If you are dreaming of being the next level SharePoint Development Company, then a little appetite of learning can help you reach the new heights. Since time is changing with a rapid pace, and more and more organizations are shifting towards the new technology called SharePoint.
Therefore, in this blog, we will address all the must-have skills that a SharePoint development company needs to manage highly technical SharePoint platform effectively. Possessing the creative SharePoint skills means satisfying your clients at its best and make them fall in love with you. Below are the SharePoint development skills that every SharePoint developer should know to implement SharePoint solutions effectively in any organization.
1.Learn to Use Out Of the Box Tools
SharePoint allows custom development, which should be done under certain circumstances after a complete evaluation of the available SharePoint technologies, including Out of the box features, SharePoint designer, 3rd party tools and MS cloud applications.
Most of the SharePoint consulting firms take benefit from existing SharePoint features and serve their clients. Some of the key advantages of using out of the box are stated below:
- Already tested by QA professionals
- fewer chances of errors during the upgrade
- Accessible Microsoft Support
- Availability of the knowledge-based articles on the web
SharePoint Out of the Box Features
These are a few major SharePoint out of the box features:
Content Management: Record management, Office integration, file sharing, custom content and entities, and document management.
Search: Enable SharePoint for searching enterprise documents, contents, and other internal and external items.
Social Computing: Incorporates advanced collaboration via Wiki pages, tagging, forums, blogs and Yammer integration.
Identity Management: Control and facilitates end-to-end authentication and authorization.
Business Intelligence: Integrates Visio, Excel and BI services and features to better visualize online dashboards for end-users.
Branding: Enable users to use custom themes and logos for their SharePoint portal through the easy-to-use user interface.
Besides, the mentioned features, the SharePoint developers should also know the usage of few more toolsets, including:
- SharePoint Designer
- SharePoint Object Model (OM)
- InfoPath
- Visio
- PowerShell
- Visual Studio
2. Set Your Service Delivery Approach
A service delivery approach is necessary for a successful SharePoint solution. The approach helps to understand, define and maintain the ownership of a business SharePoint solution.
Various enterprise systems, like ERM and CRM solutions, comprise a well-defined service delivery method. Therefore, before implementing a SharePoint solution, make sure to follow a well-defined methodology to escalate customer engagement and ROI with a successful delivery path.
As a professional SharePoint consultant, your methodology should consist of the following elements including, diagnostics, and analysis, design, development, deployment and operation phases.
No matter, whether you use an agile or traditional approach still these elements are essential to incorporate.
Moreover, the service delivery methodology also needs to be:
- Industry-focused
- Scalable
- Flexible
- Repeatable
- Systematic
3. Understand the Features Of SharePoint Designer
An expert SharePoint Developer already knows about SharePoint Designer and its features. However, many of you might not know about it.
SharePoint Designer is a dedicated HTML editor and web design program that helps to create custom workflows for your site content and your documents that are available on SharePoint.
SharePoint Designer can also pull together external data into SharePoint, and also revamp the look of your site’s pages.
Microsoft is not expected to roll out a new version of SharePoint Designer any soon. However, SharePoint Designer 2013 can be used with SharePoint 2016, together both can extend the SharePoint Server 2016.
Since SharePoint Designer can significantly meet various customer needs; therefore, it is important for the SharePoint Development companies to understand it before creating a SharePoint solution for any organization.
4. Learn to Build and Manage Large Document Libraries
Your SharePoint installation will not be considered successful if it is not storing a large number of documents.
Setting up your document libraries through folder structures, number of libraries, term store sets, metadata and configuration influence your search features like crawled and managed properties and it either makes it super easy or super messy to find your data in need.
A professional SharePoint developer must understand how he can combine the company culture with document categorization to better come up with both long-term and short term document storage plan.
5. Learn to Incorporate Other MS Cloud Service
Microsoft is promptly creating an ecosystem full of cloud-based services that enable the SharePoint and Office 365 environments to function better.
Below we have mentioned a list of cloud applications that come with SharePoint/Office 365 licenses:
- MS Teams
- Yammer
- MS Flow
- MS Power Apps
- MS Planner
A SharePoint team site or an Office 365 Group site, is usually enough to guide you about which collaboration tool is needed when to use MS Flow to support document routing when to support your team and departmental projects following MS planner.
There are numerous choices and options available. So, being a professional SharePoint developer, you must have knowledge regarding which tools will boost business productivity when combined all together.
6. Understand Third Party Products
Client satisfaction is not a cakewalk. It is the most challenging task, and every business is struggling to achieve it.
If you want to satisfy your client, then it is important to solve their problems by all means.
Being a reputable SharePoint Development firm, you are required to understand the functionalities of wide-ranging third party products. It will help you to provide a faster solution to the client regardless of the scenario.
Below is a list of the most useful third-party tools that you should know about:
Sharegate: It a flexible migration tool that performs all types of data and content migration. It also streamlines security and permission management in a matrix organizational structure.
Nintex: A handy tool for building workflows in a drag & drop settings and create custom forms with refined business logic behind.
AvePoint: An Unparalleled tool that integrates with SharePoint and provides specialized authority while maintaining the document lifecycle.
Wrapping Up
All the mentioned skills and features are the core of SharePoint Development. If you want to score highest among top SharePoint Development Companies 2019, then you should be able to implement each when needed. Keep in mind that a successful SharePoint consulting firm provides training at every level of expertise.
