SharePoint-Videos.com offers a lot of video training content on the new App Model for SharePoint® 2013. This content includes:

• a broad overview on beginning to implement the new model, authored by Steve Fox, a Director at Microsoft Services
• a set on using the new model, which is authored by Yaroslav Pentsarskyy, a widely respected subject matter expert on related topics, and a published author
• JavaScript and jQuery, a scripting language, and functions library, respectively, are presented in yet another set on the new App Model; the author of this final set is Mr. Marc D. Anderson, another subject matter expert, and published author on related topics

So it may be fair for readers to ask “why all the attention”? A direct answer is the new SharePoint App Model is a big deal. As Ed Hild of Microsoft has defined in a blog post titled A Perspective On SharePoint 2013’s App Model, Part One this renovation, one can argue, redefines SharePoint itself. For enterprise businesses adopting the new methods, SharePoint will no longer likely appear as an ambiguous hybrid combination of ” . . . product or platform . . .” (quoted from Mr. Hild’s blog post).

Mr. Hild argues this ambiguity spawned a number of difficulties for enterprise IT organizations and internal Line of Business (LoB) units:

1. Custom applications, meant to service specific LoBs, nevertheless had to be built as farm solutions. Farm solutions ran directly on the server, which is, traditionally, the administrative and support responsibility of enterprise IT. So, defacto, enterprise IT had to assume administrative and support responsibilities for the custom applications, themselves.
2. Upgrade cycles (even enterprise wide fixes, I would argue) could not be implemented by enterprise IT for fear these custom applications for LoBs would break. The result? SharePoint wasn’t upgraded. In some cases, fixes weren’t implemented.
3. Enterprise-wide SharePoint performance, and, worse yet, security were exposed by custom farm solutions. Enterprise IT may not have certified the coding, but, nonetheless, had to shoulder the responsibility for it as part of its mandate to maintain quality of service standards.
4. LoBs often had to “do without” the custom solutions they legitimately needed as the result of 1-3, above.

As one member of our team, I would encourage readers to take a look at Mr. Hild’s post. Better yet, read it and then sample the summaries of the video tutorial content sets we offer on the new App Model. Please contact me directly. I’ll be happy to elaborate on this perspective.

Ira Michael Blonder

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