John Keadle works as a Manager of Technology at Sapient in Atlanta GA. After many years of database and application development, he began working on SharePoint solutions in 2002. In addition to a number of successful print publication efforts, he shares much of his SharePoint work on his blog, SharePoint from Scratch, which you can find at http://12Hive.com.
8 Ways to Make Things Easy for Your SharePoint Development Team
1 -- Establish a Clear “Sandbox” Mentality.
SharePoint developers need robust environments where they can develop, debug and troubleshoot sophisticated solutions that integrate resources supported anywhere on the internet. This includes domain controllers, Active Directory, external databases and Office clients. Without this solid foundation, the user-centric, social value that SharePoint provides will remain out of reach. In addition, without a robust 64 bit 4+Gb host, your developers will spend hours looking at an hourglass and any developer with any ADD will quickly lose focus.
2 -- Allow for Developers to Segregate Their Personal Workstations from their Development Environments.
Anybody with full-time use of a specific workstation will grow comfortable with its configuration. If your developer must support his development efforts on that same machine, he or she will hesitate before venturing into unfamiliar territory. To maintain the delete and revert option, the developer’s personal machine must not be vulnerable.
3 -- Store and Maintain a Number of VM Images and Snapshots.
Deploying a “Greenfield” farm should not take more than 20 minutes, enough time to download a VM and enter its admin password. Once site design and configuration tasks are completed, take snapshots so subsequent efforts can continue without fear of breaking something that already works. Development add-ons, third party solutions, troubleshooting and community sourced artifacts often lead to dead ends. Delete and revert can be substantially more efficient than backing out.
4 -- Support Frequent Machine Rebuilds.
Once solutions are packaged and deployable, they can be off-loaded and stored elsewhere and the host machine can be restored to Greenfield state ready to support the next development effort.
5 -- Provide a Development Network.
As development efforts mature, they need to be socialized. A universally accessible network supports this demand in a virtual team setting. Populated with valid accounts, real people and real work is the only way to be sure a “model office” can meet production demands. Likewise, with access to network resources and internet connectivity, all the content on the www is within the developers’ reach.
6 -- Support Frequent Functional Reviews Demonstrating Generic Solutions.
Developers should be steered toward solutions that can be deployed without involving the customers brand or intellectual property. These elements should be deployable at runtime at the site collection level. This way, a solution can be installed and demonstrated using Fabrikam-like design and content. Network users and potential stakeholders can discover and experience the solutions as they operate in a real-network setting.
7 -- Explore and Adopt Best Practices Aggressively.
When a successful solution is deployed and its ROI measured, be sure the entire development community learns its objective and becomes familiar with the solution’s approach. Allow the community to compare that approach with others and comment on suitability and alternatives.
8 -- Keep and Update Links to Virtual Community Content.
As developers explore and identify applicable content on the internet, make it clear that they should post the link, with subject matter tags and comments, in a master link list. This way, SMEs on one topic can leverage the experience of SMEs on other topics.
Other SharePoint topics that might be of interest:
- 8 things you need to know about SharePoint governance
- 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system
- 8 more things you need to know about SharePoint
- 8 things to consider when implementing SharePoint with another ECM engine
- 8 ways to use SharePoint for social computing
- 8 things you need to know about automatic classification and metadata tagging in SharePoint
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