Who isn’t excited about SharePoint 2013? There is a lot of new goodness in SharePoint 2013 and from a strategic standpoint. I see a pattern of its enhanced features that can be utilized by an Enterprise Architect to move towards a Services Oriented Architecture more rapidly than in previous constructs, but SharePoint has one big limitation still that is holding it back from being a one stop shop for organizations.
Services Oriented Architecture is a design methodology based on collections of software modules that provides complete functionality of a larger more complex application. SOA Methodology allows for the reuse of software across multiple applications allowing for less development of like functions inside of an enterprise.2nd International SOA Symposium created the following SOA Tenets: “Business value over technical strategy; Strategic goals over project-specific benefits; Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration; Shared services over specific-purpose implementations; Flexibility over optimization; Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection.” The SOA approach focuses more on business user satisfaction. SOA gives technicians more flexibility in solution development and allows for interoperability of multiple silos of data and services
How do we get from SharePoint to SOA SharePoint 2013 
I will first discuss some new and some newish features of SharePoint 2013 that can lend themselves nicely to creating a SOA SharePoint 2013 implementation that would enhance business productivity as well as enable organic metadata growth for better and more transparent information sharing.
- FAST Search Integrated – Microsoft in its recent history has bought an outstanding product, built some loose and hard to use integration capability, and marketed it as easily integratable Think PerformancePoint 2007, then they ingeniusly made it a feature of SharePoint 2010, well they have done it again. FAST Search has replaced the SharePoint Enterprise Search Service and now it is as easy to set-up and manage as search always has been through the Shared Service Provider or Central Admin. Like some of its competitors FAST is capable of indexing lots of external data sources, it can also query Exchange with SharePoint 2013′s new eDiscovery capabilities. What does this mean for your SOA SharePoint 2013 implementation? IT means that you can build your own internal Bing search application that will allow users to search practically all of its content from a single location. It will also apply permissions based results. We don’t want John Doe to be able to search and preview his pink slip prior to its delivery. The Bobs recommend firing on Friday, and not letting people keep their swingline staplers.
- Access Management and Cross Domain Single Sign On/Account Federation – No SOA SharePoint 2013 implementation would be successful if your organization makes its partners log in everytime they hit your site from the outside. Think sites like United.com and their MilagePlus partners, when you want to spend your miles on a nice gift for you significant other frim FTD.com you login to United, click a link and viola your miles can be easily spent on your gift! How does this happen? Secure Assertion Markup Language(SAML)! SharePoint 2013 supports the SAML access model allowing Cross Domain SSO, account federation, and token based authentication. SharePoint 2013 is also integrated with Active Directory. Implementing SharePoint 2013 will increase the speed in moving towards an Enterprise role based access model. These roles can be easily copied and edited based on business unit. Ultimately you can create a roles based Access Model and use SAML to provided the “assert” and “trust” providers for all systems. This Enterprise solution could be used to provide access and permissions to all of your systems without having to pass credentials with large header information and eliminate the need for cookies. The SAML approach would also give organizations easier time in authenticating external partners for collaboration on hosted solutions.
- Mobile Device Support – How many organizations are still 100% static. Everyone is on the go, either meeting customers at their locations, traveling, working remotely to cut cost, Mobile Devices are in everyones hand, sometimes in both hands! I will check my email on my smart phone but use my tablet to create a presentation. Seriously I think you need a third hand to use the Galaxy Note 2 to its full potential! SOA SharePoint 2013 implementations will need to be ready to be designed to the future and not the now. HTML5 and iOS, Android and Windows are all going to be used, and sometimes all three by the same user depending on location. HTML5 also allows for content to be viewed by multiple parties without pesky browser compatability issues that SharePoint is notorious for in previous versions. Your employees and customers will be on the go, and for the gadget lovers who are on their devices even when watching TV will be able to look and interact with your site whenever and wherver they want.
- Web Content Management – SOA SharePoint 2013 implementations will be able to utilize multiple new features I will highlight a few that really stand out and show a lot of promise in implementing a SOA based solution to a huge business need for any organization that uses the internet to get to its clients. SharePoint 2013′s enhance content authoring capabilities allow for better use of all media, but specifically image rendering capabilities. Not to mention HTML security and the ability to use iFrame features in a much more content creator friendly way than previous. Cross Site Publishing allows you to publish the same content across multiple sites. If you have customer portals and want to publish out a new service offering to all of their sites it is now possible.
- Social Collaboration – Are your employees on FaceBook and Twitter, do their friends know everything about them, down the the nirty gritty details? They are probably addicted to social media. Your organizations SOA SharePoint 2013 implementation will feed their inherent ability and lust for using social media features but will also put those hastags to work. A social metadata library will be created making athose items coworkers share between eachother searchable and filterable based on tags. Users can also apply notes to items highlighting their usefulness to their collegues. Communities and MySites functionality can be leveraged to share ideas and opinions on important topics in your organization organically, and organic is 100% trending at all times.
SharePoint 2013 has a lot of new/newish features that will enable a robust SOA style implementation that can be tailored to the business needs of the users without sacrificng those needs for the sake of tech strategy. What is still missing? In my opinion XRM5 has a leg up on SharePoint for a simple but powerful feature it has…The ability to create relational tables through the GUI. XRM is heavy, ugly and hard to setup and configure in regards to its sister product SharePoint but the ability to through the admin GUI create relational databases blows SharePoint lookup fields out of the water. I beleive that if SharePoint swallowed this feature of XRM5′s it would be unmatched in its ability to get to 80% of all organizations needs with little customization and even smaller development efforts. So what does this mean for your SOA SharePoint 2013 implementation? It will require external databases being pulled in through SharePoint designer in order to consume relational tables and custom code to interact with those tables properly. Dynamics XRM has the one thing that SharePoint is missing, I think MSFT should figure out how to incorporate this feature into SharePoint, but I think it would remove the need for Dynamics in the future. I think it would alternatively grow the SharePoint market at the same time.
Thanks for the good read: 
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