SharePoint Maze

Is it necessary to have many customizations in your SharePoint 2010?

I suddenly think about customization in SharePoint 2010. To be honest, I haven’t been SharePoint developer yet thus I can’t talk about programming or something which mentioned in programming technique area.

Is it necessary to have many customizations in your SharePoint 2010? My brother mentioned in an ERP Oracle he implemented in the morning. We discussed what would happen when there were many customizations in a software product? I know that in order to meet business requirement, we need to customize SharePoint 2010, but what do you think of corollary of many customizations? SharePoint is such a huge product that you can use it for your core business such as BI, sales dashboard, record management..etc. Let’s think about my question as a result.

Corollary makes you “dizzy”

SharePoint 2010 needs to be considered as a long-term strategy. Simple reason is that it’s difficult for you to realize what SharePoint 2010 will bring to your organization within short time. If you think that it’s deployed for your short-term strategy, don’t implement it immediately. Is out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 sufficient for your business requirement? Depending on your SharePoint 2010 skills, you can utilize maximum features that SharePoint 2010 provides. I saw that many companies want to customize SharePoint 2010 without using out-of-the-box features. Even, with my current project that I’m responsible as a consultant, they haven’t utilized available features, and so they have been encountered a little complication. They hired SharePoint freelancers and requested for many customizations.  I just give you one true example from this project. When they wanted to have a list of all countries in the world, they asked SharePoint developer, but I queried “Why didn’t you use Choice list in SharePoint 2010?”. They misused SharePoint developer and make customized features that they could do it by clicking mouse. Let’s revise the introduction to SharePoint 2010 from Microsoft. They said that SharePoint 2010 was no-code solution. I agree with this.

When you have many customizations in your SharePoint 2010, have you ever wondered if SharePoint developers or administrators would retire from your organization after working for a long time. Yes, it’s corollary. You will hire sharepointer to continue to work for your SharePoint environment. But when they come to, they will be “dizzy” with many custom code in solution. Do you think that they can resolve or continue to manage for your SharePoint environment well? I’m not sure about this. Return my true example, when the previous developer had retired, the project manager would continue to hire new developer in order to continue to develop until feature but the new developer was “dizzy” because of customizations. Although I don’t have much programming knowledge, I know that not every developer has similar programming style. I mean they have different code styles depending on their skills. One can develop with 5-10 line of codes, but another one can do it with 10 – 20 line of codes, thus it’s difficult to fix or manage codes from previous SharePoint developer if you don’t have broad and deep understanding of SharePoint programming.

Now, I want to share my viewpoint by mentioning the patches of Microsoft. Yes, do you think that your customizations will be fit patchs from Microsoft? Are you sure about the compatibility? If there are any issues, who will resolve your customizations? Will you remove them and then build new customizations or find a SharePoint expert? Or will you be subordinate to outsourcing company? I mean that you will consider support from outside company.

Try to reduce your worries

To reduce your worries, I think you should consider what I mentioned earlier. You can think of following factors:

• Retirement
• Different programming style
• Patch from Microsoft
• Impact of core business

You can learn or find a good SharePoint consultant who can know out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 as far as possible. They will utilize them without code in order to meet business requirement effectively. Don’t misuse SharePoint developer for your customizations.

You can refer to additional resources:

• Is it necessary to customize your SharePoint implementation in order to mature it?
• Where to draw the line between SharePoint Customisation and SharePoint Development – from Jeremy Thake
• When to Customize SharePoint 2010 and Some Reasons for Doing It – from O’Reilly Answers
• SharePoint, fighting the business, getting it right, doing it right – from TechNet Forums
• You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em – from Lori Gowin
• To Customize or Not to Customize—That is the Question (not SharePoint-specific) – from Jack Boyer

13:45 GMT +7 June 27, 2011