A couple days ago, there was an awkward moment while I was working on a new project.
I was on a video conference with a customer who already had a SharePoint site set up – actually a whole application including CRM, project management, etc. And he was happy to show me that my Easy Tabs were part of his solution, and had been installed by his developer.
Naturally, I was interested to see if the script was implemented correctly, so I asked him to edit the Web Part. Surprise! Instead of an out of the box Content Editor Web Part (or Form Web Part, or PVWP, etc.), I discovered a custom Web Part, with no option whatsoever to edit or link to an external script.
The customer was not able to tell me what the developer had done, but apparently the guy had embedded the script in a custom Web Part. This is a standard practice, and you can for example see it explained in this recent post from the SharePoint Developer Team Blog (one of my favorite SharePoint blogs of the moment btw). But for me, it was the first time to actually see it, and done to my very own script…
A glass of cognac and a couple nights of rest later, it is time for me to try and understand the respective benefits of the two techniques.
This is actually a topic I discussed six months ago with SharePoint MVP Sean Wallbridge (the discussion was already around the Easy Tabs). I submitted to him this idea of wrapping my Easy Tabs in a Web Part. At that time his advice was that I should not bother to do that, and that the CEWP approach was more convenient.
I’d be interested in hearing from others who have applied the technique described in the SharePoint Developer Team blog, to try and understand possible benefits. At this point, I don’t see any, but maybe I am missing some specific use cases. One interest of packaging the script is that if you update it on the server side the changes will apply to all the Web Parts. But AFAIK you can have the exact same effect by linking a CEWP to a central script.
Developer approach vs. User Managed Solution, what’s your take on this?
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