SharePoint adoption has increased as business owners have realized the fact that various sophisticated applications can be developed and implemented using the platform. Since businesses are always inevitably changing, developers too have to face the challenges to create out of the box features and modules that are custom developed to meet the specific requirements.

One of SharePoint’s main strengths is that it already has ready components like authorization system, security, user interfaces and developers can directly focus on the business needs through this existing user interface.

The success of SharePoint developers always depends on the effective use of best practice methodologies and their ability to understand how to take advantages of third party add-ons and services for developing customized solutions.

So, let us discuss in this blog, some of the best practices that the developers should follow while building customized SharePoint solutions.

Some challenges that the developers face with SharePoint customization:

Extremely tight deadlines: One issue that every developer usually faces is the competing demands of schedule, resources and functionality, which has to be completed within the fixed timeline. The demands of the customers may be very high and you may find it quite difficult to develop a fairly functional solution within time.

Configure versus custom coding: Creating customized solutions often involve the decision of whether to rely on custom coding or to configure SharePoint solutions. The best practices states that leveraging out of the box features of SharePoint is the best approach possible as the solution will be easy to develop and maintain.

A flood of changes are requested: Another most significant point for the developers is to respond to the changes that are requested from the end users. Such users usually identify enhancements that they would like and collecting and filtering these are definitely a challenging task.

Best key practices to manage these pains successfully:

Empower your users with Reusable solutions: To reduce some pressure on the developers, you can empower your staffs to use some creative solutions that fit their needs with little support. When such empowered users request for help, the users also tend to be directly engaged and are more aware of the platform. Latest SharePoint version has included many enhancements that make customized development mature and a feature rich experience. Microsoft certified partner organizations are particularly useful as they have easy access to various SharePoint tools and resources that other organizations may not have.

Manage change requests effectively: There are multiple tools that are designed to help the development team manage the change request effectively. Here is the process that you should follow

• Request tracking: Try to track similar requests that can act as ideal systems in different areas also. The ability to add attachments, status information and notes are often very helpful.
• Source control: This is important to maintain a well-documented development life cycle. This serves as a way to securely store source code for customized solutions and also provides the audit trail for each part of the process that includes information like who worked on that part of the solution. When the user asks a follow up question, source control can help to easily find an answer.
• Automation: Implementing a repeatable script for testing and deploying a solution has its own benefits. It automates many necessary tasks for new build of the solution, freeing the time and allowing the developers to focus on the problem domain.

Separate the user interface from data or Login: A customized design always separates the user interface from the business data and logic. This makes the solution more testable, reusable and more likely to meet the future requirement changes that are likely to come. The main lesson is to separate the page design from the content creation.

Manage deployments carefully: After the development work is completed, the new solution must be deployed in the proper environment.  The developer also plays an important role here by adhering to the corporate governance and by properly packaging the solutions.

• Multiple environments: The development or test environment is useful when it reflects the configurations of the production environment. There are various SharePoint tools that can help to keep the environments in sync.
• Governance: There are many organizations using SharePoint that doesn’t allow custom code solutions in their environment. There may be limitations even on third party tools. SharePoint developers must consider these factors before determining how they will deliver their solutions to the end users.
• Packaging: Another recommended best practice for customized solutions is to create a package, which can be easily deployed by a SharePoint organization by an administrator. This can also be deactivated if desired. This practice is not only beneficial for the SharePoint administration engineers, but also for the developers allowing them to provide solutions in a repeatable way.

Thus to conclude, your SharePoint development team does not need to be overwhelmed by customized development requests. Providing the users the right tools and third party add-ons can empower them to employ good designs and add more flexibility and reusability to the solutions. Together, these best practices help to gain the most valued from the SharePoint investment.