The state of SharePoint and Office 365 development

SharePoint is the most widely used hub for modern businesses, while Office 365 is increasingly the first choice for cloud productivity. With these two platforms forming the bedrock of many companies' IT environments, business leaders need to understand how the platforms are changing and the needs of the employees who work with them.

SharePoint customization specialist Rencore has surveyed over 1,200 SharePoint and Office 365 developers and other professionals to get a picture of how the community is evolving.

Among the findings are that businesses are gradually phasing out older versions of SharePoint and increasingly adopting later versions of the platform. While SharePoint 2013 is the most commonly used version, it already supports the newer development models which allow cloud migration and/or hybrid operation. Code analysis tools are common, with SPCAF being the most widely employed at almost 40 percent. Governance, however, is still a largely manual process in around half of cases.

Microsoft is encouraging new methods of development around SharePoint and Office 365, in particular a move to client side development and the introduction of the SharePoint Framework. But while developers are interested in these approaches they're not widely adopting them with 48 percent still using server side tools. Similarly while 81 percent are aware of SharePoint Framework, only 38 percent have used the preview -- a figure that rises to 44 percent among software architects.

"Microsoft seems to be pushing development for SharePoint and Office 365 in a direction which encourages more openness, and is making it easier for developers and architects with little to no traditional experience to work the platforms," says Matthias Einig, CEO and founder of Rencore and Microsoft MVP. "On one hand, this is great, but it also poses a lot of challenges for IT management and teams that already have significant investments in their environments".

Around 46 percent of respondents say they’re planning to upgrade to either SharePoint Online or some variation of SharePoint 2016 (hybrid or on-premises) in the near future. This may be because Microsoft's new emphasis on client side development means some existing approaches to customization will be less relevant or even obsolete.

"Developers are going to need to update their skills and maybe even learn new programming languages if they want to remain relevant," adds Einig. "And for heads of IT and CIOs, this is going to require investment in people, providing more training and working out which skills their people will need to adapt to their companies' long term IT strategy".

You can find out more in the full report which is available from the Rencore website.

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