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SharePoint has quickly become one of the go-to platforms for corporate communication and collaboration within companies, providing customizable menus and dashboards that work on any version of SharePoint effortlessly. SharePoint development companies specialize in helping their clients with this by taking advantage of SharePoint customization features to deliver safe, reliable platforms with user-friendliness features built right in.
Let's dive into this blog's discussions on what SharePoint customization entails as we explore its many uses what it can achieve, its various uses for business solutions as well as ways it can make these concepts make any business solution more user-friendly while eliminating rigidity from solutions designed in-house by taking full advantage of customization concepts to transform business solutions into flexible user-centric business solutions with user-friendliness that is unsurpassed today.
What Is SharePoint Customization?
Customizing SharePoint refers to altering its functions without adding code-specific additions, for instance, creating subdomains in SharePoint Online and changing SharePoint List settings without changing their names and metadata.
- Customizing SharePoint has made branding any type of SharePoint website extremely straightforward; style sheets, master pages, and unique page layouts all play their parts to enable this.
- Customizing SharePoint Designer 2013 to build workflows is another aspect of customization.
- SharePoint websites can also be customized by applying themes.
- InfoPath can also be used to customize the appearance of SharePoint list forms.
Read More: Maximizing User Experience on Modern SharePoint Sites: What's the Cost of Ignoring It?
The Reasons for Personalized SharePoint
SharePoint is one of the top Office 365 platforms; it enables businesses to edit and improve the usability of content on websites as well as manage and collaborate on documents. Businesses now expect more from their websites than just basic functionality; they require distinctive features that entice visitors. They often prefer SharePoint websites equipped with dashboards, reports, display options, logos, and navigation.
What is SharePoint Should I Customize?
Branding
Modern websites allow businesses to customize SharePoint websites through customization options that fit with an organization's branding. SharePoint makes this possible with its capabilities of aligning with corporate identity; users of websites today can quickly alter appearance and feel by changing elements such as the logo or color scheme quickly and efficiently. In addition, SharePoint offers both pre-made themes as well as options to develop customized themes based on users needs; with custom configuration files they can even specify theme colors specific to their work.
Navigation
Maintaining effective navigation can simplify a collaborative setting. Users of SharePoint websites should enjoy effortless access to an abundance of information quickly while finding what they are seeking quickly which makes navigation so crucial in custom SharePoint apps; an appropriate plan needs to be devised for optimal usability of current SharePoint websites.
Design
SharePoint features provide features to facilitate design customization across all of their sites, such as colors, page layouts, styles and logos giving each website its unique appearance and feel contributing to corporate culture development and helping create distinctive sites. This feature also makes changes easier.
Page Content
Maintaining perfect information presentation in SharePoint sites is of utmost importance for any user and developers can achieve this by creating various types of pages (site pages, wiki pages and web part pages) in which to display data. Microsoft provides several web parts designed specifically to do just this though many are no longer fully functional on modern SharePoint site pages making displaying information easier than ever. Adding contemporary web parts can further facilitate information display.
Workflows
Workflow and automation solutions in SharePoint are one-step fixes that allow developers to easily design amazing business workflows for SharePoint environments using Power Automate. SharePoint actions can quickly initiate these workflows within its system while existing workflows will continue functioning even after earlier SharePoint Designer workflows have been discontinued; new workflows may even be created using this solution.
Forms
Custom forms for polls, surveys, and quizzes can easily be created using Microsoft Forms and Power Automate. Users can quickly embed these forms in SharePoint Pages without difficulty; Microsoft forms include built-in analytics for tracking responses in real-time while exporting these responses for further study if desired. Furthermore, using a Microsoft Forms Web Part makes embedding forms into pages even simpler.
How to Customize SharePoint?
SharePoint can be customized in various ways, including the following.
Farm Solutions
SharePoint on-premises versions such as 2013, 2016, and 2019 offer farm solutions as a customization feature, but because SharePoint Online doesn't, developers may use Microsoft's server-side code dll for SharePoint instead.
SharePoint Add-Ins
SharePoint Add-ins can be installed both online and on SharePoint Server, with support coming via client-side APIs such as CSOM or REST API. Available via Microsoft Office Store for SharePoint Online use, developers can build two main categories of Add-ins or Apps within SharePoint Online for deployment to their users.
- Provider Hosted Add-Ins (PHAs): When developing provider-hosted apps, SharePoint developers rely on CSOM code.
- SharePoint Hosted Add-ins (SHBAs) allows developers to easily build apps using either JSON or Rest API code.
SharePoint Framework
Experienced SharePoint experts only require one development model in order to enjoy modern SharePoint experiences, the SharePoint framework development model (SPFx). It gives developers access to design various client-side web parts, command sets, extensions, and development according to business demands based on this development model or you could create SPFx web parts which work seamlessly on all three versions of SharePoint 2016, 2019, Online in addition to traditional ones.
Power Platform
Modifying SharePoint Online sites has never been simpler thanks to PowerApps, Power BI, and Power Automate. In today's marketplace, these power platforms are increasingly used.
- PowerApps provides list form customization capabilities for developers.
- Power BI can help a company analyze its data.
- Power Automate is capable of creating custom business processes with automated workflows to streamline any type of business activity.
Best Practices for Customizing SharePoint
There are various best practices for customizing SharePoint that all developers should know of.
When Modifying SharePoint On-Premises, Exercise Caution
Businesses often turn to SharePoint platforms because they provide numerous customization opportunities; one such is using its framework and developing custom workflows. Building the ideal database and integrating SharePoint with other apps should be straightforward. However, if a developer chooses an inappropriate list or neglects to update security updates for the SharePoint platform in time, the customization plan for SharePoint could easily unravel and result in the failure of the customization plan. As even minor modifications may cause outages or performance issues, SharePoint developers must exercise extreme care when customizing the server platform.
Connect with Flow and PowerApps
PowerApps and SharePoint allow even non-coders to easily build applications thanks to their integration, which features data push without code requirements and customization templates that allow Office 365 users to add an infinite number of elements without formal testing requirements. No impact is felt by PowerApps/flow integration on Microsoft updates either.
Introduce Bot
There is an array of bot solutions on the market for bot introduction. Through Microsoft Flow connectors, bots enable customization based on user requirements while being easy to use, another benefit of using them to customize SharePoint. Furthermore, AI technology has proven quite successful at customizing Office 365 apps with other software programs and providing seamless integration capabilities between them all.
Policies for Governance
As you are no doubt aware, customized SharePoint platforms will have a major effect on their businesses, and as such business owners place immense emphasis on managing employee accessibility. In order to do this, any business owner should establish governance guidelines allowing employees to access systems according to their job descriptions; this helps reduce any danger. In addition, a process could be developed that alerts when employees attempt to modify any aspect of the SharePoint environment.
Conclusion
business solutions on the market for team collaboration and creating ideal enterprise solutions tailored specifically for their customer base. Through customized SharePoint customization services, small-scale productivity issues that erode efficiency cost businesses both money and effort can be addressed effectively, leading to greater efficiency overall and increasing success across various industries. Numerous businesses already using SharePoint have seen increased success utilizing it successfully while other industries eagerly adapt enterprise solutions tailored specifically for customer requirements using it as well.
