Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

SUMMARY

The SharePoint Store offers developers and ISVs access to the potentially hundreds of millions of SharePoint customers and users around the world, creating a global marketplace for components, add-ons, and a full line of business apps. The store is an unprecedented channel to get these reusable and resalable components into customers’ hands.

For users of SharePoint it provides a single trusted location for procurement of apps. Today, users generally need to research and find components themselves and then go through the common and often arduous process of asking their IT department to install the component on their SharePoint farm. The IT department often balks at the task, given the risk involved in installing others’ code on the SharePoint servers and so typically only the most popular apps ever see the light of day in SharePoint. The store helps fix that situation by offering a sandboxed and secure location for installing components where the IT department can have a level of trust that the apps won’t bring down the SharePoint farm due to poor programming or the like. However, apps may still be able to read, edit, copy, and delete data depending on the permissions they ask for and are granted, so caution is still advised. To assist with this problem SharePoint provides the ability for the IT department to shut off access to the store and only provide apps through a curated private app catalog experience that IT controls.

Developers should seriously consider offering ...