Third party solutions include applications developed locally by ICT or college IT personnel as well as commercial applications or open source applications. These solutions will be tested on the SharePoint test environment (see the test environment policy).
Commercial/Open Source
Although SharePoint has many capabilities, colleges or departments may discover situations where a third-party solution implements a feature that is not in SharePoint out of the box. In these cases, ICT may permit the third-party solution to be installed on the ICT SharePoint 2010 farm. Before a third-party solution can be installed, there are a number of questions that must be answered. The unit interested in the third party solution must consider the following questions with the ICT SharePoint support team.
Questions for the Vendor:
- How is the software licensed? For the entire farm, per server, or per user? The ICT SharePoint farm runs on multiple servers, so if the licensing is per server, the cost will be multiplied by the number of servers.
- Which level of SharePoint is required? Foundation, Standard or Enterprise?
- Does the licensing fee allow the software to be installed on a test server as well as production? If not, what is the additional cost for the test server license?
- If the licensing is per user, how will the solution be restricted to the licensed users? Who will monitor the usage to ensure that the solution is only available to the licensed users?
- Will the solution run in a SharePoint sandbox?
- What performance implications does the solution introduce? How much RAM and disk space does it require? Should it run on its own server?
- Is there an evaluation period for testing?
- Does the company offer a money-back guarantee?
College/Department:
- Who in the organization will test the solution to ensure that it is an appropriate solution?
- How does the college/department expect to handle upgrades to either the third party software or SharePoint itself?
- What is the test plan? This includes functionality testing (does it do what we want?) as well as performance testing (will it adversely affect other clients on SharePoint?)
- If the licensing is per user, who will monitor the usage?
As part of the evalution of third-party products, ICT will peform the following tasks:
- Confirm that the above questions are answered adequately.
- Ensure that there will be no conflicts with existing software on SharePoint.
- Inform the college/department if there is already a solution in place that will address their needs.
- Install the software on the SharePoint test server for evaluation.
- Assist the college/department with evaluating the software, if desired (this may be fee for service).
- Move the software to the production SharePoint server if/when it is determined that the software works correctly and is appropriate for the organization's use.
- Maintain a log of tested third-party solutions and the outcomes for future reference.
In-house Developed Applications
The issues with in-house developed applications are similar to those for commercial software excluding licensing fees. It is up to the developing unit to determine who should have access to the solution and how that access will be regulated.
If your college or department is interested in developing solutions for SharePoint, please contact sp_enquiries@usask.ca. ICT will assist you with getting an account on the development server. Development must take place in a sandbox unless the nature of the software being developed precludes use of a sandbox. (Because sandboxed solutions are only partially trusted, there are a number of features available to farm solutions that will not run in a sandbox. See SharePoint sandbox.)
The developers must:
- Purchase an MSDN subscription to cover licensing for the development software
- Ensure that they are covered by the Microsoft Campus Agreement or purchase CALs for access to the test SharePoint server
- Create automated tests and test coverage reports; the results of these tests must be presented to ICT for review before the in-house solution will be installed as a farm-wide solution
It is recommended that the developers install SharePoint on a local machine for development and testing purposes. The MSDN subscription includes licenses for all required software for development usage.
Recommended reading for In-House developers
