One of the best things about SharePoint? It has to be how much flexibility the platform offers and supports. No matter how your business works, whatever processes and activities your employees perform, SharePoint can be designed to fit right around you and your organization’s needs. Even ‘Out of the box’, SharePoint is a great environment in itself, however, the vast majority of companies want to take it further by customizing it to their specific needs. Whether you do so in-house, or ask outside consultants to do it for you, implementing custom developments is the standard way of extending the platform to the next level.
Some of the most common SharePoint customizations include:
- Tailored branding
- Workflows and forms
- Publishing (layouts, webparts, building blogs etc.)
- Integration of third-party systems
- Site provisioning (with custom approval & custom templates)
Now, it’s one thing to design a useful customization, it’s quite another to deploy that customization to your farm smoothly and seamlessly. However, by using a third party tool like DocAve Deployment Manager from AvePoint, which handles staging from testing, to integration to production across your farm, you can be confident that your deployment will be well managed. However – as useful as these tools are, they can still run up against a wall when it comes to the quality of those customizations that you’re migrating. Deploying poor quality, hacked-together code can potentially trip up your new environment, doing more harm than good.
And this is why we’re so excited to announce Rencore’s new partnership with AvePoint. By bringing our SPCAF code analysis framework into AvePoint’s DocAve Deployment Manager, SharePoint pros will not only be able to deploy customizations easily, they’ll also be able to check the quality and riskiness of the code in those Office 365 or SharePoint customizations.
How does it work?
DocAve automates the deployment of SharePoint artifacts, solutions, apps etc. to minimize human error and have a central hub to manage those deployments correctly. But, if any of those deployments contain problematic code, DocAve has not previously been able to warn you.
The solution? Our new integration of SPCAF into AvePoint’s DocAve Deployment Manager. This new integration will automatically be part of the product and allow SharePoint administrators to use SPCAF to test and analyze their customizations before being deployed – helping you save a lot of time, money and frustration. By providing an analysis of the code before it is deployed to your farm, this integration will work as a quality gate to ensure your customization is safe and secure.
Want to see it in action?
Our integration with DocAve Deployment Manager 6 Service Pack 8 will be released on 29 September at the Microsoft Ignite event in Atlanta. If you’re attending Ignite, make sure you stop by AvePoint’s booth (#1104) on Thursday to see a demonstration with AvePoint’s subject matter experts and Rencore’s Microsoft MVP Erwin van Hunen.
Let’s collaborate!
We know that while customizing your Office 365 and SharePoint environments offers enormous benefits, it needs to be done correctly at the beginning, or companies can face risks further down the line with their chosen environments. What our partnership with AvePoint and DocAve Deployment Manager will do is remove any roadblocks when deploying Office 365 and SharePoint customizations by providing complete transparency throughout the process.
We’re really excited about the potential of collaboration with our peers in the enterprise IT space. This partnership with AvePoint adds to our many great relationships with our awesome partners from around the world. We really value the possibilities of integrating SPCAF with the amazing tools of other companies in the SharePoint ecosystem – take, for example, our work integrating SPCAF with Acceleratio and SPDocKit.
To ease the process of deploying your customizations and ensuring they’re secure, download AvePoint’s DocAve Deployment Manager 6 Service Pack 8 today.
