Not long ago I started an internship at a company that supplies SharePoint consu

Question

Not long ago I started an internship at a company that supplies SharePoint consultancy, hosting and development. While their consultancy seems to be pretty good and solid, I feel their development department lacks direction. The reason for this, most likely, is that they stopped outsourcing not too long ago.

One thing that I've frequently bumped my head into is the following:

My supervisor strongly insists that everything that can be done natively in SharePoint (somehow this includes editing xslt files in Designer) should be done in SharePoint. Even if this results in longer development time (at least when they make me write XSLT) and reduced usability.

Her main arguments for this are:

Better maintainability
Editing the functionality doesn't require programming knowledge
I feel the company is a little biassed and I am unable to get a decent discussion going. This is why I am looking for other places to get some responses on the subject (and not only on the arguments of my supervisor, but more on the subject in general).

Kind regards

Explanation / Answer

Editing the functionality in SharePoint may not require "programming knowledge", but in my experience most users need to be highly tech savvy to really understand the other ways to edit SharePoint, like SharePoint Designer and Dashboard Designer. I think if you can put functionality natively in SharePoint (like BCS), then that gives you CRUD screens for your existing data, workflow support, and more. With 2010 this is a real timesaver once everything is set up correctly, which can take months.

The incentive at a SharePoint consulting company is to bill as many hours as possible to increase profits. You get more billable hours by clients requesting work. Clients will request more work from a SharePoint company if most of their functionality is tied to SharePoint. SharePoint makes things easy for users with the tradeoff that development takes longer (yay! more billable hours for the company!). There is a happy medium to be met and the value of such work varies greatly from situation to situation, so the company not sitting down and having an honest discussion and blindly saying "put it in SharePoint!", is a red flag that it's less about the customer and more about the bottom line.

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