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I am trying to develop web application but I can't decide which framework to choose for front-end.
I could use Vue.js, Angular, React or Vanilla.js.
What are the parameters we need to consider while choosing front-end technology?
Stage of your business Your technology stack plays an important role at every stage of your business. If you’re just starting out, your primary goal must be launch the MVP as quickly as possible. Any language/framework/CMS tool that lets you put together a working prototype in the shortest possible time should be a good fit. WordPress is the ideal choice for a customer facing website or building a landing page as you do not require heavy programming knowledge. If your business is in the finance or banking space that requires security from the onset, opt for Java from the beginning.
Project requirement Before choosing any tech stack, understand the requirements of the project. Does your app require real-time functionality, such as a chatbot or live chat? In such cases, go with a tech stack that is good at concurrency, such as Node. If you’re a blogger who requires a functional website to increase conversions, WordPress or Drupal will work best. Is your frontend UI full of complex interactions? Then React or Angular may be good front-end tech stacks. Complete understanding of the project goals and business objectives along with the right selection of tech stack plays an important role in long-term success. Wrong selection may lead to financial loss.
Availability of resources The availability of developers who will create your product is one of the most influential factors defining your company's technology stack. Look whether your developers are willing and able to work within your chosen tech stack. Suppose you select a programming language not in common use such as Lisp, you will be hard-pressed to find programmers who know how to use it. If they do, they’ll charge a premium. Pick a tech stack that has a dynamic developer community. Commonly used programming languages will thrive in the near future and as a business owner it is easy for you to add new developers to the team.
Development and maintenance cost The technology stack directly influences development cost. There are a couple of factors to consider before picking up the right tech stack:
The cost of hiring a developer: Developers must be skilled professionals and the cost of hiring them varies based on the technologies they work with. Maintenance cost: The job doesn’t get over with the development completion of the MVP. Take into account the maintenance and upgradation cost. Consider sticking to open source technologies because they are cheaper and can be updated and changed without any restrictions.
Time to market Time to market is perhaps the most important for all startups. The faster you develop and launch your application, the more exposure you’ll get. Also, the less the time you spend developing initially, the more time you get to learn from the feedback of the users. Here is a list of the common issues you must consider while choosing a suitable tech stack: Third-party integration: Make sure the technology stack you choose allows third-party integrations, to integrate the features you need into your web or mobile application without reinventing the wheel. Developer availability: To turn your idea into a great web application, you need to have an experienced team of developers that can use the tools you choose and work with you in the long-term. Ask them if they will offer post-launch support. Testing: Make informed decisions based on how easy it would be to run tests on the chosen platform. No software product is developed perfectly the very first time. The chosen tech stack should allow you to fix bugs or tweak features easily without eating up a lot of time.
Scalability and security Products require a well-defined scalability matrix that works on both the scenarios either vertically or horizontally. Vertical scalability: lets you add more features on top of the core value proposition of your product. Horizontal scenario: lets you handle increased volume of users and transactions on the platform. Security Always make sure the application is developed keeping the best practices of security and threat mitigation in mind. Run security tests both on client and server side to eliminate the common security threats. The more robust your product is, the easier it becomes to sell in the market. At the end, make a choice that works best for your business. You can choose the technology to go with, based on your business goals, requirements and the resources you can afford.
there are plenty of articles on the internet if you search:
https://medium.com/unicorn-supplies/9-steps-how-to-choose-a-technology-stack-for-your-web-application-a6e302398e55
https://hackernoon.com/how-to-pick-the-right-web-technology-stack-for-your-product-f6d94440af2f
https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-clients/how-to-choose-a-technology-stack-for-web-application-development/
etc.
For start, choose the technology you know better :)
This is more general question - I was asked to come up with a document called "SharePoint Strategy", which should descibe (or maybe it's better to say suggest) general company strategy for handling SharePoint in the future. And by handling I mean mainly:
how we manage and support current instance (which is SharePoint Online custom solution provided by external company)
how we evolve current instance with new solutions / features (we have some development skills in the company - 1 dev), so I think the question is how we manage, develop, deploy and support custom solutions
I would be grateful if you can share your experience in this kind of work (if you've had chance to write documents like this or you were part of the discussions). Any idea where I should start?
Regards
George
Your question is not a good fit for this site for "enthusiast programmers", but you raise an important issue that I'd rather try to address than shut down.
What you are after is called a SharePoint Governance Plan.
Nobody can tell your company how your company should be using SharePoint. You will need to work that out amongst yourselves. If you have been asked to come up with a document, you've really drawn the short straw. Because you won't be able to write that document on your own. But you can look at SharePoint governance guidance and sample governance plans and work out from there what decisions your company needs to make, what your company wants to achieve and where your company wants to go.
The Governance Plan helps to document where you are now, where you want to be in the near future, and maybe a few tactical steps to map out how to get there.
The samples and articles you can discover when you google SharePoint Governance Plan sample will only be a starting point. The hard bit comes after you realize that your company needs to make a few decisions, which are above your pay grade, but you may not know who should make them. You will need to collect representatives of the business in a Governance Committee, and they will contribute to the SharePoint road map and the governance plan.
If you work in IT, chances are that you will find it very hard to get the commitment from the business to contribute time and effort to this whole Governance spiel. They just want SharePoint to work and expect the IT department to magically mind-read and automatically apply whatever they need without spending time to detail the requirements.
A SharePoint Governance plan is a little bit like a business plan. It includes vision, goals, strategy and tactics and it cannot be written by one person's efforts alone. It has to be a team exercise.
Try this article for a start: https://sharegate.com/blog/real-world-sharepoint-governance-plan
Edit: If the document is supposed to shed light on difficult decisions, you can present different approaches for each of the scenarios along with pros and cons for the approach.
For example:
Challenge: Developing custom solutions in SharePoint
Option 1: hire external developers
Pros: no need to recruit and/or
train in-house staff
Cons: more expensive, also hard to tell if externals have the knowledge to do the job
Option 2: employ developers
Pros: working full time in-house, easy to manage, cheaper
Cons: hard to recruit, difficult to judge applicant skills in advance
Option 3: do nothing
Pros: don't have to make a decision, phewww!!
Cons: Nothing gets done, arghh!
Again, the point here is that it is not you who has to make the decision. You present options and the business representatives evaluate the options and make a decision, which will then be documented in the next version of the governance plan. The governance plan is not set in stone. It changes all the time. It is a living document about how the business wants to use SharePoint.
Things change. That's a given.
The Governance Plan tries to define how things should be handled with the current information.
The Governance Committee meets regularly to review the Governance Plan and they can change the plan.
The whole idea here is that the Plan comes from what the business wants, not what a poor single soul in IT has been tasked to dream up.
My company is in need of a task management system to handle scenarios as simple as "Purchase a computer for X" to "Relocate a person to another country". The simple scenarios are a single tasks handled by a single person, whereas bigger tasks can be broken down into multiple sub tasks delegated to multiple people during the workflow. Additionally the clients and vendors need their own views into the process.
We are evaluating different solutions from a custom application built on Workflow Foundation to SharePoint to BPM products like Metastorm and BPM.Net.
Here's my current understanding of these solutions:
Workflow Foundation - Low level workflow designer and/or library with no host environment. It seems we would have to reinvent some wheels if we went this route such as fault tolerance and document management. Some of the answers on stack also cause concerns such as the lack of versioning and a complete overhaul for VS10/.NET 4.0
SharePoint - Built for document management and collaboration but trying to create advanced workflows and tasking on top of that seems like a hack. Plus all workflows have to be tied to either documents or lists. I cant envision how a list (or list of lists) can address this issue.
BPM products - Mature workflow engine at a seemingly high price. BPM.Net is the only solution for which I could find some level of technical detail but im still not sure how different developing against this product would be from developing against Workflow Foundation.
Are there any workflow engines dedicated to solving all the workflow pains that can be easily deployed with their own hosting environment and initiated through a webservice?
Are there any other options I am missing?
Thanks in advance.
****Edit**
To answer the questions below the workflow needs are pretty light. Basic routing of tasks to approvers and subcontractors.
Whats driving us too look deeper than PM software is the nature of the business not the need for advanced workflow. We are basically in the business of procuring goods and services through subcontractors for our clients which can also include full employee relocation. The interface of the package should reflect this by being customer branded as well as intuitive for this line of business.
Basically if im moving my family to the other side of the world Im not sure i'd want to interface with Jira or Sharepoint or any other PM software to facilitate this.
If you are on Microsoft stack I would definitely recommend SharePoint for this scenario. As it seems to be very simple you can go with Windows SharePoint Services edition because it is free and it has everything you need.
You are right when you say that ShartePoint workflow are bit limited. IMHO the best way to overcome that limitation is to purchase Nintex workflow to create your workflows. It is cost effective solution that can help you design workflows you need.
You can find workflow samples inside the product (as workflow templates) and on the web site.
Nothing you mentioned has much to do with workflow. You're just doing project management. If that's the case, a simple bug tracker (like FogBugz! ;) would work - but if you're going to show it externally, it may not be the most professional presentation.
The closest off the shelf solution I can think of would be Project Server - though, depending on the number of projects and project managers, the desktop Project with a sync to a webserver for client views may be enough.
If that's overkill - because your projects don't require a lot of resource scheduling, Gantt charts, or other PM artifacts - you can take something like Trac and replace "bug" with "task". ;) (Seriously though, that'd probably get you 90% of the way there.....)
Have you looked at RT? I believe it can handle all your requirements, including that it's designed to let customers interact with the system by email, rather than having to log into the website. If you've emailed IT support desks then you've probably interacted with it without knowing... You can also completely customise the web interface and allow customer access.
Can't vouch for the quality as I haven't used it, but I did watch an online-demo video of Intalio, which has BPM and workflow capabilities.
We use Basecamp to control this sort of "task management" stuff. I'm not sure if it fits your needs totally, as it's a little light on the document management side, but it has a web service (REST) API, customer / vendor facing components, and basic interaction / chat capabilities.
The best part about it is that the API is simple enough where you can offload a lot of the "management" for it to admin support personnel, like assistants and interns, by providing custom scripts. If you've got people who aren't programmers using it you'll probably have better luck with it than even something like Trac or FogBugz.
I have/am going through a similar process. We wanted a lightweight workflow for internal use by our sales team. Most of the third party apps we looked at ,K2 and Skelta BPM.Net in particular, looked way over the top for what we needed. I'm now 2 months into working with Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0 and I have to say it isn't the most pleasant coding experience I've had.
If your workflows will truely be simple then it is pretty easy to build a workflow and hook it up to some web pages for the UI. But if you need to be able to change it on the fly, or do versioning (ie the user says we want another step added, then its a whole lot of hacking to get it to work - and it only works if you limit your workflow to being really simple), then you are in for a fair bit of work. And forget about it if you use an Oracle database.
The next version of windows workflow will have it's own runtime environment, code name dublin, with will provide a WCF interface into the workflows.
If your timeframe allows you could use that.
For information on Dublin and the next version of WF see:
http://www.microsoft.com/net/dublin.aspx
My vote is for FogBugz. Unless I am missing something in your requirements, why would you want to reinvent the wheel by using a code based workflow solution where you have to code up the flows yourself when you can use a perfectly good project dependency solution like FB or even MS Project Server - which lets you create nice dependencies for resources and people.
Check FileNet
FileNet is expensive but makes a good job with content and process management, but I guess is not what you are looking for.
We use Captaris Workflow, it is pretty good but it may be expensive for your needs.
At our company we are currenty trying to define the basic things our software architects have to know about SharePoint for them to architect and/or lead a SharePoint implementation project. Many architects in our company have a .NET developer background and know a lot about .NET development and the various framework components and tooling. However, they currently lack SharePoint knowledge. In fact they don't even want to know the nitty gritty details. They want to know just enough about it to make the right architectural decisions and apply proven patterns. If more specific knowledge is required they'll ask a SharePoint expert.
So What would is the basic set of SharePoint knowledge / skills that an architect would need to have?
Skills such as list, documents, workflow, permissions... are a bit too basic and are requirement for a SharePoint DEVELOPER.
I'd argue that perhaps site (and site structure) is an area that would fall under the architect's plate.
There are more areas that a SharePoint architect can help with:
Capacity planning - running multiple servers in a farm. Scalability and other magic words.
Knowing the capabilities and business scenarios of using SharePoint - this is a very common one.
The manager asks: what can SharePoint do for me?
The developer asks: well, what do you want it to do.
The manager then asks: well, I don't know what it can do for me so how do I know what do I want it to do?
Closely related to SharePoint capabilities are the various licensing costs related to each component.
As well as familiarity with development and customization costs. Take the same project time that would have taken in ASP.NET, then multiply it by a large coefficient, and then add an additional constant.
And closely related to what-can-it-do, and how-much-does-it-cost, is the all important question of Return-Of-Investment. All hail supreme ROI!
SharePoint deployment can be a massive issue and a lot of pain.
SharePoint upgrade from v2 (MOSS 2003) to v3 (MOSS 2007). We should be seeing a new version of SharePoint in 2010(?). Well soon after the next version of Office goes out the door. So past upgrade experiences may be useful.
Knowledge of 3rd party webparts. I believe a SharePoint architect should be able to give you at least 5 webparts that they've tried from CodePlex and tell you what they think about them. These are free and easy to grab and play at your own leisure.
Some knowledge of commercial webparts. Because they are still cheaper than writing your own.
Have at least 5 SharePoint blogs that they follow religiously (know the community). If not having their own SharePoint blog (give back to the community).
If they are on StackOverflow they must try to answer SharePoint questions (such as this one).
Attend local SharePoint usergroups. I think communities are a huge deal. Especially what you'd learn from talking with people directly and learning what they are doing with their SharePoint installation. You may just surprise yourself.
Experiences with SharePoint Integration - this comes in two equally important flavours - both from SharePoint accessing existing systems (business catalogs, webparts, etc), as well as other systems accessing SharePoint content via webservice or API.
In addition, SharePoint works with (or works well) with Office, OCS, reporting services, performance point, project server.
SharePoint hosting arrangements - Microsoft SharePoint online services can be a popular and cheaper option to start using SharePoint. It can be hosted inhouse, or with a 3rd party company. Knowing the options is always useful.
Must have read SharePoint code using reflector (and preferably still having hair).
I think it takes at least a couple of years to be a SharePoint architect (your mileage may differ). Your .NET architects need to want-to-be a SharePoint architect, otherwise I agree with other's summaries before me - find someone who already is a SharePoint architect.
An architect should have quite a good understanding of our a product works, from a functional and technical viewpoint.
So in my opinion, an architect should:
Have been involved in at least 2 Sharepoint deployments, from design to roll-out.
Have knowledge of our the major sharepoint components can be used using the API.
i.e. Sites, Lists, Documents & Workflow components.
As none of your architects have this knowledge, I would pair them with a Sharepoint expert in an existing Sharepoint project, so they get the knowledge they need.
Ideally SharePoint Architect Skills fall into the below mentioned categories
Infrastructure Level/Operational
Capacity Planning
Physical Architecture (Farm Setup, Network, OS, Licensing)
Application level (Functional and Non-Functional)\
Requirement and Feasibility Analysis (Custom Vs OOTB Development/Implementation)
Techno-functional Mapping of requirements
Information Architecture
Logical Architecture
Conceptual Architecture
Detailed Design
Database design (not in terms of traditional Database design), this is with respect to Number of content Databases for Site collections/web apps.
Deployment
Best way to go for deployment, first time and incremental
Some other activities that an architect will collaboratively work is the Project Manager in Planning, Estimation, Execution/Implementation, Risk Management (assessment, mitigation).
Apart from his daily tasks of working with technical teams, testers, User Interface professionals, Vendors, Clients (Business and IT teams).
Interacting with Enterprise Architect groups if any.
In my not so humble opinion I think the entire "Sharepoint Architect"/"Expert" thing is over-played.
Sharepoint is a tool to centralize an organizations digital resources for centralized collaboration or working together in a centralized way.
The best explanation of What Microsoft Sharepoint is and does
from the WROX book "Beginning Sharepoint 2010 - Building Business Solutions"
"Because computers play such an integral part in any business, not surprisingly, more and more
of the information that is created, consumed, and shared in an organization is digital. The more
business that you conduct and the more successful your business becomes, the more information you
have to manage. Usually, you have some form of document for just about every process and transaction
that plays out during the day-to-day operations of your company. From proposals to legal
documents, from sales receipts to human resources policies, the amount of information required for
a company to function is staggering.
To manage your information overload, SharePoint offers tools with which you can build business
applications to better store, share, and manage digital information. With it, you can create lists,
libraries, and websites for your various company teams to help run your business processes more
efficiently. By locating your organization’s important business data in a single location, it becomes
much easier and intuitive for users to find the right information when they need it rather than
searching through disparate locations such as email, computer hard drives, or file shares.
WHAT IS SHAREPOINT 2010?
SharePoint 2010 is an extensible and scalable web-based platform consisting of tools and technologies
that support the collaboration and sharing of information within teams, throughout the enterprise and
on the web. The total package is a platform on which you can build business applications to help you
better store, share, and manage digital information within your organization. Because you can build
with or without code, the package empowers the average business user to create, deploy, and manage
team websites, without depending on skilled resources, such as systems administrators or developers.
Using lists, libraries, and web parts, you can transform team websites into business applications built specifically around making your organization’s business processes more efficient."
Creating a schema for an organizations Sharepoint deployment is not rocket science. 1. Determine the structure of the organization 2. Determine what Sharepoint can do as far as centralizing the organizations digital resources. 3. Create a Sharepoint construction plan. 4. Build it, test it, refine it. 5. Maintain it, test it, refine it, add onto it. There! Not so tough.
Sharepoint can be a nasty beast to work with if you don't know the ins and outs of it (they should be experts with it to architect it). At a minimum, they should know how lists, sites, and permissions work. Ideally they should also know how all the web parts fit together on pages and how they are supposed to interact. Really if the architects don't want to learn about sharepoint, they are going to create a .net web application and force it to run on sharepoint. It won't really follow the paradigm of how a sharepoint app is supposed to work.
I would look at a company called Mind Sharp for guidence as to what they should learn.
My advice is look for a doer that doesn't just reads PowerPoint to much in the Sharepoint world is just based on what other people have said.
We have been having issues with crawling 500000 items in a Sharepoint farm and everyone gives another story how to get better speed... Normally people refer to not more than 2000 items in a folder, but that does not change the crawl speed....
So a good architecture is someone who is able to do POC proof of concepts himself of his design and not just refers to some vague stories.....
I have seen to many Sharepoint Architects that hasn't had experience from real life....
Our organization started on the SharePoint path about two years ago. Before that, we (the developers) wrote mostly asp.net front ends for SQL back ends. Now it seems like every time a new project comes up, we are asked to “make” it fit in SharePoint; and we have stuffed some things into SharePoint that probably should have been stand alone applications or web applications due to complexity and interactions with other technologies.
My question is: Where do you draw the line as to developing a project in SharePoint versus Web/Winform application, and how do you convince your manager(s) that SharePoint may not be the best solution for a particular project?
I sort of agree with you that this is sometimes a tough question. In general, though, I agree with the cliche that you just have to think about a sharepoint app a little differently. If your data can be considered as list-based, then SharePoint probably isn't a necessarily bad development framework. It may seem like more work on the surface, but IMO the challenges just move from one place to another. If you use things like custom field templates and web parts, you can relatively naturally handle all sorts of data. And you get the positive aspects of SharePoint for free (an already mature security framework, built-in searching, site and list templates/definitions, personalized page customizations, yada, yada).
I also I don't know what you mean by "complexity and interactions with other technologies" here, so it's hard to imagine what specific issues might be introduced when SharePoint is added to the mix.
If your dev team is relatively inexperienced with SharePoint and you care about quality and deadlines, I can definitely see your point. It's not an easy learning curve, but I think the SharePoint product is more naturally extensible than many people give it credit for.
There is, in some cases, a third option between a SharePoint application and an ASP.NET application. You can build custom site and application pages and deploy them to a SharePoint site. (The book Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 gives a good overview of how to do this.) This will allow you to use ASP.Net and SQL Server within a SharePoint environment (which means you can also take advantage of things like SharePoint security). It's not as easy as developing a plain ASP.Net application, but it's a compromise.
Of course, this is sort of a technicality if they're wanting these new applications to be built on SharePoint technologies (lists, libraries, workflow, etc.), not just to be "inside" SharePoint.
One of the primary reasons why you might put an applicaiton in SP is when you want to take advantage of the building blocks SP gives you:
Security (share security with the site)
Data (store some or all of your data in lists)
Provisioning (if you want you app on multiple sites)
Some basic data UI e.g. Lists give you that and you dont need to build it.
One thing to consider when trying to 'integrate' a new app into the existing pool is whether there is any overlap in data (customers, inventory, etc) that would benefit from the merger.
There is also the benefit of being able to back up multiple applications and all of their respective data in one place.
Why are they asking for it all to go into SharePoint?
In my experience it is because the 'ole SharePoint intranet is being great as a portal to keep everything together and findable under the one information architecture.
Approach the issue from a uses perception of the application space in the organisation.
So long as the application looks and feels just like part of the intranet site and the user does not have to think about how to get to it (and how to get back out), you can pretty much take any architecture decisions necessary to get the best bang for the organisations buck when it comes to implementation and maintainence.
When we started thinking about the site less from SharePoint vs other stuff to the nice woolly concepts of Information Architecture, findability and usability, our decisions not to make it actually inside SharePoint, but still skin it like the Intranet became easier to sell.