First blog post!

Time for an introduction for myself I suppose; my name’s Sam Betts, I’m an Enterprise & Developer Support engineer in Microsoft with several years of developing and/or supporting SharePoint projects and installations of both large & small scale. I’m planning at documenting all the lessons I’ve learnt along the way, with the help of my good friend Tristan the Cat who helps me out when he can. Yep; you read that right, Tristan the Cat is a great companion for figuring out SharePoint issues – here he is:

In this blog I’ll be writing about SharePoint from a system development point-of-view covering why I feel SharePoint can be a great platform to build on and how it solves some very common development issues quite nicely. It’s not perfect for all things of course, but there’re one or two development pains it specifically handles very nicely, so that’s what I want to blog about. Yep.

In fact, who knows where this’ll go but I thought I’d state my intentions at least.

Why This Blog?

Quite simply, I believe quite firmly SharePoint is a great web/application-development platform and people don’t know why yet. There are ways of making fairly simple apps very easily for the non-skilled and ways of delivering extremely complex systems automatically - Tristan the Cat & myself are hoping to show how, as frankly there’s not much material on this from what I’ve seen – it’s a very understudied area of system design, partly because developing in SharePoint is relatively new.

Also, you don’t even need to have a SharePoint environment setup if you don’t want or have your own – there are cloud-hosted options that take the pain of admin & worrying about your own system quite nicely, which makes SharePoint apps even more attractive IMO.

I’m hoping that if I document some real-life examples of where SharePoint comes into its own in a typical development lifecycle then more people will consider it as an option. SharePoint as a product is relatively new but is also one of our fastest growing products so it’s potential, in my opinion, has yet to be fully appreciated by the community at large – I’m hoping to do my bit to change that.

So check back here for cat-themed posts along these lines!