eBig Best Practices SIG: No Code SharePoint May 6, 2009

For many years, "the business" in enterprises has gone around IT because IT can't get them solutions fast enough. In the classic example, organizations order Microsoft Excel on their departmental budgets, using it in creative ways to compensate for the limitations of their enterprise systems.

To address this, software development platforms have attempted to reduce or eliminate the need for developers to write code. Do you recall the "no code" solutions promised by some 3GLs and 4GLs? Since then, and seemingly always, users have had the desire to create their own solutions, and to some degree, own the know-how for doing it.

In recent years, the Microsoft SharePoint platform has gained widespread use. One of SharePoint's capabilities is the ability to create "no code solutions" or "almost no code solutions". SharePoint requires serious commitment from organizations trying to use it. In some organizations, the users actually tell IT they want it (and some users have told IT to put it up and they will learn it themselves). This approach typically crashes more often than it succeeds. But user requests such as this illustrate their ongoing hunger for more control.

SharePoint has a massive front-end, administration and development surface area. This talk will give a high-level overview of this, but most of it is beyond the scope of the talk. Instead, the focus will be on user-perceivable function and architecture.

No code and almost no code approaches still have many kinks to work out. But they do point towards a future where a new kind of business analyst and some educated users can use a platform like SharePoint and its tools to create prototypes if not applications in the timeframe that business requires.

Presenter:
Roger Williams, Consultant for Franklin Laboratory

Free for eBig Members, $10 at the door for non-members.

Official Website: http://www.ebig.org