Deciding Whether Development Is Required to Meet Business Needs

When embarking on a development project in Microsoft SharePoint 2010, there are several important criteria to consider so that the developer has the proper tools to complete the task at hand. An initial question to ask is whether SharePoint 2010 offers tools out-of-the-box that might provide the functionality required. Some investigation in this area might save the developer many hours of needless labor.

For example, some of the lesser-known web parts (such as the Content Query Web Part, Content Editor Web Part, or Page Viewer Web Part) provide functionality that can be leveraged and extended to meet more complex business needs. Many tips exist for pasting JavaScript into the Content Editor Web Part to perform a wide variety of tasks.

SharePoint web parts can be connected to each other, enabling one list to filter the contents of another list. Connected web parts enable a selection in one list to filter the contents that display in another list. Although the functionality is limited to single column joins, the relative ease of connecting web parts should not be overlooked as a possible solution and is leveraged in many dashboard configurations to enable a user interaction with the data displayed.

In SharePoint 2010, to support the connected web part features, the underlying lists and libraries can now maintain enforced relationships among each other using the lookup column, as covered in Chapter 22, “Managing Metadata and Content Types in SharePoint 2010.” New in SharePoint 2010, lookup columns can spawn additional columns from the source list into the host list that contains the lookup column. Calculated columns allow SharePoint administrators and developers alike to complete many of the same calculations that Excel supports, including advanced string, date, and number operations. Although the functionality is fairly limited, this just might satisfy the business owner’s requirements.

Content types are another overlooked and often misunderstood feature in SharePoint that, when used properly, can reduce the need for custom programming. Content types are in use throughout SharePoint from lists and libraries to article pages and are heavily used under the hood by InfoPath Forms Services. Creative use of content types is a powerful way of providing enhanced behavior, metadata, and workflows, ultimately providing the user with a rich and intuitive experience.

There are also many possibilities provided by features such as alerts, tasks, project tasks, or out-of-the-box workflows that push information to users of the SharePoint environment. Creative SharePoint administrators have long used alerts as simple workflows, because they push a limited amount of information to end users based on changes that take place in lists and libraries.

Assuming this due diligence has been performed, and the desired functionality was not readily attainable, it is time to look into SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. This chapter demonstrates several different methods to harness the features provided by the two very different applications.