INTRODUCTION

This article is a series. The previous article can be found here Part 2.

Another pitfall that we may encounter is an expectation that Sharepoint can do everything. Well, can it do everything? IT CAN but with how much customisations?

First of all, it’s actually safe to say that Sharepoint is a custom application built on top of .NET framework in which you can pretty much build anything you want on top. However, Sharepoint has been developed and designed a specific way to serve a particular purpose so that it can perform its functions most efficiently.

Same with a mobile phone, I can use it to be a book marker, I can use it to hold my broken chair, I can use it to watch videos and browsing Facebook, etc. But it’s performing most efficiently if it’s used for calling and sending SMS.

Sharepoint is like that, too. You can always build custom feature receivers, page layouts, master pages, etc to achieve whatever you want, but it may take a lot of time to do. There may be other tools that can perform what you require a lot quicker and with minor modifications.

This has been a pitfall in Sharepoint engagement. Sure Sharepoint can automatically send flowers to someone you love on her birthday but you will need to develop custom lists, payment gateway processing, content types and fields, add-to-cart functionality, etc etc etc which an off-the-shelves shopping-cart application can just do straightaway.

HOW TO DEAL WITH THE SITUATION

So, what I can suggest is, do not just sell Sharepoint for the sake of it. But instead, find out what the client truly needs first and let Sharepoint be one of the technologies you can offer to achieve what’s required (does this make sense?).

If they need to provide online shopping capability then why use Sharepoint. They can simply deploy a simple and cheap shopping cart application and let Sharepoint be the point of collaboration (eg. viewing sales reports, etc).

Cheers,

Tommy