Over the past few years as we’ve been involved with developing
You’re perfectly able to get some actually-useful (!) things done without this, but we have always ended up having to go that bit further – there’s only so much a workflow can get done, sometimes you need some special business logic wrapped up in there and as great as JavaScript is it is essentially client side – not sitting on the server in the back where all the guts of the business are.
So… this brings something of a problem when you either try to move an existing solution into a hosted platform, or develop in place on a hosted platform. As we’ve found out with our work on the Microsoft BPOS platform – which we’re big fans of, or on other hosted SharePoint platforms – for example that of Star and their Flex platform – which is also a very competent platform. These and others, as far as we can work out, provide no way to access what you might call the guts-n-bolts of SharePoint – which thinking about it is obvious – they are (or appear to be) multi-tenanted – so there is no way that you should be able to get round-the-back. Nor have we been able to upload an existing site developed off platform into their hosted infrastructure – because you cant get to the Central Admin site to restore from backup – because its multitenant….
And this is the dilemma – is hosted (multi-tenanted) SharePoint of various flavours really something that a serious business could use?
The pricing and simplicity of it can make it attractive when you look at the costs for a properly licensed SharePoint installation – I’d suggest that it looks like an attractive bolt-on if you’re going for a hosted email solution for example – “ we could use that at some point in the future…” - but the reality is that if you want to get some serious business done on it that its a platform in this guise you should side-step.
Single-tenant hosted SharePoint, dedicated server with SharePoint on it – very different propositions….
