The SharePoint platform and SharePoint solutions have a great significance in an organization

SharePoint undoubtedly is a hot topic nowadays. Unlike a lot of software apps which are developed for a certain purpose, the technologies of the platform provide a framework that could be used in a lot of various functions. The extent of what it could do is only limited by the imagination and creativity of both the developers and end users.

The platform claimed more than seventy percent enterprise penetration, bringing in over $2 billion a year for Microsoft.  The product, which was launched in 2001, experienced the fastest growth in the firm's history, even compared to Windows and Office and is considered an industry standard ECM platform. Why is SharePoint so successful? The main reason is because it is deeply embedded within organizations. As a matter of fact, two out of three enterprise employees have it and use it in some capacity. The usages range from extranet, intranet and portal creation to most common document management or enterprise content management. With the recent 2013 release, organizations could even use it for widespread social networking and the App Marketplace.

It is indeed the platform of choice and is extremely beneficial to any organization because of innovation, practicality and adoption. For a smaller company, deploying SP via Office 365 could be a great way of addressing specific needs cost-effectively and efficiently.

Through its use as a centralized workspace, a firm could gain the following : 1. A backed up, secure, searchable and versioned repository for maintaining and storing documents.

2. A place to share information and collaborate with members of the project team.

3. Ability to access documents with any device anywhere with an internet connectivity.
4. Access to calendars and presences so one could find and reach colleagues when needed.
5. A portal to communicate and engage employees.
6. Access control over workspaces to meet regulatory needs and protect sensitive data.

Regardless if only one of these needs is a priority for an organization, the speed of implementation, price point and ease of us would likely make the decision to go in this direction a no-brainer. Moreover, by starting SP when a firm is small, it would be a part of how the business works and it would face far lesser adoption challenges as the business grows and expands its use to address the requirements which are common in bigger and more complex firms.

For bigger, more complex and geographically dispersed enterprise, the platform is a powerful one that could increase productivity and collaboration across the firm as well as facilitate information-sharing and employee engagement. The companies that are best able to capitalize on the business value that the framework offers, embrace it as a tool that meets a huge range of needs, like the following :

1. Team collaboration

2. Knowledge and document management

3. Corporate communications/intranet

4. Employee community-building

5. Process and workflow automation

6. Personalized workspace and portal

For example, there is one leading restaurant chain in middle east, which effectively utilized SharePoint to develop a Document and Request Management System, an intranet web application. The system solved their major problems in day to day coordination as many of the tasks were handled manually and information was distributed over different branches. The system handles workflows in HR, Document library, Request handling and Event or Appointment Management. In each workflow, specific users have permission to carry out specific task.

Using the Microsoft framework to address these requirements benefits a company in several ways, including:

1. Enhanced team collaboration

2. Enables information to be shared securely and in real-time

3. Easier to find and manage content that is reusable

4. Supports meeting regulatory requirements

5. Streamlines and automates business processes

6. Simplifies IT infrastructure

7. Facilitates employee engagement

8. Offers employees with one location to access everything they need to work

For example, 

Six Important things that every manager should know regarding the Microsoft SharePoint platform

It would be great if a manager could just quickly find access to company information, work closely with teams from various locations and set up an extranet to share documents in a secure manner with major clients. This could be done and all with SharePoint.

For managers considering adopting the business platform to the enterprise, here are six key concepts that they should be aware of.

1. SP is mega-popular. It is one of the fastest-growing apps in Microsoft's history. In 2009, it generated $1.3 billion in revenues from an installed base of over 100 million users. The sales continue to rise and the platform is considered the most widely used document-and collaboration-centered tool. What this could mean for manager is that it is a top-rated product that would be around for years.

2. It is a lot of things to many people. Far beyond one app, the system is a full-featured suite of various applications. These include collaboration tools, content management, business intelligence, project and workflow management and enterprise search. Organizations use it for a lot of various things, or to perform the same thing in a lot of ways. For a manager, this could mean a lot of apps that could be set up in various ways. The management should be able to define how it would be used.

3. SP relies on a lot of technologies. For it to work properly, all the other technologies should run perfectly. These include SQL databases, Windows, Active Directory, IIS or Internet information server, domain name system, enterprise networking and more. Any glitch, misconfiguration or failure in any of the components could cause the program to fail. It is paramount to have technical support and system administration as part of the initial planning.

4. Making a plan before adopting the platform. It makes sense to plan for how the team could use it best. At a minimum, the plan must cover taxonomy for data stored, which pieces would be used and by whom and who would support every group of users. Managers must ascertain that a sensible plan is in place to set up the platform and storing information with it.

5. Rackspace has end-to-end expertise. A world leader in hosting, Rackspace acknowledge Windows expertise and named as Microsoft partner of the year thrice. It hosts hundreds of SP systems for enterprise clients, with expert teams on hand to handle system administration 24/7. For the management, hosting the tool at Rackspace provides a winning combination, which is power and flexibility and supported by an acknowledged leader with end-to-end Microsoft technologies expertise.

6. Supporting the program requires special expertise. Business users could draw on the tools to develop mini applications to team members. However, these users are not likely trained in best software development practices, so the homegrown apps could be full of unpredictable bugs. Thus, special expertise is critical. For managers, it may not be realistic to expect the IT team to support a major app by themselves. It is necessary to hire the services of SharePoint experts for this matter and even consultants. 

Benefits of Using SharePoint Online for the Large and medium scale Information Management

SharePoint is a great tool that offers small to mid-size businesses, but it’s also a great information management tool for large companies. Some expert believes that an organization might need a different solution to store additional data and manage more users, but with SharePoint Online, maintaining the system is the same irrespective of the number of users.

Today managing the platform becomes more than just managing user licenses than about scalability. In terms of storage space Microsoft allows individual site collections to hold a terabyte of information, and the several licensing options available which helps large or medium scale enterprises to control costs.

Below given are some key benefits of using this tool for the enterprise information management.

Instead of using on-premises solution, the new SharePoint Online takes over some backup and recovery duties. This easily helps organization for the dependency on third-party solutions these routine tasks as well as tracking and auditing exactly server performance.

A recent update of SharePoint Online allows any organization to receive updates and utilized new features. For example a busiest month like March might not be the best time to think about new SharePoint features. Previously, these updates are implemented on Microsoft’s schedule, and might throw users if the timing was inconvenient. Now, with SharePoint online get a dashboard for these changes that allow easy process of scheduling or delay some platform improvements.

1. Adding mobility without compromising security:

SharePoint Online gives in the cloud to keep enterprise information management behind virtual private network. This configuration would ensure the content could only be accessed over the company’s network while providing mobility and flexibility for users, all without having to create additional infrastructure for authentication.

2. Hybrid deployments:

Large organizations choose to use a hybrid cloud environment, in which highly secure information, which remains on-premises, while everyday collaboration requires moving to the cloud. SharePoint online stores, personal file shares and personal profiles in the cloud using One Drive, and enterprise to look across in on-premises and cloud environments.

3. Cost control:

Today all the organizations flexible ways to bring collaboration solutions and functions of their workforce while reducing significant cost of the overall cost of the infrastructure. The SharePoint Online helps manage these costs. Depending on the arrangements with Microsoft could use inexpensive, limited licenses for many companies to keep costs down.

4. SharePoint Online allow the easy Microsoft Integration:

SharePoint has been around for 10 years, and like most other Microsoft tools it has slowly matured into prominence. There are still other great tools in the portal marketplace, but when companies look at productivity and driving adoption, this tool dominates its competition by natively integrating with Microsoft Office. While this may seem as another obvious benefit, these features have grown as Office has developed. With Office Web Apps a user not require to leave a browser to accomplish their daily activities.

5. SharePoint Online Centralize entire Content Management:

With the SharePoint Online suite included in Office 365 that are able to create a Public facing website, an Intranet, and any number of collaborative solutions all in a single location. Centralizing an organization's content management creates a strong core of power users that are consistently using the system and can easily identify key points that the system supports.

These five advantages make SharePoint Online an Ideal enterprise information management solution.  Apart got this organization gets the unified collaboration suite with Yammer and SharePoint.  Thus, it helps companies to increase the collaboration.

REST API – Effective solutions to solve development issue involved in the SharePoint development

SharePoint is one of the most popular platforms which is highly used and several professionals and enterprises have built many applications using the SharePoint Object Model. SharePoint developers can easily able to develop Web parts and have access to the SharePoint’s Server-Side Object Model which allows developers to callSharePoint data and perform various operations.

The problem in the SharePoint 2010 version:

In SharePoint 2010, if developers want to customize or add new features to SharePoint, the only way is to install code which might be also untrusted directly into SharePoint's servers. However, sandbox solutions existed; the restrictions applied which forced SharePoint Developers to run even entrusted custom code, in full-trust mode.

There is an issue which rises when running fully trusted code in SharePoint 2010 as it might destabilize the entire farm and in this version it is challenge to migrate to newer versions of SharePoint. As the code made use of SSOM and ran as a part of SharePoint Processes, there are distinct change of high memory consumption and CPU utilization. So to manage the code well, it became an overhead for developers to know SSOM objects and utilize them appropriately to reduce memory allocation issues.

How REST API helps in SharePoint Programming?

In the SharePoint 2010, SOAP based web development services were provided for performing data operations, but finally it is SSOM that mostly used to create programs with SOAP. But, this lead to bulky data transfers. Because of this issue the new set of APIs introduced for developing SharePoint solutions which is known as a REST API.

In 2010 version of the SharePoint developers were provided with Client Side Object Model which gives them an ability of accessing SharePoint functionality in the remote client applications like sliver light.

The protocols that used by CSOM used to talk to SharePoint are XML and JSON so that other systems can also make HTTP requests to the SharePoint Data. But, one limitation of this feature is that it has provided API support for SharePoint based Sites, Lists and Documents.

Improvement given in the SharePoint 2013 version:

But, In the SharePoint 2013, a new API support has been added along with the already exist one SharePoint 2010. This provides access to APIs in several forms, to help development of remote applications using REST for .NET as well as for working with frameworks other than .NET. With this new set of APIs, if developers want to use client applications not using managed code or Silverlight technology then they can consider the use of REST to read/write data from and to SharePoint.

The fact that this REST API not requires any type of reference to assembles and it allows developers to manage and limit the footprint of the web applications. It is certainly an important consideration especially when building mobile apps for Windows Phone developed using HTML and JavaScript. One of the biggest advantages of this API is that developer can use of JavaScript libraries like, jQuery, Knockout, Angular to develop SharePoint applications, using the skill sets that most developers are familiar.