Hello All -
My team runs the infrastructure and operations and we've been lending support to our SP team recently as we've just built out their 2010 environment and they are breaking it in with their first new application build.
Since our teams have had to work very closely over the last few months to get through some issues and meet deadlines, I've been trying to understand more about the SharePoint platform and development practices in general. As such, I had a few questions I'd like to toss out to the group for advice.
Some background:
1.) For the initial release, our Dev team has been creating their application stricly using SP Designer and not Visual Studio
2.) They are now getting ready to deploy into Production and they are requesting to do this via a backup/restore of the Dev environment site collection
3.) They plan to make future updates to the application using VS and deploy via a WSP
4.) FWIW, we really don't have a "build" server that I'm aware of per se (but don't quote me)
My understanding is that the generally preferred approach to migrate SP code (?) between environments is to use a WSP. However, the Dev team has so far been unable to get this to work ... ostensibly because they say that they don't have all the third-party components installed in their local Dev environment (Nintex workflow, Storage Point, etc.) necessary to create a viable WSP
My concern is that, while we can likely get this initial load into Production to work, what future issues are we opening ourselves up to?
Are there any risks we need to be aware of switching development approaches/tools?
Once users start adding live data in Production, I doubt that we can use the same deployment approach again for future releases. This gives me additional concerns about the overall maintainability (and quality) of the application in the long term.
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer!
Regards,
TJ