SharePoint Dragons

When you’re a developer or IT Pro working with SharePoint 2013, you’d better bookmark these two links:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662513.aspx , provides an overview of the administrative and service accounts you need for a SharePoint 2013 installation.
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678863.aspx , describes SharePoint 2013 administrative and service account permissions for SQL Server, the File System, File Shares, and Registry entries.

A general overview of SharePoint 2013 Best Practices can be viewed here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12438.sharepoint-2013-best-practices.aspx

SharePoint 2013 Apps can’t communicate with each other (hey, did we just address a new feature for Apps vNext, the App communication framework? We bet your hat it is). But since SharePoint 2013 can interact with parent SharePoint sites, it might be a good idea to create lists and libraries in one of the parent SharePoint sites if you want multiple Apps to access them or need to establish basic interaction between multiple Apps.

What’s the ideal dev machine now that SharePoint 2013 no longer supports being installed on a client OS? Probably run a Windows Server 2012 virtual machine using Hyper-V on Windows 8, with at least 24 GB.

Although it’s still really early in the life of the SharePoint Store, it will be interesting to see how and if a potential issue will be resolved. The enterprise market is a totally different one than, let’s say, the smart phone market. Although it’s certainly possible that a one-man developer shop creates a valuable SharePoint App, and, through the SharePoint Store has no trouble reaching a huge audience, it remains to be seen if companies are willing to put enough trust in unknown smaller vendors to buy and/or use their Apps within their own SharePoint environments. We did notice that most of the Apps that are currently available ask for Full permissions, almost by convenience. We’re afraid that this will become the trend. It will definitely help smaller vendors trying to sell their Apps if they limit themselves in their needs for permissions.

Thus far, branding solutions have been proposed as likely and logical candidates for Apps that will be sold via the SharePoint Store. We have our doubts, in our experience the selling of branding solutions hasn’t really taken off so far. People are eager to try free branding additions, presumably often using them for presentation purposes. Paying for these solutions is another thing, as most companies have a strict set of rules and principles in place regarding company design in software applications. We’ll be curious to see if the App model will be able to change all this. We may have missed it, but it seems that the current SharePoint Store offering is of yet lacking in this area.