For almost a year, I’ve been working with SharePoint Online (SPO) and cloud integration. I’ve found that the latest version of SPO provides many new capabilities and more flexibility for developers who want to create business solutions that run on SharePoint sites in the cloud. After I give a quick overview of what you can do with SPO, I’ll discuss how to do it. As you’ll soon find out, there are many different design patterns that you can use to integrate SPO solutions with cloud components.
What You Can Do
SPO is essentially SharePoint 2010 running in the Microsoft cloud. It lets you create sites for sharing documents and information with colleagues and customers. The latest version of SPO falls under the Office 365 umbrella of Microsoft Online Services, which includes Exchange Online, Lync Online, and integration with the Office Web Apps. You can sign up for the beta version of Office 365 and learn more about the new SPO version.
In past SPO versions, the main development tools have been the web browser and SharePoint Designer. In the latest version of SPO, you can do much more than configure solutions with a web browser and enhance them with SharePoint Designer. Now, you can deploy custom code to SPO in the form of sandboxed solutions.
Sandboxed solutions can deploy coded components, declarative components, Silverlight applications, and more. For a complete list of the components you can use in SPO, check out the Microsoft article “SharePoint Online: An Overview for Developers”. You might be surprised when you see how many different components you can deploy to SPO. Table 1 lists some of those components and gives examples of how you might use them to create SPO solutions and, in several cases, interact with cloud components. Although this list isn’t exhaustive, it provides a good starting point that can get you thinking about how to create SPO solutions that include sandbox-compatible components that integrate with cloud components.
Table 1: Components Available in Sandboxed Solutions for SPO
How You Can Do It
Now that you’ve seen many different ways to extend and enhance SPO sites, you’re probably wondering how to go about developing SPO solutions. To get started, you’ll need a standard SharePoint 2010 development environment. If you haven’t built one yourself, you can download the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine. This virtual machine (VM) set includes everything you need to develop SharePoint 2010 solutions. Also, make sure you check out the SharePoint Online Developer Resource Center and the SharePoint Developer Center for training kits, SDKs, and sample code.
Next, if you’re creating Silverlight applications for use in your SPO sites, download and install the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. You’ll also need the Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime.
Finally, download and install the following:
The Windows Azure Developer Center contains training kits and videos to help you get up to speed on this platform. After your development environment is set up, sign up for a Windows Azure account.
SPO Design Patterns
As Table 1 shows, there are many ways to integrate SPO sandbox-compatible components with cloud components. How you choose to go about integrating the two will depend on your environment and requirements. There are several options available. To begin, let’s discuss the client portion of the implementation.
By design, sandboxed components (which run in the context of the User Code Service) don’t have permission to make calls to external services. This behavior is identical to that in the on-premises version of SharePoint 2010. To learn more about the User Code Service and the sandbox execution model, check out the Sandboxed Solutions web page in the SharePoint 2010 Patterns & Practices documentation.
To make calls to external resources, such as cloud resources, you need to use code that runs on client machines in a web browser session. Both jQuery-based and Silverlight client solutions can be deployed as SPO sandboxed-solution components that interact with external services, such as cloud resources. This makes jQuery-based and Silverlight applications the perfect choice for clients that interact with cloud components.
After you decide which technology you want to use to implement your SPO solution, you need to figure out how to access the services that support your solution. Perhaps the most common design pattern you’ll see at first is calling external web and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services from a client browser session. The reason this pattern will be so common is that there are already many services on the Internet that line of business (LOB) applications rely on, such as weather data, traffic data, and customer relationship management (CRM) services (e.g., Salesforce.com). In this pattern, users access a jQuery-based or Silverlight application deployed to an SPO site. The jQuery-based or Silverlight application calls out to services available on the Internet. Figure 1 illustrates this pattern.
