Making SharePoint a truly adaptive, responsive interface is no simple task.
Firstly, we need to decide if getting a full mobile experience out of SharePoint is a worthwhile endeavor. Should we invest our time (and client money) to develop a mobility framework within SharePoint that will actually work. In some cases the answer is yeah OK that makes sense but when the style of the application is important and specifically the mobile / device rendering of that style is highly important the challenges definitely outweigh the wins. Secondly, how tied to SharePoint is the application? Do we rely heavily on the SharePoint platform to deliver large parts of the application? If so then we might reconsider the above. If not, then what are our best options. The one resounding success we've had here at Resonate IT is our mix of SharePoint and AngujarJS - we've named this approach our Shangular not only because it sounds like like an earthly paradise (see Shangri-La) and we love spending time there! This has become somewhat of a framework for us lately. In very basic terms we utilise the underlying platform SharePoint provides to take advantage of simple data structures, authentication, workflow and similar whilst we build the application itself using the ultra-modern AngularJS framework. We generally host these pages in the SharePoint 'hive' (_layouts/app). So far this technique has helped us deliver a number of very successful enterprise applications in a way that clearly differentiates us from the competition. The projects include:
Here's a little taster of one of our recent Shangular's:
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Recently, a number of clients, technical and business alike have asked about the future of SharePoint development. where is it going, is it falling behind...
We've answered these questions more by introspection than direction from anywhere else. As a business we changed the way we develop about 12-18 months ago, we did this as a reaction to other, non-SharePoint, projects we were working on in an appreciation of the maturity of frameworks such as AngularJS and toolsets like Telerik - the integration between which is seamless and simple. It's good to see that the decision we made wasn't a diversion from the norm and that even the developing standards are following a similar route. Here are a couple of links that will help describe where this is going and help understand the technical aspects of developing in this vein. Framework Developer: dev.office.com/blogs/sharepoint-framework-developer-preview-release Framework Client Webpart dev.office.com/blogs/building-simple-sharepoint-framework-client-web-part One thing we also find exiting here is that as developers, we will be able to develop SharePoint applications (complex ones) without the need of a full on SharePoint implementation on the development machine. So today is our 5th day here in Ghana with the TPSCO guys.. We've been working non stop to get RiskPoynt ready for production and the hard-work is finally paying off as we transition the tool into Tullow's QA environment.
Currently I'm running through the KPI module testing and updating all translation items while Twisty concentrates on Risk Assessment creation and Steve does Oracle stuff!!! ...but he did. Here he is on his way to Ghana with TPSCO.
Coding the Risk Management software whilst checking flight progress - model employee, well done Andres. Andrew and Andrey helping our support partners get to the bottom some pretty big systems / applications.
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