While at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, I went to a session on this mysterious thing I never heard of called Composites. Sadly I am not sure if Conposites are an actual set of capabilities on SharePoint or not. I will investigate further while I am here.

The key takeaway that was interesting had to do with how SharePoint is changing the game of software development. We learned of two case studies where two companies took very different paths in how they developed a custom in-house app to capture and define business requirements for their customers.

The first company built an in-house app based completely on ASP.net. All doc managemet, notifications, reports, etc were about 70% code and 30% SharePoint. Each of the 175 offices are expecting to pay 300k over 3-6 months to rollout.

The second company used base functionality of SharePoint as the starting point. End users defined the lists, documents, templates and workflows they wanted. Where there were gaps (data extraction/submittals) developers wrote SharePoint code to perform those activities. That code can be re-purposes for other business units. End result here was the application cost $300k to build and 25k-50k to rollout to 168 offices.

In conclusion, Microsoft is really trying to push developers to write re-usable components in SharePoint to add, augment or enhance features rather than trying to build something new altogether.

-Bill

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