Overview
By using SharePoint, businesses can create the following types of applications:
- Applications with comprehensive content management capabilities.
- Applications with collaborative spaces to share information.
- Applications that can integrate with external line-of-business (LOB) services.
Additionally, it provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.
Developing SharePoint Applications helps architects and developers design, build, test, and deploy enterprise-scale SharePoint applications. A reference implementation named the Partner Portal application is based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It shows how to develop a content-oriented, collaborative application that integrates LOB data for a partner extranet using several cooperating sites.
Another reference implementation, the Training Management application, is based on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0. It shows how to build a single site, intranet SharePoint application.
The SharePoint Guidance Library includes a set of reusable components that is helpful when you develop your own SharePoint applications. They were created in response to the challenges of building the Partner Portal application.
This guidance covers the following subjects in the context of SharePoint applications:
- It describes how to use application and design patterns to help solve common development challenges.
- It describes the design and use of the SharePoint Guidance Library, which is a set of reusable components.
- It describes how to design and secure a site topology.
- It describes how to design and implement an application that is scalable, manageable, and configurable.
- It describes how to integrate a SharePoint application with Web services. This includes security options and design tradeoffs.
- It describes how to develop a SharePoint application that can publish and deploy content.
- It describes flexible approaches to navigation and branding, including how to implement custom cross-site collection global navigation and custom site navigation.
- It includes guidance on many of the common decisions that developers encounter, such as choosing between a list and database.
- It includes implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Partner Portal application, the Training Management application, and in the QuickStarts.
- It includes guidance on testing. For example, there are discussions on unit tests, build verification tests, and continuous integration tests.
- It includes a discussion of scale and stress testing that uses the Partner Portal application as an example.
- It describes how to set up different team build and testing environments.
- It describes how to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
- It describes a team-based application development.
For more complete information about the topics in the guidance, see Topics at a Glance. The guidance incorporates the content and Training Management reference implementation provided in the previous release of SharePoint Guidance. The guidance does not address how to build Internet-scale SharePoint applications or multilingual SharePoint applications.