A Little Misguided...

I was recently at the Independence Day (4th of July) fireworks in my local community and began talking with an acquaintance who attends my place of worship with his family (our wives know each other pretty well, I got to know him a little better that evening). He works for a local non-profit and explained to me that the non-profit had just recently started using Office 365. I naturally congratulated him on the move and showed him some of my SharePoint-hosted app development work. The president of the non-profit organization also attends our place of worship, and, upon seeing him the following Sunday, I advised him to give me a call if he ever needed any assistance with Office 365 and SharePoint Online in particular. I explained to him that I had several years of experience with the Office 365 platform and have been developing custom solutions for SharePoint.

What he said next absolutely floored me. It went something to the effect of "yeah, we got Office 365 and SharePoint hoping to reduce the need for a developer..."

What???? Huh?

I'm just speculating here, but it appears that no one had informed the organization head (who happens to be a lawyer by trade) that SharePoint ebbs and flows with additions and deprecations of features and needs a steady support system in place in the organization to make SharePoint a viable solution for long-term use. What is offered out-of-the-box changes with every new version of SharePoint and customizations are occasionally required to keep SharePoint on par with the needs of the business. One key deprecation that is a case-in-point is Microsoft's announcement of the removal of the SharePoint Online public facing website from the Office 365 offerings. Not being a very quick-witted individual, I knew he was misguided in his thinking about SharePoint but didn't know at the time how to politely convey this to him, so I said nothing more on the subject other than a friendly reminder to call me if he ever ran into any trouble.

What's the moral?

When you implement SharePoint, implement it with the mindset that SharePoint is a complex tool that can do many, many things for your organization but it does not eliminate the need for one of your biggest organizational assets - your web developer - your prized Swiss Army knife that solves many of your most complex business challenges with thoughtful solutions. To get the most out of SharePoint, some critical skills - like HTML and even some JavaScript - that only your web developer can provide are still required.

New Add-in Available for SharePoint Online / SharePoint 2013

Now available in the Office 365 App Store, Course Scheduler provides an easy-to-use way of scheduling courses or webinars in your SharePoint 2013 site and allowing site users (with at least contribute permissions to the host web (parent site) to enroll in those courses. Admin users must have at least Manage and preferably Full Control permissions on the host web to add course catalog items as well as courses and announcements (news).

The store listing can be found here.

This add-in follows the spirit of the SharePoint 2007 "Fab-40" template called Event Registration and is now available for purchase. I used CAML queries and JavaScript along with the JS libraries JQuery and Moment.js. Before you get too excited, this is NOT a full learning management system (LMS). There is a very good LMS add-in available through LMS365 (http://www.lms365.com). This add-in is a simple, low-cost means of scheduling training and allowing users to sign up for those courses.

This is the first Office 365 Store Add-in that I've released. Here's to hoping for many more to come!

LightSwitch... Or Not.

As Microsoft often does, it took a great tool in LightSwitch, which had gained a pretty hard-core following of power users, citizen developers, business analysts, and even some seasoned developers, and completely threw it into the ditch, without any further, substantive explanation, just like it did for Silverlight.

How do we know this change is permanent?

1) They made no (I repeat, NO!) improvements to LightSwitch in the Visual Studio 2015 release candidate. It's a small wonder they included it at all.

2) Andy Kung left Microsoft.

3) Beth Massi (or whatever her married name is now) is also no longer doing LightSwitch content.

4) Jay Schmelzer so eloquently danced around the topic better than any Democrat politician could ever do when it was brought up during a podcast. Pertinent comments start around the 5:00 mark in the podcast.

So... what's next? I wrote previously that learning skills like JavaScript, JQuery, and CSS would be vital for survival in the SharePoint world. This assertion still resounds true today.  Another stack that I have just recently started learning is asp.net MVC, used in conjunction with Entity Framework. This development toolset, like LightSwitch (though in a much different way than LightSwitch), handles much of the data source connectivity for you and it JUST... WORKS. You can still work with fully relational datasets, created either by code-first or by scaffolding via Entity Framework. Code can be generated for you while still customizing the business logic, but you will still need to know HTML. HTML helpers and RAZOR syntax help shorten the code required to render the output.

Microsoft Virtual Academy has some great resources on MVC and Entity Framework featuring Christopher Harrison. Just search for MVC and Entity Framework.

The biggest disadvantage is the difficulty of implementing file / database relationships, which was very easy in LightSwitch, though "Mike" shows how to do both database and file system storage and relationships here. Interaction with SharePoint lists and libraries is exclusively through javascript and is still tedious enough that I wouldn't recommend it in good conscience to non-developers.

Takeaway for today - LightSwitch isn't dead, but it's future looks grim at best and appears to be marked for deletion. I suspect the same will occur with Access 2013 Web Apps. If you're trying to do anything with some Microsoft tool that isn't part of the .net core stack, don't count on it being there in two years.

The Future of Rapid-Development, No-Code Business Applications

As a follow up to my previous post on Access 2013 Web Apps and the fact that Microsoft will be discontinuing any further development of the InfoPath product, a major question remains on the future of custom forms development and data-driven business applications. I submit to you, in my humble opinion, that Visual Studio LightSwitch will be tabbed as the primary tool for rapid development business applications. LightSwitch has many options for creating, consuming, and exposing data. LightSwitch includes robust validation, easy screen customization, and the ability for coders to take their applications to the next level, but isn't necessary for business users who want to build nice, responsive (mobile device-friendly), data-driven applications.  The data can be external data stored in SharePoint, SQL Azure, and other common data sources, yet LightSwitch can also create its own data entities and relationships that it stores and exposes as OData through web services.  Access 2013 is good for quick prototyping, but as I'm finding out, its UI is not very customizable and has an overall data storage limit of 1 GB.

LightSwitch and its SharePoint-specific tooling known as Cloud Business Applications is available as a free add-on to the Visual Studio Community developer suite.

Other nice to have skills are HTML, JavaScript, and T-SQL. T-SQL is a necessary skillset if you want to host your data in SQL Azure.

Today's Worst Mis-Titled Job Description Award Goes To...

The Pew Charitable Trusts!

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/17632795?trk=job_view_similar_jobs

From their "SharePoint Administrator" job post...

"Position Overview:
The SharePoint Administrator will be responsible maintaining the organization’s SharePoint platform and several custom applications developed on the platform. In addition the Administrator will manage changes and enhancements to a handful of other custom .Net applications. "

"Design, implement, test and deploy  Share Point custom features  and packages, 2007/2010/2013 solutions programmed in ASP.NET/C# with particular attention to user interface design."

"Demonstrated experience  in Microsoft .NET development technologies, including Visual Studio 2012, C#, ASP.NET,  HTML, CSS, JavaScript,  LINQ, WCF, Silverlight, AJAX,CAML,XML,  XSLT, REST, and DOM "

DEVELOPER!  Not Administrator.

Sorry, but this is unacceptable for the recruiter or the hiring manager who labeled this as a SharePoint Administrator position when it is clearly a SharePoint Developer position.

Don't let this happen to you.
 

If Your Job Posting Contains "SharePoint Online"

If you are an employer and your job description contains the phrase "SharePoint Online", like any of these, you can expect that candidates seeking a 100% telecommute position are going to come knocking your door down, even if you do not advertise the position as a telecommute position - and rightfully so. If SharePoint Online offerings (part of Microsoft Office 365) can be accessed from any location via an Internet connection, those who are applying for positions to support this platform should be able to perform that support from any location, including their homes. Onsite support can be replaced by Lync video conferencing (if you subscribe to a plan that includes Lync) and possibly a phone call. Isn't mobility and location independence one of the core drivers of Office 365? Microsoft certainly thinks so, and I would have to agree with them.

Recent Announcement from Microsoft Could Affect Your Skillset Recruitment Efforts

So, Microsoft has officially announced that InfoPath 2013 will be the final version of InfoPath, but will support its use in its existing forms until 2023. Okay... so now what?

At SPCON2014, Microsoft has stated, in more detail, that it will shift its forms development platform from InfoPath back to Access 2013 and Excel, and that future versions of Microsoft Word will be enhanced to include additional forms capability to replace InfoPath.

In fact, Microsoft has made HEAVY investments into Access 2013 and subsequent releases as the new SharePoint 2013 Web Apps are also SharePoint Apps that can be packaged and monetized in the Office 365 SharePoint Store and in an enterprise's corporate App Catalog. Microsoft is actively polling for insights on how to beef up / improve future releases of Access even more.

As a recruiter, it will probably be in your best interest to, for now, still consider candidates that have expertise in InfoPath. However, you should probably give equal consideration to those users who have past experience in Microsoft Access for SharePoint Business Analyst / Power User openings.

As I have recommended before, obtaining an E3 subscription of Office 365 ensures that you will have access to the LATEST that Microsoft has to offer in terms of power user / citizen developer tools. Give Office 365 a free trial today!