Customization and Configuration

As of recently, SharePoint is starting to take off here at my current employer. Good and Bad. Good is that it is my responsibility and I’m happy to see the usage take off like a jet plane. Bad because everyone is starting to use it all at once and they all want to “tweak” or “change” or “customize” all the things SharePoint does.

Except there is one problem. They use those terms to describe what I would consider SharePoint development. Things they want are not built-in, require custom coding of web parts, extensive use of either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.

So what is the problem with that? 1) I’m not a developer. I have done custom pages, custom workflows, etc., but not rewriting SharePoint controls like the Contact Details web part. 2) These simple “tweaks”  are not simple. Heck, they don’t even know how to upload documents to SharePoint and they want to have the Rich Text Editor work like Word. In SharePoint 2007, that is not how it works.

Back to the point, to customize or configure and why that is important. I don’t want to discourage anyone from customizing SharePoint, I just want to warn those starting down that path. Have you thought about upgrades in the future? How will those customizations translate when a service pack is applied, when a new version of SharePoint comes out and you want to migrate the content? All those are not so simply to write off when you are talking about a site that is gaining popularity and has to be running for critical business processes.

So if you fear your users are asking for the world, use this simple statement. We can configure what is there, but we are not doing any customization of the existing features. At least not yet….

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