Microsoft Sharepoint review
by Pierre Boisvenue. June 22, 2009
The first time I laid my eyes on a fresh installation of windows 2003 server along with its SharePoint services and then installed the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) on top I was humbled by the sheer magnitude of it all. One could easily run a small country with it and because of this considering certification exam 70-541, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Development. This product is an amalgamation of years of software development using Microsoft technologies like .Net framework, SQL Server, OLE DB, ASP.Net, HTTP, XML, Web Service, Windows Workflow Foundation and IIS just to name a few.
So all is not lost for us Microsoft Developers knowledgeable in these technologies as we sure would gain by leveraging SharePoint knowledge and features. Knowledge we mostly have but assembled in such a way that makes SharePoint a multi tier system from Presentation to business rules to storage with the main plumbing in place. The SharePoint stack was assembled in such a way to allow for scalability by allowing programmatic site manipulation yet in a lot of small organizations SharePoint could be used out of the box using it’s built in feature. However most organizations have specific needs and requirements that would require some level of customization which can be achieve by leveraging its API via Visual Studio extension along with SharePoint web services. It is also worth mentioning the tight integration between MOSS and the Microsoft Office suite like Word 2007 and Microsoft excel really taking productivity to the next level.
The book Professional SharePoint 2007 development comes highly recommend as most of the authors have been actively involved in SharePoint’s success from the beginning.
Software