custom apps in their SharePoint environments.
67% of SharePoint users consider third-party solutions important to their deployments.
K2 helps companies build applications that allocate work to the right people, with all the information they need to make smart decisions. More than one million users globally rely on K2 software to streamline operations, save money and reduce risk.
To learn more about K2 Appit for SharePoint, a cloud-based platform that allows you to easily deliver workflow and forms apps for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online, contact K2 for more information or a free trial by visiting appit.com.