What if you are a little SharePoint, and how to live with it?

It so happened that my work over the past 6 years is related to Microsoft SharePoint Server. In this article, I do not want to find out whether this is good or not, but I would like to help those who have already chosen this path or are just eyeing it. Considering that SharePoint is almost not taught in universities, it is rather difficult to start working with this technology on your own. More often the picture is as follows: the company takes a .Net programmer and starts pumping it.

In business, it is not knowledge that is valued, but the ability to set and achieve results, generate profits, and increase efficiency. In other words, you must have competencies that reflect your ability to apply knowledge and experience. Moreover, knowledge and experience should go inseparably, no one needs at work a theoretical professor or bruised tester, these are too great risks, uncontrollable and unpredictable.


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How to grow?

As you know, a successful career requires knowledge and experience. Experience can be obtained only in real projects, but for this you need at least basic knowledge, and from that I will begin.

For the start of a good set of videos on the sites TechDays and Channel9 . There are excellent video courses on the Pluralsight website, they are paid, but worth it - very detailed and useful at any stage (by the way, there are courses not only on SharePoint, for example, there is a completely furious course on .Net, where even the differences in optimizing free memory .Net 2.0 and .Net 4.5). But Critical Path Training often conducts free webinars or uploads records . For reference, Critical Path Training is perhaps the largest cluster of MVP for SharePoint.

To solve problems, go to the forums, but there are very few of them: GotDotNet , MSDN forum , StackExchange .

According to the current version of SharePoint 2013, few books have been published so far, but the old versions of books are much larger, moreover, both as a purely programmer and a higher architectural level. Anton Vishnyakov has a good selection of books on all versions of SharePoint.

To keep abreast of all the new products, it is useful to attend Microsoft conferences, for example, TechEd, Platform and others. Not necessarily present, you can watch the webcast. A list of all upcoming conferences, as well as records of the past, you can see on the Microsoft website in the Events section .

Do not forget about the section on SharePoint on MSDN , which lists all the manuals for deploying and configuring the system. Pay attention to the section “Technical diagrams” , there is a lot of information on building solutions on SharePoint, but there are also disadvantages to this section - there is a lot of information, sometimes you can not even find what you need.

The problem of quality is central in this direction; here, as in any business, the main thing is not to stop developing. You need to know several versions of SharePoint, not just the latest, because there are always many integration and migration tasks. New versions of SharePoint come out about once every 3 years, the differences in the versions are quite substantial, the architecture or approach to development often changes, that is, a lot of time should be put in for training right away. Throw for half a year or a year and lag far behind.

Experience can be obtained only by working in the project. The easiest way is to find a company that is ready to take a Junior developer for growth. There are many such companies, because there are few specialists in the market. Another option to gain experience is to start creating separate components, solutions. For example, you can join the project or create something of your own at CodePlex , there is the greatest concentration of SharePoint projects.

What are the ways of development?

So, you are a .Net programmer, which means you can learn MVC, a couple of CMS and make money creating public sites. The downside of this path is that all orders will be small, well, medium, but no more.

Another way is what is called Enterprise. Here SharePoint, CRM, Navision, Axapta, Project Server, BizTalk and more. There is a big salary. It is very difficult, but very interesting. Once you are at the junction of technology, experience will avalanche grow, if you want, you don’t want, you will understand several related industries, you will learn to interact with other huge and cumbersome systems, when you cannot approach and ask the web service method to rewrite.

If you are interested in the Microsoft product line, then SharePoint is the best simulator for studying all products:

• A corporate portal that works with an IIS web server uses a SQL Server database, integrates with Active Directory and requires a certain culture of its maintenance. Chaos and disorder is discovered immediately, you have to accustom yourself to the correct infrastructure;
• integration with Exchange, Lync, Office;
• subtleties of proxy settings, scaling, building a logical architecture.

All this will quickly teach you about the features of enterprise development.



Can you create a web part in ASP.Net? So you can already start developing for SharePoint. Yes, quality will be lame at first, but you are already solving business problems.

Where to grow?

A SharePoint programmer eventually grows to a leading programmer, who can either be simply the best, or show management skills, and then Team Lead will become. But not everyone wants to take responsibility for terms and quality, some are more comfortable to work when they are given a task. This is also good, otherwise it will end with Peter’s principle . In more detail, I presented in the figure below.



I would especially like to draw your attention to the issue of communications Team Lead and Architect. This is an important skill, along with knowledge of the platform. If you do not learn to communicate with users, customers, managers, the result will be deplorable.

Other roles in the project (analysts, administrators, implementers ...) are presented on the map at http://www.mindmeister.com/326099311/sharepoint .

If you know any other useful resources for learning SharePoint, then lay out in the comments, I'm sure this information will be useful to all.

useful links

Video courses:
Techdays
Channel 9
Pluralsight
Critical Path Training

Forums:
GotDotNet
MSDN forum
StackExchange

Selection of books on all versions of SharePoint by Anton Vishnyakov

List of conferences:
Microsoft Events section

Sections on MSDN:
SharePoint on MSDN
Technical diagrams

Resource source code CodePlex .

Roman Polyakov, leading developer SharePoint ADV / web-engineering